Author: Scott Weaver

Before we get into the chemical compounds and statistical trends and tonnage numbers sure to scare the hair right off a hippie, let’s you and I define a word. Ambitious. The definition of this adjective, I think we both can agree, rests in the details of one particular plan of President Barack Obama.

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Obama made it the goal of our nation to cut our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 80 percent by the year 2050. And on April 17, word leaked that Obama’s EPA plans to propose regulating GHG emissions, a sharp reversal of the previous administration’s policy. 

This plan is ambitious because, as we’ll see from the 12 local examples that follow, even a place like Charlottesville—home to greenies and tree-huggers galore—produced 919,991 metric tons of GHG in 2006, up from 868,952 in 2000. At this rate, our fair city will belch forth a little more than 1.1 million tons in 2020. In 2007 alone, UVA produced almost 300,000 tons of GHG, nearly a 15 percent increase from 2000.

In another word—yikes.

But these are not head-in-sand type times, people. Charlottesville has been Sam Cooke-in’ it for more than a couple of years, working on the change that’s gonna come. Thanks to energy-efficiency upgrades and retrofits to its buildings through the Energy Performance Contract, the city saved roughly $450,000 in energy costs during one fiscal year.  It’s “greened” its vehicle fleet with fuel-efficient and hybrid cars and trucks.

But as you’ll see below, there is still work to be done. What follows, then, is what a few people with access to a printing press consider to be the face of climate change in this home of ours. Let’s take a minute and look at these pictures and see if we can, if only for a small moment, see our reflected selves, looking hard at this, together. Ecologically speaking, 2050 is right around the corner.

Ivy Landfill

According to the EPA, this country’s landfills accounted for approximately 23 percent of all anthropogenic methane (CH4) in 2006. No matter how hardcore we as a community get about our curbside recycling programs, this is where tons upon tons of our waste already rests—the Ivy Landfill. But it’s not all bad news. Recently, the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority was recognized by the Virginia Environmental Excellence Program for continually—and let’s quote the press release here—“minimizing the effect of operations on the environment.”

From 1990 to 2006, however, CH4 emissions from landfills dropped by 16 percent. But this drop isn’t due to reduced usage. It’s attributed to the increases in the amount of landfill gas collected and combusted, even as the amount of solid waste that ends up in our landfills keeps increasing.

Office buildings

You walk into the office, another day on the job, and what’s the first thing you do? Probably not turn on the lights: They’re already on. Same goes for your computer, the copier, etc. We spend so much time in our offices, like these at UVA’s Fontaine Research Park, that we hardly stop to consider the resources these buildings expend.

And we’re not alone. A 2007 survey by the American Institute of Architects showed that just 7 percent of respondents could identify the top cause of greenhouse gas emissions—buildings. In 2000, the city’s municipal buildings alone produced 12,387 metric tons of GHGs.

Our buildings, especially large cubicle farms, produce 48 percent of all GHG emissions and consume 71 percent of all electricity produced at U.S. power plants. They are buzzing gobblers of resources, whose appetites continue long after the likes of us have left for the day.

One of the city’s newest buildings, however, represents a change in course. The Downtown Transit Center is certified LEED Gold, and according to Kristel Riddervold, the city’s environmental administrator, the center performs 33 percent better in terms of energy conservation than current building standards require.

Golf courses

Really, where else do so many of our resources go to benefit so few? Whether it’s the amount of gasoline used for the daily cutting of fairways and greens, or the electricity or gas used to shuttle around no more than two golfers on a cart, or the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers used on the grasses, golf courses are both a bucolic retreat and a highly engineered cultural symbol for the idea of such a retreat.

About those synthetic nitrogen fertilizers: Only a small percentage of total usage is applied to golf courses in the country. The vast majority of these fertilizers are used in the agricultural sector (a whole other can of [synthetic] worms). But the amount of resource consumption relative to the communal benefits of golf courses should cause us to take a hard look at this pastime. And we have. As of 2003, the EPA has been working with the United States Golf Association and Cornell University, among other groups, to minimize nitrogen fertilizer in surface and ground water.

Charlottesville, though, has sworn off such fertilizers. In fact, no chemicals are used on the McIntire Park’s golf course (pictured here), says Riddervold. At the Meadowcreek Golf Course, the city switched from gas-powered carts to electric, lessening the course’s carbon footprint.

New development

Look, we’ll be honest with you, this is just a mess. According to the United Nations, deforestation contributes between 25 and 30 percent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere each year. And why are we clearing land, as at this hefty red-dirt site on 29N in Ruckersville? So we can move up to that bigger, better house, that much farther away from the hustle and bustle of the city. It’s time to take another look at that American dream. Meanwhile, from 2000 to 2006, Charlottesville residents increased their electricity use by 20.5 percent, a figure that was consistent with the national average.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (a hard-partying bunch, to be sure) has estimated that U.S. forests absorb roughly 1 to 3 million metric tons of CO2 each year. That’s an offset of about 20 to 26 percent of the U.S.’s greenhouse-gas emissions. That said, expanding our (sub)urban ring around Charlottesville by developing forest land into tracts of houses that are bigger than we need, along with attendant strip malls, is probably going to look really, really dumb to our grandkids.

Food

As anyone who’s been paying attention to the American book publishing industry knows, the ways in which we feed ourselves are utterly bizarre. This has been covered: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, etc. Supply lines span the world.

So when we dig into that steak at a place like Applebee’s (not to single out Applebee’s, which really is a Great American Eatery, but still, it is Applebee’s), we are cutting into one of the major sources of GHG emissions. Because chances are, that steak was shipped from a Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) somewhere in EPA Region 7 (Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska), burning fossil fuel all the way to your plate.

In 2006, enteric fermentation (i.e. cow burps and farts) and manure management (i.e.…never mind) combined to contribute 30 percent of all CH4 emissions. Add that to the CO2 emissions caused by trucking your food from Nebraska, and the 5,313 metric tons of GHGs that food waste produced in Charlottesville in 2000, and all of a sudden hippies begin to make a lot of sense.

Transportation

Even though electricity production is the biggest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S., transportation seems to get all the press. This could have something to do with America’s love of the open road or the independence that comes with owning several boat-sized automobiles or several other half-baked schemes dreamed up by marketing assholes that we will quickly have to dump into the garage heap of history if we want this here “Climate Change” deal to turn around.

Passenger cars pour out the three major GHGs, most of all CO2, which represents about 85 percent of total GHG emissions. Transportation is the second leading source of CO2 emissions, and emissions—while dipping recently—have been increasing since 1990. But transportation is more an auxiliary cause than anything else. Most of us don’t drive just to drive; we’re going somewhere or hauling something. So addressing the way we handle New Development and Food will do a whole lot more than taking the bus to work once a week.

Manufacturing

Industrial processes produced 5 percent of all U.S. GHG emissions in 2006, and that’s not factoring in the energy consumption of the companies involved. Overall, though, the industrial sector only produces 1 percent of Charlottesville’s total GHG emissions.

And while Charlottesville’s economy has moved from being industrial to more service-related (a move Harvard economist Theodore Panayotuo has argued will lessen an area’s environmental impact), there are certain industries that there’s almost no going without. For instance, cement production is the second leading source of CO2 in the industrial sector, and, as the Downtown Mall has shown, bricks are kind of a pain-in-the-ass alternative.

Contemporary consumption

If you’re looking for the nexus of all GHG emissions, look no further than our own Fashion Square Mall. Most of us drive our cars to walk around the florescent-lit retail space, neon signs demarcating separate stores selling goods produced in other countries flown, then trucked, right here, just for us, only to end up, inevitably, in our landfills.

While the commercial sector—of which malls, schools, and office buildings are a part—produces 1 billion metric tons of CO2, the shopping mall is today’s shining symbol of our disposable, shrink-wrapped culture. Charlottesville’s commercial sector (which, it must be said, includes UVA) produced 530,386 metric tons of GHGs in 2006, up from 475,258 in 2000. When John Winthrop wrote “we shall be as a city upon a hill,” it is doubtful that he envisioned a community propped up by a pile of discarded batteries, used Pepsi cups and cardboard Nike boxes.

Wastewater treatment plants

While issues like transportation and electricity production might get all the attention, treating our sewage or wastewater, as at this facility in Woolen Mills, can produce both CH4 and N2O emissions. In 2006, domestic wastewater treatment released 16 teragrams of CH4, the equivalent of 16 million metric tons of CO2.

CH4 emissions have decreased since 1998, although N2O emissions have increased. Why? According to the EPA, the increase is “a result of increasing U.S. population and protein consumption.” Are Applebee’s steaks hurting us in more ways than one?

Your home

Once upon a time conventional wisdom told us all to buy big houses because oversized suburban tract housing was the same as buying a stock that would never go down. And that worked…for a while. Now, of course, the real estate sector is in the economic dumpster and we’re left with houses that were bought under the real estate market equivalent of ordering an extra-large pizza after eight hours of heavy drinking.

This being the morning after, we’re left with the soggy mess—extra rooms we don’t really need and longer drives to the things we do. And, of course, we’ve got all these buildings. In Charlottesville alone in 2006, residential buildings like these in Crozet accounted for 20 percent of GHG emissions. These are also the buildings that are producing 48 percent of GHGs, consuming 70 percent of the U.S. electricity, where CO2-eating undeveloped land used to be. Between 2002 and 2007, the Daily Progress reported, the Charlottesville region lost almost 8 percent of its farmland.

Hospitals

The health care industry ranks just behind restaurants as our most energy-intensive industry, and as the country’s largest GHG producer. And it’s not difficult to understand why when you consider hospitals’ 24-hour dependence on electricity, the massive buildings and use of one-shot (and essential) petroleum-byproduct items—surgical gloves, syringes and even antibiotics.

As energy costs continue to rise, the Premier Healthcare Alliance, made up of roughly 2,100 U.S. hospitals, has launched SPHERE, an initiative to reduce health care’s impact on climate change. By creating target energy usage numbers, partnering with experts and offering a reverse auction, SPHERE hopes to reduce the industry’s impact while increasing its use of cleaner, renewable energy.

Schools

It may say something that one of our largest national newspapers (The New York Times) considered it big news when it discovered that kids in an Italian town actually walk to school. Schools, like hospitals, are on the whole large buildings that suck up GHG-producing resources, never mind how students get to them. In 2000 alone, Charlottesville schools produced 9,132 metric tons of GHGs.

In a way, they are the end result of most of the above categories—food with a long paper trail, fossil-fuel-burning travel, large buildings and—despite recycling programs—the production sites of large amounts of landfill-bound waste. Charlottesville’s Facilities Maintenance group, however, oversees services for city schools, so each school is a part of the ongoing energy management program.

If you’re like me, you’ve spent the last six months in the glow of computer screens that shine slumping graphs onto your bewildered face, mumbling the day’s TED spread in your sleep and generally trying not to freak out as we ride out our sputtering economy as Amelia Earhart surely rode out her Lockheed Electra.

The national unemployment rate hit 6.5 percent in October, while retail sales fell 2.8 percent. Even UVA, that last bastion of steady-handed investment in these shaky times, saw its endowment drop $600 million.

Let’s face it. Worrying is not going to fix this economic mess. Truth is, we don’t know how to fix it. This thing may not be fixable.

The finance people who broke our economy don’t even know exactly how they did it. The details of this crash seem almost magical, even to the detail people. It’s a little like letting a Wall Street guy borrow your car, except that he comes back not only without your car but also without a firm grasp on the concept of cars.

In short: We’re screwed.

Slumps beget downturns beget recessions, on and on, until we find ourselves much like our grandparents, waking up to a daggone Great Depression. But not the ’30s-style, fedora-wearing Depression that we’ve seen in WPA photographs. Oh no. This will be a new Great Depression.

But like our grandparents, who scraped out of their hardship with ramrod backbones and enough steely-eyed determination to fill the burlap sack that they unfortunately ended up wearing a week later, we will overcome. In fact, the coming Great Depression has the potential to be The Greatest Depression Ever™.

If there’s one thing this country has left, it’s optimism…because, really, with no auto or steel industries left, optimism’s the one thing we got going for us. Yup, blind, religious-like optimism.

It’s this optimism that allows us to see the upsides of the economic downturn. And not just the obvious ones. Sure, the price of oil is dropping, allowing us to drive a block to buy a bottle of water again, and house prices are now affordable—sort of. And yes, soon we’ll probably see another stimulus check which will go straight to MasterCard.
But there is a positive underbelly to this slug of an economy. I’m talking far-reaching, life-changing upsides. Take that MasterCard bill. Maybe by the time it comes due, we’ll all

be out from underneath the boot of credit card companies.

Maybe, just maybe, The Greatest Depression Ever will see us, as a people, grow more healthy, more educated, working fulfilling jobs and listening to better music. Maybe this downturn is just the thing we need to move forward as a nation, to grow some grit and steady our nerves.

We the people might even emerge from this as a stronger, wiser generation, the kind our grandparents became.
There is a chance, by God, that this is our crucible, our moment of definition, and from it will come a better world filled with a richer populous, in both body and soul.
 
Optimism! Yes! We will follow its light through this dark, worst time because, let’s face it, rationalism is just too dang scary at this point. Vowing this, here are 13 upsides to the downturn.

No more credit card debt.

Remember the movie Fight Club, where Brad Pitt and his co-stars—Brad Pitt’s Gleaming Eyes and Brad Pitt’s Rippling Abdominals—try to blow up the headquarters of every credit card company and thereby free consumers around the world from a lifetime trapped in the samsara of $2.14 coffee purchases carrying 27 percent interest?

No? Well, it’s the movie in which he bleeds a lot.

Something similar might be brewing, albeit without vintage shirts and nitroglycerin. Credit card companies have been quietly packaging credit card debt into securities, then selling those securities to investors.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s called securitization, the practice that got the mortgage industry into so much trouble. Everything was (supposedly) fine in Mortgage Land until housing prices finally dropped and people started going delinquent and defaulting on their loans. Defaults then caused a wave of foreclosures that—not to put too fine a point on it—put not only the mortgage industry but high finance in the crapper.

According to USA Today, credit card delinquencies are at their highest point in six years, with default rising rapidly. Enough defaults, and suddenly you’ve got even more toxic securities floating around, wreaking havoc and potentially doing what even Mr. Cheekbones himself couldn’t—bringing down credit card companies.

In a perfect world, all companies would collapse, leaving us with no more debt and several handy windshield scrapers. Must likely, though, we’ll have to settle for the schedenfreude that comes from watching the Feds lend money to Visa, only to jack up interest rates without reason or warning and provide shitty customer service over the phone.

Better public health.

Ever see those photographs from the original Great Depression? People looked good, huh? Standing in long lines, resting on porches after 18-hour days of sharecropping that put them even further in the hole, those folks were just working the look.

They were slim, trim, lounging about like they had discovered the secret to the perfect body. They had—Poverty!
Some researchers have found that as the economy tanks, our collective health improves. Why? Well, we could throw a lot of fancy numbers at you, with variables, control groups and cosigns, but let’s put it simply: When we don’t have any money, we can no longer afford to buy the everyday shit that is slowly killing us.

The L.A. Times reported that Christopher J. Ruhm, professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, found that deaths decrease as unemployment goes up. Most people drink less, smoke less and cut down on eating out, instead opting for cheaper, more healthful food. They also drive less, which translates to fewer traffic-related deaths. And people get more exercise—no more sitting at a desk for nine or 10 hours, surrounded by packaged balls of polysyllabic chemicals that pass for food. No sir, the unemployed get some goddamn exercise, what with the pounding the pavement, the frantic searching for a job beneath your dignity and the constant worrying.

An hour of worrying burns 278 calories! It’s true!

And don’t forget the fresh air. The Downtown Mall will be the new ACAC when our whole stupid economy sounds its death rattle and collapses into a Milton Friedman-induced black economic hole. With no jobs or gym memberships, we’ll have nothing to do but sweat out laps on the bricks.

Bonus for rich people.

The treadmills, rowing machines, and Stairmasters will now be clear of hoi polloi who have lost their “jobs” that allowed them to pay for membership, leaving the select few to pursue their gerbil-like exercises without waiting for a machine.

Easier coffee orders.

With disposable income, much like health insurance, rapidly become a thing of our prosperous past, no longer will we have to stand in line at Mudhouse behind business-

suited nitwits and professional mothers, their charges in SUV strollers, while each orders “coffee drinks,” stringing together no fewer than 18 words for over a minute and a half while we, the hard-working people—the backbone of the economy, dammit!—stand behind them, waiting to order a simple cup of coffee, black if you please.

We don’t want to overstate the importance of this. But this may be the single greatest benefit of our economic downturn: the melting of the $4, iced mocha-halfcaff-skinny-soy-doubleshot-lightwhip-latte at the headwaters of coffee lines around the town—nay, around the world!

Even more Horatio Alger stories.

You can’t go from rags to riches if you don’t have some rags. And a 6.5 percent unemployment rate will get you some goddamn rags.

Banks pay you more.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that banks large and small are trying to lure more customers with increased interest rates on deposits. Of course, deposits require money, which none of us will have, but we can take solace in knowing that if we had some cash, we’d be getting paid handsomely for not spending it, right?

A better-educated workforce.

It’s a dynamic that is as sure as tomorrow’s slumping market numbers: When the economy tanks, enrollment for community colleges increase. The job market gets leaner, wages stagnate, and people see an opportunity to pump up their resumes and make themselves more marketable. Folks around these parts are no different.

Piedmont Virginia Community College has seen enrollment increase 17 percent since fall 2005. Anita Showers, manager of marketing and relations at PVCC, says that the economic downturn is “one of the dynamics” driving the bounce in enrollment.

If it takes a total collapse of the economy to get a better-educated workforce, so be it. Eggs and omelets and all of that, right?

Of course, this is presuming that there will be jobs for all of us well-skilled, whip-smart workers. It also assumes we don’t all turn into English majors, we suppose. But don’t worry about job creation, because …

Our new Corporate Masters will emerge.

What do Intel, Microsoft, Apple, and HP have in common? Other than having their advertising campaigns skillfully burned into our collective hypothalamus, each was founded during the beary-ist of bear markets.

So which new Corporate Giants will emerge from these Hard Times? Is there a Spicy Bear IPO in the near future?

The New WPA.

When the original Great Depression hit, New Deal economists seized on the loony idea of putting unemployed people to work on the Fed’s dime by having them do jobs essential to the nation’s well-being. Instead of, you know, pumping billion after billion directly into the industries that precipitated the entire crisis by using the wrong Excel spreadsheet to assess risk.

The creation of the Works Progress Administration turned us all into socialists, of course. But nobody seemed to care because redistribution of wealth isn’t that big a deal when there are no more bankers, on account of them all jumping out of windows, this fact according to our most reliable historic cartoons. So we fixed bridges and built roads and documented our society, a society that was quickly, it surely must have seemed, going none-too-gently into that good night.

As the The Greatest Depression begins to take hold, socialism will inevitably make a comeback, due to us recently electing one of those socialist guys. And this could mean big things for not only the nation, but for Charlottesville as well.

We may finally be able to fix all those bridges and sewer mainlines and the crumbling Interstate system, those things that are too boring to pay attention to when we’re all rich and throwing around multiple credit cards at fancy bars and then sweating out day-old whiskey stink on gold-plated treadmills.

But now…. We will know what work is.

Perhaps cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia and—who knows?—even Charlottesville can complete what has been, up until the housing market dissolved and the credit markets gave us the finger, our three-year boondoggle of bringing broadband Internet to every corner of this great land. So we can all, in one great patriotic push, ruthlessly scour Craigslist for a job.  And then decades later, we will explain to our clueless young children, with a touch of by-the-bootstraps pride, how we used to have to schlep actual “laptops” to “coffee shops” for the Internet.

In Charlottesville, under the Brand New Deal™, buskers will surely be paid a living wage by the government under the new and improved WPA, since none of us will have a dollar to spare to hear that one really cool Radiohead song yet again. Ditto graffiti artists, electronic musicians, and any other person whose art holds the promise of obscure poverty, if not full-on starvation.

This will not apply to area poets whose names include the words “Charles,” “Wright,” “Rita,” or “Dove.” Sorry suckers—you’re on your own.

Better music.

Look. We like 23-year-olds in snap-button flannel singing Depression-era songs as much as the next Charlottesville resident, really. But sometimes enough is enough. As the markets crash and bread lines form, the New Greatest Depression will hopefully usher in our own Depression-era music. A music that is formed out of our rough times, not our grandparents’. The New Greatest Depression will ring of our stories, told by our best musicians, and hopefully not another teenager who downloaded “Tom Joad” lyrics to his iPhone.

Don’t get it twisted, the Great Depression gave us the Carter Family, which gave us “No Depression” which gave us Uncle Tupelo, which gave us Jeff Tweedy, who gives my girlfriend the hots, from which I reap benefits. But now is our time to birth a new kind of blues and quit riding coattails, albeit heavily patched and dirty ones.

It is a sad fact that the best music comes from the worst times. The Great Depression gave us Woody. Reaganomics gave us Public Enemy. The Cold War, Metallica. And who came out of those heady, Internet Boom days? The biting genius of the Backstreet Boys, LeAnn Rimes and post-Biggie Puff Daddy doing that silly dance during the breakdown of seemingly every song on the damn radio.

These new days will belong to innovators and poets. In short, long live the Beetnix.

The demise of Linens ‘n Things.

Enough said on this, really. Thanks to this depot of uselessness filing for bankruptcy, there will be far fewer grown men having temper tantrums in the home decor sections of our nation. A quiet national dignity will assuredly return.

No more flip-flops.

As jobs become fewer and ever more precious, sartorial consideration will become increasingly important.

No more rolling into the office—assuming you still have an office—looking like the poster boy for Gamma Delta Papasmoney. And no more goddamn grown men wearing flip-flops.

Take a look at those photos from the original Great Depression. Even the unemployed had style. And not a single flip nor flop among them.

Furloughs.

After the 10- and 12-hour workdays brought by a booming economy, who doesn’t need a break? Well, employees at large companies like HP are about to get one, without pay, of course. As big-name businesses and government agencies grow more desperate in their fight against red ink, they will increasingly turn to a time-honored tactic of saving money—not giving their employees any. HP and Micro, two tech heavy hitters, recently announced holiday furloughs. And Fairfax County has also furloughed employees for at least a day.

Which leave workers plenty of time to relax, watch what little savings they have dwindle, and generally enjoy life as it ever so gently flutters to a collapse around them.

I have a personal and rather embarrassing standard for Metallica. It hinges on one question: Does the song lend itself to the daydream in which I stand on a stage, 32nd-note riffs sparking from my guitar, and snarl vocals that proceed to both impress and frighten the crowd, which—incidentally—is composed in equal parts of people I would like to impress and people for whom I have a great hatred.

The majority of Death Magnetic, when held up to this ridiculous yet reliable standard, succeeds admirably.

The band’s 10th studio album, produced by Rick Rubin, was hailed as a return to Metallica’s speed metal days long before it was released in September. And it is. Gone are the bluesy, wandering melody lines that populated the Load albums, as well as the pop-song structures of the Black Album that seemed content with a single riff. Mostly.

Because while Death Magnetic brings back galloping riffs and sonic fury, there are moments when shades of Metallica’s more recent, sludgy past pop up. And they’re not all bad.

Vicious tempos and start-stop precision made Metallica famous way back in the days of tight jeans and mullets. The 2008 Metallica reaches back for both (tempo and precision, not tight jeans and mullets). But they combine them with some of the more “Mama They Tried to Break Me” moments of the ’90s. It works on songs like “The Day That Never Comes” and “Cyanide.”

Instead of relying on those alt-metal years, Metallica uses them to do something they haven’t done for the last decade: write songs with multiple movements and complex arrangements. Or, put another way, songs that make you want to drive fast and punch concrete.

But for all the celebration of Metallica’s return to its first-four-albums form, there is an aspect that didn’t come back. Lyrically, it may be time for fans to learn to live without the Master of Puppets-era James Hetfield.
 
The lyrics for Death Magnetic came solely from Hetfield, and thank whatever deity for that, given the low points from the group’s previous album, St. Anger. Clearly, though, Death Magnetic still exists in that nebulous, post-recovery mode of self-evaluation.

Hetfield was clearly at his best when writing in a persona—songs like “Disposable Heroes,” “One” and “Creeping Death.” But those are nearly 20 years in the past. The songs we’ve got now aren’t bad if one can forgive the occasional poetic inversion for the sake of rhyme, the more-than-occasional metal cliché and the phrase “forever more.”

There are bright moments, of course, songs like “The End of the Line,” where Hetfield is back to barking lyrics and sounding like the same lead man whose staccato shouts on “Creeping Death” hit like spears.

If the early Hetfield of Master of Puppets was metal’s Hemingway, sparse and violent in nature and subject, then the post-recovery, pushing-50 Hetfield is someone different, more personal, drawn to assaying an interior world. It’s just good to hear him do it at this tempo again.

I am inclined to disbelieve in life’s exactness, but I swear this to be true. Precisely in the middle of the 10-hour drive that connects my old home of Washington, D.C., to my hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, a drive I have made many times in many emotional states and will continue to make for the foreseeable future, sits a bridge over the Ohio River that begins or, depending on your direction, ends in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Destination: I-70 bridge over the Ohio River Location: Between Wheeling, WV and Martins Ferry, OH Distance from Charlottesville: 328 miles Bio of James Wright, with audio of “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/73 Martins Ferry High School football team: http://www.mfcsd.k12.oh.us/hs/sports/football/index.html

From that bridge it is five hours to your destination, no matter if you’re chasing the sun or running from it. Below, the Ohio River cuts through the valley that separates the long-forgotten steel town of Wheeling from Martins Ferry, Ohio, the birthplace of the poet James Wright. The town on the Ohio side is the setting for Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” where men whose lives have been used up by steel mills hide in bars and dream of their sons on the football field, who grow “suicidally beautiful,” as Wright puts it, galloping terribly, crashing into one another.

For seven years I’ve crossed that bridge going one way or the other, and I have yet to stop in either city that hugs the muddy river. From the bridge, both look like forgotten places, untouched by modern development, shoeboxes made of bricks and black shingle roofs, church steeples rising from the grid. In the midday sun, and it’s always midday when I cross the bridge, the masonwork of those churches gleams between the wire bridge supports whipping by.

I’ve never stopped, partly because there is always a rush to arrive wherever I’m going, the promise of something at the end. Comfort at the end of a bad marriage. A mother who is set to die. The face of someone new. Or there is the thing I’ve tried to put behind. The hazy mistakes of the night before. Rituals I cannot stop performing. False hope. Sometime around the fourth year, it became impossible to tell promises and dead ends.

The river comes, bending south as it wraps itself around Wheeling. In the middle of the bridge, if you take your foot off the gas just for a count of three, you can see Wheeling Island, the Manhattan-like chunk almost exactly in the middle of the river, its small clapboard house neatly in line with its gridded streets.

Rolling by, 50 or 60′ above it all, there is no time to stop, but there is enough time to wonder about the houses and the lives they contain, to imagine what the place becomes when the sun drops behind the rolling hills of Ohio, how the high school football stadium that sits just on the tip of the island looks when it’s lit up on Friday nights.
How many boys created the most fruitful times of their lives on that field, and did they have the awareness at 16, 17, 18 years old that they would long for those times for the next 30 years? There is time for questions like these, but only in a space of a few seconds before you touch your foot back to the gas and leap ahead.

Back then, the most satisfying thing about traveling was being unleashed from my life. It still is. Rumbling over the pieced-together concrete slabs of that bridge, the river spreading out on either side of me like a set of wings, I was the farthest I could possibly be from both beginning and end. Those 10 or 15 seconds of suspension above a town I know only by its rooftops were the equivalent of a pardon or reprieve from something that, I knew, would be waiting for me when I stopped the car.

During the first couple of trips in my early 20s, I came to think about Wheeling and the river as being the great divide of the East and Midwest. On the Ohio side, traveling west, you roll over gentle hills until the land gradually flattened, as if some enormous rolling pin had taken a single pass at it. Traveling east across the river, you immediately began the climb into the mountains of West Virginia and Maryland. 

Sitting exactly between the two topographies, between East and West and old and new, I used to feel unbound by everything I had ever done, the person I’d somehow become. In the noon sun, I finally felt able to start writing that second act that Fitzgerald had claimed—mistakenly, I thought at the time—didn’t exist.

Gentle Reader,

It’s time we had a talk. Things haven’t been the best between us for some time, I think we’ll both admit. While some of you are holding this page in your hand, trying to keep our relationship alive, the Old Media Writer and the 21st Century Reader, I know some of you are online right now, reading this with one eye elsewhere.
And that’s not all you’re doing online.

Look, I know all about the late-night blogs, the comment threads with God knows how many others, the anonymous posters and the good-time websites that amount to a witty sentence or two. I know all about your little flings.

But I also know what we once had, the serious time that we spent together, me telling you exactly what was what, you taking it in with little to no chance to respond. Have I taken you for granted?

There are things that I have been loathe to give you in the past. A say in the matter? Sure, if you don’t mind waiting a week or two for your letter to my editor to run. A voice in the discussion? A conversation with other readers? My dear, that would simply be chaos.

Yet here you are, leaving me in the newspaper rack, barely even skimmed, as you skip off on your next New Media date. I see where you’ve been spending your time, gawking at Gawker and shuttling around the Web like some newly free 18-year-old, beer-drunk at his first frat party. And that’s fine, great, do what you want kid, but really, even I am shocked to see you ditching our quiet time together for post after post on that website. You know which one I’m talking about.

It’s time we had a talk, honestly. There are things that we both know I just don’t do for you, and that’s why you’re out browsing around. But we can make this work. I can change…I think.

The cacophony of a community weighing in on every story? The power shifted from writer to reader? The vandals over-running the journalistic wall we’ve spent the past century mortaring and cementing? Can I change? Can Old Media take its Web 2.0 beating, accept its snarky welcome to the Internet from the New Guard and keep its readers?
I know you want change, darling, but just how much can one fading informational empire do?

So before we both say our last goodbyes, just for old time’s sake give me a few moments of your time. Let’s try to remember what we once were. Let me dress up in that well-worn authorial Old Media Voice and tell you one last story, this one about a businessman named Kyle Redinger, the manchild who has made it his goal in life to hasten my demise.

In the beginning, there was Microsoft…

In October 2007, Business Week magazine featured two men from Charlottesville in its America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs issue. Among the photos of teens and 20-somethings in open collars and blazer/designer t-shirt combos is one of Kyle and his business partner Francesco DeParis leaned back in Captain of Industry leather chairs in full-on, take-no-prisoners, Always-Be-Closing dark suits, legs crossed, staring down at the camera.

And why not? Anyone with balls enough to ditch their financial jobs at a company like Microsoft—first jobs out of college for both—move to Charlottesville and start up a boutique investment bank smack dab on the Downtown Mall is damn sure confident enough to lean back in a leather lounger and look at Business Week photog’s camera dead in the eye.

Of course, this is just what Kyle did. After graduating from Western Albemarle in 2001 and UVA’s McIntire School in 2005, he sloughed off his hometown and, as so many young men with the gleam of a personal fortune in their eyes have done, he headed West. The Internet gold rush had come and gone ages ago—business years, like dog years, pass quicker. But a job in the guts of one of the county’s most influential capital behemoths is just too good a deal to pass up when you’re a born businessman.

Which, of course, is what Redinger is. He doesn’t say so, and instead tosses around labels like “business dork” or high school “wild child,” but the people around him, well, that’s the first thing they say when they hear his name.

But back to Microsoft and Seattle’s constant rain. It wasn’t for Kyle. When he left UVA for the West Coast, George Overstreet, a professor at the McIntire School who had served as a sort of mentor to Kyle guessed that he wouldn’t find roots in Seattle.

“I knew when he went out to the world of the big corporation of the West Coast that he won’t be long out there,” says Overstreet. “I didn’t think he’d be too taken with corporate America, large corporations. But that was a good experience.”

The Behemoth wasn’t for Francesco, either, who had come to the West Coast fresh out of Babson College in Boston. They both worked in the financial rotation program, spending six months in different parts of the Behemoth, doing analysis, looking at industry trends. The two met in the first days of the rotation program. Both were foodies, connoisseurs of cuisine and drink, and began hanging out, cooking together, hitting the bars.

And businessmen being businessmen, Kyle and Francesco turned their eye toward their first true love: doing deals.

“Both of us had not been very satisfied with the experience at Microsoft,” says Francesco. “Kyle was pursuing interviews on Wall Street, and I was thinking about leaving and starting my own business.”

So he set a deadline to leave the Behemoth, whether he had a job to go to or not.

“I needed to get out of the company,” Francesco says. “A project came along that I took on, and I realized that I needed someone else’s help.”
 
This was an outside deal, a little something on the side. While shuttling back and forth through Microsoft’s innards, Kyle and Francesco noticed something. There were small deals being done—$5 to $6 million companies, not big enough to warrant the attention of Wall Street but in need of help in navigating the acquisition and merger process.
 
So on the tail end of their run inside the Behemoth, Francesco and Kyle founded DeParis Redinger in June 2006, a boutique investment bank with one eye on those smallish companies that may be finance chum to bigger fish.
 
But the other eye is squarely on the state of media, and this, gentle reader, is where you and I come in.
 
Because in October 2007, just three months out from the bank’s creation, DeParis Redinger acquired a majority stake in cVillain, a website that, depending on whom you ask, is a blog, a media outlet, an online destination or a straight-up gossip site. Whatever it was and is, DeParis Redinger’s buyout of the site represented a salvo in the battle for you, the reader.

If Helen of Troy’s face launched 1,000 ships, then the battle for your unseen visage, my dear, will launch 10,000 online comment threads. For the last year, cVillain has been staking out its territory in the local New Media sphere, and its 4,000 unique page views and myriad voices are gunning for the mantle that’s occupied by Old Media.

And to some degree—one that is up for debate—Kyle Redinger is leading the charge. Because he’s got the finance degree and Microsoft background, sure. But he also has one of the things fueling the New Media’s ascent: youth. Plus, the man knows his technology. Combine that with a little marketing sense, a feel for where the Internet might lead us, and you’ve got the makings of a New Media empire.

This is, after all, the same Kyle Redinger who was behind a private marketing campaign to lobby online for people to vote DeParis Redinger into Business Week’s Top 25 feature. Because it wasn’t the bank’s résumé that earned DeParis Redinger a spot on Business Week’s top 25. Up to that point, it hadn’t even done a deal.

No, it was that viral online word of mouth, the Facebook campaign and mass e-communications to engage friends and business acquaintances to vote for them. And it worked. Those votes propelled them into rarefied media air, gave them a kind of legitimacy that doing a couple small business deals simply couldn’t. DeParis Redinger was media anointed, all on the back of online lobbying.

“That was kind of the moment,” says Kyle, “when I was like, ‘Well, the Internet works for long-tail marketing needs.”

We’re having a party

Hardcore cVillains know the two founders like evangelicals know Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—by heart and, perhaps more importantly, by pseudonyms. In the beginning, there were Thor and Lilith.

From its start in April 2007, cVillain was a rollicking walk through Charlottesville’s restaurants, bars and back alleys. It kicked its way into the local blogosphere with varying degrees of edge and wit, calling out restaurants’ lousy service, dropping this or that rumor, kicking the shins of Charlottesville’s Old Media for perceived slights and scoop thefts and generally raising a ruckus that readers took to almost immediately.

Kate Malay, a.k.a. “Lilith,” helped found cVillain. “At the time,” she admits, “I did not really know what I was doing.”

More than a year after the site’s debut, and eight months after DeParis Redinger acquired cVillain and its two sister sites in the Spicy Bear network, Kyle sits at a metal table in the middle of the Mall and begins to drop some serious knowledge about what cVillain is after and how its writers plan to get it.

“The funny thing is that we always told our writers, ‘The difference between what you’re doing and what a traditional publisher would do is that you’re a host at a party,’” he says. “You’re there to put out fires, to engage different opinions. But you’re not there to be an authoritative person.
 
“That’s not how you throw a party, right? If you were to throw a party like a traditional publication, it would be kind of weird. It would be like, ‘O.K., you drink now. You eat this now.’ No one wants to do that.”

As the site grew by word of mouth, it became what every late-night typer with a Blogger account dreamed of. Anonymous characters formed in the comment threads. Discussions were sparked by posts almost at will. cVillain became an online community.

As all this happened, DeParis Redinger had an eye on the site. Kyle began helping the two anonymous founders of cVillain on an informal basis. In October 2007, the bank announced that it had acquired a majority stake in the site. DeParis Redinger put some money into cVillain, though Kyle won’t say how much. In that way, the bank acted less as a consultant and more as a venture capital company.

And just like that, two nameless guerilla bloggers had done something the Old Media said was impossible. They had just monetized a blog.

It was a fun, local business to get involved in, says Kyle. “But at the same time, they don’t have capital. They don’t have the necessary infrastructure. They’re missing a lot of the things that would make it a business. So how do you take it to the next level?

“Well, you have to put in, eventually, professional management. You have to invest capital, which we did, and then raised a little bit more money. And then we decided to really take over and guide the strategic direction of that company.”

And this strategic direction is pointed squarely at the establishment. From the beginning, cVillain occupied a space that once was the domain of alt weeklies, the loud kid brother in the room, pointing fingers, cracking wise and making an overall and entertaining nuisance of himself. Once the upstart goes legit, though, that space becomes empty. Enter cVillain.

“Honestly, I think it’s a lot more like what a newspaper should look like,” says Kyle. “That is, engaging community members to have discussion and have a platform and information source for them.”

If New Media marches under a banner, it is little-“d” democracy. And no one understands this better than Kyle. Thanks to the interconnectivity and immediacy provided by the Internet, readers come to content with much different expectations than they did 10 years ago. The writer is no longer the lone voice, only to be challenged or added to after the fact.

New Media has flattened the informational landscape. Instead of being the Alpha and Omega, writers in the postdigital age will have to settle in playing the alpha. The blog post, the news story, the editorial—these are now simple starting points for a roiling, sprawling discussion. The omega belongs now to the masses.

And in a publishing economy that’s fast beginning to look a little more wasteland-y than the gate keepers would like, it’s a lesson that Old Media had better learn.

“We don’t want to be the authority on anything,” says Kyle about cVillain. “We just want to be a facilitator of that community. I think that’s how newspapers have always been. You’ve got this print product that’s tangible and important. And it’s hard to get in there. Now with the Internet, anyone can be on there, so how do you stay competitive if anyone can publish?

“Well, you stay competitive by having the most interesting discussion.”

And gentle reader, if you close your eyes and picture the comment thread for this story, recently added before what may be our last time together, you’ll see that we don’t have much of one.

To Old Media, the story’s the thing. But spend 20 minutes on cVillain, and you’re bound to clock five of them reading the posts. The other quarter of an hour will inevitably find you scrolling through comment threads that grow 80 and 90 comments deep.

So, my dear, that’s where you’ve been spending your nights.

Of course, you can always stay competitive by breaking news no one else has, providing unique insight and fresh writing. But in a publishing world that’s beginning to measure success more in unique impressions and less in unique coverage, the refresh button threatens to become mightier than the pen.

And so the party that was cVillain continued on into the night. The two hosts, Thor and Lilith, pointed the discussion in different directions, occasionally stepping in to put out flames. And it was a never-ending party. Multiple posts went up each day, friendships and rivalries formed, inside jokes flourished and the discussion seemingly never stopped while the two hosts kept it all rolling until one night one of them got tired, made the rounds, said her goodbyes and went to bed.

But the party didn’t end. Oh no, not this party. In fact, it was just getting started.

Secret’s out

In the beginning, as the readership grew in the months after cVillain launched, part of its draw was its mystery. Who were Thor and Lilith?

According to Kyle, Thor is now a composite, a pseudonym under which anywhere from three to five people post each day, though he started as the personae of a single writer. An interview over Google Chat with Thor confirmed this, as much as an interview over Google Chat can confirm anything.

But while Thor played the role on cVillain that one would assume a Germanic pagan god of thunder might—perpetually edgy, confrontational and full of dated slang—Lilith’s posts walked a line between double-barreled snark and polished prose with a grace that another writer—whose chief accessory is a hammer—wasn’t able to pull off. Readers soon put Lilith in her niche. She was the nice one.

She was also the cVillain writer who was trained in the world of the Old Media.

“It seemed to me that Charlottesville was this fascinating microcosm,” says Kate Malay, a.k.a. “Lilith.” Malay, who graduated from UVA with a major in media studies, was one of cVillain’s two founders. She has a background in journalism; her byline appeared in Fredericksburg’s Free Lance-Star and UVA’s The Declaration.
 
“There was no shortage of interesting things to write about. I don’t know that what we were going to be writing about was immediately clear. At the time I did not really know what I was doing.”

Like Kyle, in 2007 Kate had just returned to Charlottesville. She was fresh from Austin, Texas, and just beginning her personal education in international cuisine, dining at high-end restaurants, doing tasting menus and reading chefs’ biographies.

The original Thor soon approached Kate with an idea. What about creating a website dedicated to Charlottesville’s nightlife, its dining, everything that people talk about when they are out on the town? At the time, Thor had already acquired two website domains for such a site. One for a site called “Cville In,” the other for “cVillain.”
And so they began.

“My family read it, a couple of close friends knew I was doing it,” says Kate. “ I was just putting content up and the comments were a whole other deal. If I could say, ‘All right, I’m putting up some quality content’ to myself, having been a trained journalist, that was the kind of writing that I really wanted to do. And it didn’t generate a lot of site traffic. My stuff was never what brought [people] to the site.

“I loved writing about the Red Hen or the Lexington opening, or a dream day or summer activities to do, or covering big festivals. The film festival and the Festival of the Photograph were so important to Charlottesville. But they’re not going to be as exciting as 100 comments about a restaurant.”

Kate found this out quickly. In one of her first posts, when she was still getting her blogging feet under her, she wrote a post about Mas. The tone of the piece got away from her. It turned ugly.

“I feel like I was just a brat who thought I knew something from being in a few kitchens,” says Kate, her voice shaking a little over the phone. “I’ve grown very fond of this restaurant and everyone that works in it. And I have the deepest regrets about writing some really pretentious prose. And Google is forever. It really kills me. That’s why I’m shaking right now. It’s a really emotional thing.”

Then something happened that, depending on who you are and what you were expecting when cVillain launched, was either completely surprising or simply part of the plan. The site took off. According to numbers published by Lilith, cVillain had 2,000 visits a month in May 2007. In August of the same year, the site had doubled its traffic, bringing in 4,000 visits and more than 13,000 page views.

The growth came largely on the back of the site’s restaurant and bar reviews, its insider gossip and the particular voices created by the fire-and-ice duo of Thor and Lilith.
 
Those were numbers that, if handled correctly by the right business person with a tech background and marketing savvy, could convince the very restaurants and bars that they by turns praised and pummeled that cVillain was a unique way of reaching a readership that contained a huge percentage of their potential customer base. The cVillain writers had obviously learned something that critics, artists, editors and publishers had long known: Nothing gets readers’ attention more than a negative review.

“I think everyone’s capable of writing really volatile things,” says Kate. “I just really hate that I was O.K. at it. What we started out writing was very critical and sassy and edgy, and I think I evolved fast. Every time I did write something nasty, I would and and…ugh…feel awful all day. It’s a gossip site. Gawker does it really well. I don’t read those. I don’t derive a lot of pleasure from reading Gawker. It’s interesting that I was doing it.”

The party’s over

After the buyout, Kyle and Francesco’s bylines started appearing on a few cVillain posts. The site got a redesign. There was even talk of hiring an ad salesperson for the site. But five months after both cVillain and DeParis Redinger announced the acquisition, Kate wrote her last post and ended her run as Lilith.

cVillain had lost not only one of its two founders, but also a voice of moderation, good-willed humor and, yes, even compassion.

By the end of 2007, says Kate, it was getting harder and harder for her to remain anonymous. The mask was grating on her as she grew closer to the people and places she was covering.

“When we were seeing businesses being affected, the lack of accountability started to eat at me,” she says. “I was also spending a lot of time in restaurants and was learning a whole lot.

“I was making good friends and really caring about these businesses succeeding, so I came out to a couple of restaurant owners. Like Alice at OXO, what an amazing woman. She did Artini! The woman’s a genius. I just felt like I owed it to her to tell her.”

Then there was the fatigue. At her peak, Kate spent 20 hours a week researching and writing her posts. All this on top of her regular, full-time job. She paid for her own meals, though she did have a drink named after her, the “Lilith” at Boheme. (“It was delicious.”)

While her anonymity weighed on her conscience, the time and cost of covering Charlottesville’s nightlife for cVillain weighed on those more tangible assets.
 
“And not making money,” she says. “I’ve never made a cent from this.”

That’s what DeParis Redinger had set out to change. But the way in which the announcement of the acquisition came pushed Kate even further from cVillain.

Perhaps one of the largest ironies in Kate covering Charlottesville’s social scene so well and in such stark relief was that she spent so much time alone in hotel rooms far from Virginia, writing her posts. Her job sent her all over the world, and it was in a hotel room in Beijing that Kate first learned that the DeParis Redinger buyout had taken place.

She was not involved in the deal. “It was told to me,” she says. And she was not written into the company.

Before Kate left for China, where she would have little to no Internet access, she had written two week’s worth of content to post over the 14 days she was to be in Beijing.

Instead, all of those posts were published in a matter of days. She knew the buyout was going to happen. But she didn’t think it would be announced as soon as she left the country for two weeks.

“I felt a little bit marginalized,” Kate says. “I didn’t get it. But when I checked my e-mail in Beijing and saw that it had happened, there were tons of comments saying, ‘Where was Lilith in all this?’”

The timing of the announcement confused Kate, and it still does. “It really hurt at the time,” she says. “It still kind of does. That’s hard to shake.”

DeParis Redinger’s entrance into cVillain came at a time when the site was shedding its new-kid-on-the-block feel and coming into its own as a local media power.
 
“With power, I think, comes a huge responsibility,” Kate says. “I think they happened to come in at a time when the site was growing in popularity, and the comment threads were escalating in terms of the occasionally bullying and digressions. I don’t think the site changed [after the buyout]. I think [DeParis Redinger] liked the direction the site was going. The change was gradually already happening.”

As the numbers of comments grew, so too, at times, did the snark. The website that Kate had helped found was now taking on a life of its own. In the beginning, when Thor was deciding between calling the site “cVillain” or “Cville In,” Kate had hoped for the latter. What she got, five months later, was a loyal group of commenters calling themselves “villains” and a website name that Kate says is like a hall pass. “It’s O.K. to get nasty if you want to.”

There is still a remnant of the other name. Thor’s e-mail address is “cvillein@gmail.com.”

Before the deal, Kyle had been serving as an informal advisor to cVillain. Now in his official capacity as majority owner, his focus was making the site into a local New Media business to be reckoned with.

“When he talked about cVillain,” says Kate, “I would be thinking about next month. He would be thinking about five years from now.

While she approached the site with a focus on the content, the writing, the editorial side, Kate says Kyle saw cVillain as a business opportunity.

“We are not very similar people,” she says laughing.

Even as news of the deal went over the press release wires and appeared on both DeParis Redinger’s website and cVillain, there were rumors that the deal wasn’t exactly what both parties were touting it to be. That’s because some people saw a single mover behind both entities: Kyle Redinger.

Identity crisis

Think about this. You more or less accidentally start a website that takes off like an honest-to-Christ rocket and turn around and you essentially sell it to yourself, thereby creating a media buzz for both parties, cVillain and your boutique investment bank, which, incidentally, comes from what its website calls “a technology-focused background” and is focused on helping clients navigate a coming “convergence of traditional and new media.”

Gentle Reader, if you’re not impressed by the genius of this, at least acknowledge the sheer amount of balls that pulling off a deal like this would take.

While Lilith specifically outed herself to a few people and generally in this story, Thor keeps posting and remains the central mystery of cVillain. And even though Kyle says that Thor is a composite of multiple writers now, both Kyle and Kate acknowledge that in the beginning, there were just two writers behind the two original personae.

According to Kate, it was Thor who first approached her about starting cVillain. The two had known each other prior to that.

“I think he saw in me a social mobility,” she says, “that I enjoy going out and I enjoy meeting people. It started out as, ‘Hey Kate, wouldn’t it be cool if…’ And there was something attractive about it.”

When asked if Kyle had ever written on cVillain under the name Thor, Kate wouldn’t confirm that he had. She also wouldn’t deny it. When asked if Kyle was the other founder of cVillain, she would neither confirm nor deny.

But when she learned that there were now multiple people posting under the name Thor, she was surprised, as if this was a break from the cVillain she knew. “So take from that what you will,” says Kate.

For his part, Kyle repeatedly denies being the person behind the Thor persona and being the other founder of cVillain. He writes on the site under his own name, mostly about Spicy Bear and occasionally food and technology. He says he is not one of the writers that currently make up Thor.

During our textual interview, Thor him/herself responded thusly when asked if it is in fact Kyle Redinger at the keyboard: “haha definitely not. kyle just called me from the road en route to duck beach to see how this was going. you can try calling him, not sure if he has good reception tho.”

Still, there are lingering signs that even if Thor and Kyle weren’t the same person, Kyle’s hand was a little more firmly on cVillain’s rudder than he cares to acknowledge now. In a May 8 post from last year, Thor attempted to kick off a viral marketing campaign to get cVillain onto this newspaper’s C-VILLE 20. Its look and feel closely mirrored the campaign that landed DeParis Redinger on Business Week’s Top 20 Young Entrepreneurs.
 
The post, titled “Do you think The C-Ville Weekly would list cVillain.com for Top 20?” reads:

“I think it’s a big stretch, but we are already getting some pretty good traction. If you guys believe in us you could nominate us here. Hey we don’t need the fame, but Charlottesville does need a destination site that is run by the community. Maybe that’s a good reason to nominate us? You are nominating the community. Kinda like Time. Just email:

‘cVillain rocks! cVillain rocks! cVillain rocks!’”

Of course, these types of campaigns are almost as common as spam is on the Internet. But it’s not the only time there seems to be an overlap between Kyle and Thor.

Both bristle when the words “cVillain” and “blog” appear in the same sentence. And not without good reason. While many people would look at the site as a blog—albeit a powerful blog locally—it’s threatened to outgrow the name. That is, if anyone can really agree on what the word “blog” truly means.

Here’s Kyle on the idea of blogs: “Blogs to me means basically nothing. If you say, ‘I run a blog,’ all that means to me is the content looks like this on a page. People use [the word ‘blog’] with a negative connotation, like if you have a blog it means you’re a personal writer without any authority on the subject.

“It’s just a way to display content.”

So is “blog” an outdated label? Here’s Thor: “I think so. blogosphere. blog this blog that. how about media? i think blog has this connotation that it has grown out of. or maybe we are a little defensive because local media in town views us as inferior because we have a blog format.

“a blog seems more personal, what we do seems very similar to what cville and the hook do, from a 50k ft content perspective.”

As two voices, both are certainly on message. The word “blog” having dated, personal connotations. Blog being not a medium but a digital format. And the 50,000 foot content perspective? I’ve only heard that term from people who’ve spent time in business school. In fact, I heard it from someone else in reporting this story: Francesco DeParis.

And then there’s this. On the sunny June day that Kyle and I meet for the first time, we sit in the Pavilion and talk about the difference between news sites and entertainment sites, between what a newspaper like this one does and what cVillain does. And he says this:

“Like today, I published a Rube Goldberg machine Top 10. Like, you guys would never put that on your site, right? That’s not journalism, and it’s not local. But we’ll do it because it’s fun.”

True enough, I had seen the post a couple of hours earlier, and I had scrolled through the entire thing, content to waste 10 minutes because, shit, it was fun. After our conversation, though, I went back to check the byline on the post. The post prior to it had been published by Kyle, something about how the Yellow Pages doesn’t have a section for New Media.

The Rube Goldberg post, though? That one was published by Thor.

Masters of the universe?

Really, what does it matter if Thor is Kyle and Kyle is Thor, or conversely, if Kyle and Thor meet for drinks after work and laugh about such speculation? It’s a mystery, a game, one of cVillain’s many draws. And the bottom line is, whether Kyle leads a second online life, in this one, the brick-and-mortar life, he has the makings of one hell of a businessman.

This March, DeParis Redinger represented Chilltrol, an HVAC service company, in its sale to Direct Energy. According to its website, it was the bank’s first deal after acquiring cVillain. In July, the bank advised SQL Farms, Inc. on its sale of intellectual property assets to the Behemoth itself, Microsoft. Now instead of looking at deals like this from the Microsoft sideline, the two former Behemoth employees are right in the middle of the action, just like they’d planned.

“I think he’s going to be successful in that business,” says Overstreet, the McIntire professor for whom Kyle worked during summers, evaluating private firms and strategic decisions in the oil-distribution industry.

“He moved back to make his fortune instead of bring his fortune with him.”

As for the Spicy Bear Media network, June also saw the hiring of one Zikki Munyao, VP of Advertising Sales. A UVA grad originally from Kenya, Zikki was sold on the job the day he meet Kyle and Francesco.

“It was kind of like meeting a superstar on your first day,” he says. “It was good to know that I was dealing with guys who were already successful and were trying to be bigger than what they are.”

And the push to expand the Spicy Bear network is on. cVillain already has three sister sites: the music- and arts-related CvilleMUSE, cvilleSTYLE and LoveCVILLE, a site announced in a post published by Kyle on August 13, described as a “social news website.” According to Francesco, the sites have yet to turn a profit, but the next step is to grow the sites and generate revenue.

That means advertising. Ads appear on a weekly cycle on cVillain. They run anywhere from $125 for a small rectangle box 300 pixels wide in a specific category to $500 for larger ads that appear on all pages.

And while Kyle’s may be the name on people’s lips when they talk about cVillain, he’s quick to shoot down the idea that he’s the driver, that he’s the genius, that he is the face of the coming age of New Media.

“It’s not me,” he says. “I just kind of have an idea. People ask me questions, and I can answer them because…well, I can Google faster than everyone else.”

Gentle Reader, welcome to the world of New Media, and welcome to a world where people like Kyle Redinger will increasingly call the shots. Because he’s come up in a world where knowledge is not the value item it once was. The Internet has pooled information in a collective swimming hole that anyone with a 56k modem can dive into.

Now, the information must be found. Value is in the network, the conversation, the community that knowledge creates. Old Media is still in the business of hoarding, of vetting, of defending the wall around knowledge that has been overrun some time ago, one blog, one comment thread, one anonymous post after the other.

Kyle Redinger knows this: Knowing something does not make you valuable. The valuable thing now is finding that knowledge and bringing it together. It’s true, information wants to be free. And it will be, all of it, just as soon as someone learns how to turn a profit freeing it.

At the end of May, incoming UVA law school students got word that the student-loan ground was shifting beneath their very feet. An e-mail from Cynthia Burns, the director of financial aid for the law school, informed incoming first-years that the University had ended its relationship with Bank of America.

“Recent changes in the borrower benefits offered…has created a new environment that has caused us to end our relationship with Bank of America,” said Burns in the e-mail. “We recently received information from Bank of America that it has rescinded the borrower benefits being offered to University of Virginia students on Stafford and Graduate PLUS Loans for 2008-09.” Those benefits included a 2.5 percent interest rate reduction in repayment with certain transactions, the payment of the origination fee on the Stafford Loan, and a principal reduction in some cases. “Bank officials have informed us that they have no intention of honoring these benefits on loans currently certified for the 2008-09 academic year, even though these benefits continued to be advertised on their website for UVa students until May 16, 2008.”

For four years, Bank of America was a preferred lender, meaning that the bank provided Hoos with enhanced benefits and services and that the University listed BOA as the lender it preferred incoming students to use.

For the last four years, Bank of America has enjoyed a preferred-lender status at UVA, which meant that the bank provided University students with better-than-normal benefits and services and that the University listed BOA as the lender it preferred incoming students to use. But federal legislation helped put an end to the relationship. After a dust-up that involved some shady dealings between banks and university financial aid administrators—UVA was not among the schools found to have a problem—the federal government now requires schools to offer at least three lending options for incoming students.

Burns says that the federal actions “indirectly” influenced the ending of the relationship between the University and Bank of America. The five-year agreement that started in 2003 ended this year and will not be renewed.

“We were operating under a single, preferred-lender relationship, and the new legislation requires us to have three,” Burns says. “In going through the process this past year to determine whether we are going to expand our list to comply with federal regulations or go to a lender-neutral situation, we opted to go to lender neutral.”

As a lender-neutral university, UVA won’t recommend any lenders to incoming students. And that means students will have to do their homework on student loans.

“Their ability to obtain federal loans has not changed,” Burns says. “It just means they have to do a little more research. Our role has changed, in that we must now educate students more about what the range of benefits are and what to look for in selecting a lender.”

Bank of America says that it “continues to have a relationship with UVA,” according to Diane Wagner, a Bank of America spokesperson. “Bank of America will continue to honor all borrow benefits it has advertised to UVA students,” says Wagner via e-mail.

Jeff Hanna, a UVA spokesperson, says that the University and Bank of America are in “ongoing discussions,” but couldn’t comment further.

“We’re in a really volatile situation for student loans all around the country,” says Hanna. “Our goal is to assist students and parents in securing funds that they need.”

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

Todd Lucas is a difficult man to doubt. He is earnest and he is forceful and he is a person possessed of an electric personality channeled through a gleaming sledgehammer of a smile. So if Detective Todd Lucas of the Charlottesville Police Department says that there are gangs operating in a fair city such as this, your tendency is to goddamn well believe him.

Especially now. It is a Friday evening in early spring, the air just beginning to warm, the sun slowly dipping below the western mountains. And Lucas is tucked behind the wheel of his unmarked, two-door white sedan, stuffed in there, really, because he is fairly bulging with radios and handcuffs and badges and whatever else it is that police officers tuck into the front pockets of their bulletproof vests when they leave HQ for a night of jump-outs.

Local gangs, says CPD Detective Todd Lucas, are mostly based around four city neighborhoods.

Lucas is rolling down Sixth Street SE, past a whole pile of kids bunched up outside a housing complex. Gonna ruin their nights, he says, the speedometer hovering just above 25 mph. Sure, he’s in an unmarked car, but he’s cruising slow enough that a quick peek in the car from the sidewalk is enough to make him as a cop, the military buzzcut, the bulk of his vest—black with the word “Police” written in heavy serif font across the front.

And the stare. Lucas is pushing the nondescript car down the block, but he ain’t trying to hide. Even if he was in a room crowded full of white guys in their 30s, the stare would give him away as police. Not intimidating, not threatening. Knowing.

There are toilets flushing across the city tonight, he says as he drives. And it might be bullshit, false talk born of an oversized sense of importance. But one by one, as he rolls down the street, cell phones are flipped open by people on the porches, walking the sidewalks. The word is already spreading. Cops out tonight.

He pushes past Montrose, Elliot, Druid and Palatine. Here Sixth Street peters out, the foliage of Jordan Park just beginning to take on its summer colors. Lucas makes the corner where Rougemont Avenue bumps into the end of Sixth and eases on the brakes, and the tires crackle on the pavement. He stops and throws the car into park and fiddles with the volume on his walkie-talkie tucked into one of his vest’s numerous pockets.

So far there’s been little talk from the three other cars while they move into their positions. An hour before, the task force had huddled in the CPD conference room, where Lucas went over the plan for the night’s first jump-out—who was coming in from what direction, where the runners would probably run.

Tonight is the first time doing jump-outs with the full team. That means there are other CPD detectives, a patrol officer with a baby face and a nervous grin, a detective from the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement team, an ATF agent and Jim Hope, the gangs and guns detective in Albemarle County, ACPD’s equivalent of Lucas.

The radio quiets against Lucas’ chest for just a few moments as the late movers make their way to positions north of where Lucas sits drumming his fingers on the top of the steering wheel. The car idles. A crackle, then a few words go over the radio. Lucas sits up in his seat and shifts the car into gear—and as he sits there quietly, waiting for the next radio squawk, the go word, there is the sense of swelled potential and banked force, a round being chambered.

If Lucas and Hope and the City of Charlottesville and even Police Chief Tim Longo are to be believed, the gang team is about to jump out into an area of the city where not only does known gang activity go on, but it’s one of the original spots that fostered The Question. For the last six years, The Question has flashed in and out of the light of public thought, tamped down at times, at others pumped to the surface.

The Question is trotted out when something reminds us of it, when we see news reports of gun fire or a group of kids dressed a particular way, and we feel vaguely threatened and we’re not sure why. And this is The Question: Does Charlottesville have a gang problem?

Todd Lucas and the gang task force have picture after picture of graffiti on and around Hardy Drive, the heart of the 10th and Page neighborhood that rep the Project Crud.

Lucas and his crew are about to run up into the South First Street public housing complex in unmarkeds, stomp on their breaks and jump the fuck out like some overproduced Michael Bay movie to see who runs. Then, they are supposed to stop whoever’s running and find out just exactly why it is they are running from cops in vests and black gloves, to see if these people looking for a quick way out of a tightening circle of cops are running for a reason that could possibly be felonious.

It is close to 7pm. The call goes out. Lucas shoots the car forward.
 
For 10 or 15 seconds, there is nothing but the ever-increasing whine of the car’s engine, the breathless headlong motion it creates, and then the radio lights up with chatter—who’s running, who’s ducking, where they are and where they’re going. And if you do not get a spike of adrenaline now, then you, my friend, are a dead man.

The Question

South First Street is one of the gangs that Lucas and the gang team recognize as having a presence in Charlottesville. It also goes by the initials SFS and the name 900 Block, a reference to the address of the housing complex where brick walls sport tags and the grassy pathway between two specific buildings is spotted with the small, plastic zip bags that are regularly used to measure out crack, heroin and other drugs that come in quantities smaller than a Roosevelt dime.

According to the police, SFS is similar to other homegrown gangs like 6-N-0, P-Spect, PJC and Crud Nova, in that it’s a local clique based on a physical location. It was one of four local cliques that Longo named in 2002, when he broke with his predecessor J.W. “Buddy” Rittenhouse and acknowledged that Charlottesville had at least four gangs that, Longo said at the time, may be involved in the sale and distribution of drugs.

Little more than a year into his term as police chief, Longo had drawn a sharp and a politically dangerous contrast from Rittenhouse, who had consistently brushed away talk of gangs in the city. He had taken the previous chief’s assertion—naïve as it might have been—that Charlottesville is a city free of gangs and shot it all to hell.
And he did so by going public with the names of the four gangs police believed were operating in Charlottesville in a Saturday Daily Progress story.

The story appeared the day of the Dogwood Parade. That morning, Longo half-jokingly told his wife, “You need to go down to the Food Lion and start collecting the boxes. Because they’re probably going to run me out of town after this.”

At least, that’s the way Longo tells the story now, but the flat-topped police chief is nothing if not politically savvy. So it’s hard to believe that Longo had played a blind hand by going public with a story that, ultimately, wouldn’t be beneficial to his department.

The incident that sparked Longo’s acknowledgement of gang activity in Charlottesville had taken place three months earlier on Rougemont Avenue. In the early hours between Friday night and Saturday morning on January 5, 2002, gunmen had fired 42 rounds, hitting two people and five vehicles.

Afterwards, the street was littered with casings. The Daily Progress quoted a veteran police sergeant, who called the scene a “war zone.”

The next morning Longo talked with Bob Frazier, who was the commanding officer of the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement task force (JADE). Longo wanted Frazier and CPD’s general investigations unit to gather any and all possible intelligence on gangs.

Frazier came back with four groups that he believed were responsible for drug trafficking and violent crimes. These were the names that Longo took public: SFS, P-spect, 6-N-O and Project Crud. This was the first public acknowledgement of The Question.

Six years later, Longo still acknowledges that Charlottesville remains a city dealing with gangs. But as to the question of whether it has a gang problem, he turns circumspect.

“I think Charlottesville has a notable presence of gangs and gang activity. We’ve been saying that since 2002,” says Longo. He sits at a round table in his office in the morning, his Blackberry and yellow legal pad next to a coffee mug that reads, “CALL 311—Baltimore Police Non-Emergency.”

“We see it in both cases we investigate and in cooperation with the county. We see it in some of the tagging and graffiti around the city. We see it in some of our interaction with jail personnel who have an opportunity to be exposed to that level of knowledge.”

Early last year, both the city and county police departments moved to formalize the gang team, members of which had been collaborating on an informal level for about two years. Longo calls the task force “an acknowledgement of our regional effort” to address gang activity.
 
“It makes sense when you’re in an environment like this to leverage the resources around you,” he says about the creation of a joint gang task force.

Last September, both Lucas and Hope donned suits and ties to present what they called a Gang Awareness and Education Town Hall Meeting. Area citizens packed into Charlottesville City Council chambers to watch a PowerPoint presentation showing tattoos from various gangs.
 
Scary stuff, especially for the first-time viewer. But while certain photos and videos drew gasps from the audience that was split between older whites and slightly younger, middle-aged African Americans, there also was an undercurrent of skepticism about the reality of hardcore gang bangers stalking the peaceful city streets of Charlottesville, 42 shots fired on Rougemont Avenue notwithstanding.
 
And here is the surface question that almost everyone wanted to know that night: Does Charlottesville have a gang problem? It’s about as loaded a question as you can get, a line of inquiry that can service whatever point of view that takes the trouble to pick it up and start digging.
 
Want to indulge racist tendencies? Then any group of black kids standing around is a gang. Need to make some sense of seemingly random violence? The hyphenated “gang-related” tag works well. Kids wearing white t-shirts starting to cause trouble? Surely they’re putting in work for a gang.

The Question is not so much even a question, but a starting point for other, more specific debates. What constitutes a problem? Are the groups of people that the police are after, those homegrown cliques of local kids with nary a Blood or Crip to be found, are these really gangs?
 
And that’s when we get to The Real Question. What, exactly, makes a gang a gang?

Like any subculture, like any group that exists at the fringes, a gang turns downright amebic when you try to define it. It morphs and mutates itself, working its way around solid terms. Where Lucas might see a gang, another might see a group of friends, possibly up to no good on a hot summer night. Where neighbors might see a loose collection of people looking out for each other, a federal prosecutor might see a RICO case.
 
And where you or I might see some young wannabes thugging it up as laughable, those so-called wannabes see themselves as down for anything—a clique, a crew, a gang.
 
In a TV news story that aired a week or so ahead of the Town Hall meeting that fall, a reporter asked a woman on the Downtown Mall if she thought there were gangs in Charlottesville.

Nice lady, middle-aged and white. Nope, no gangs here, she says. In the background of the shot, on a wall, there was a tag, three circles forming an inverted triangle, which represent a dog paw, which represents a national gang with bodies and drugs galore stamped all over its name. Those three dots are a symbol of The Bloods.

“This is the shit we’re talking about”

Lucas walks quickly after slamming his car to a stop on the south side of the housing complex. His gait threatens to become a jog, and voices jump through a burst of static over his radio telling him that there’s a man on a scooter coming his way, a man who had turned around and puttered off real quick when the other cars came rushing in.

Just as Lucas hits the parking lot next to the complex, here he is, a big man in a white t-shirt on a red scooter, probably in his early 20s, black. Lucas waves his arms at him, his badge and his vest in plain sight, and the man lets off the throttle and comes to a stop.
 
Lucas pitches questions at him quick. “Where you going? Why’d you take off? Where’d you get the scooter? What are you doing riding it in the courtyard?” The questions come heel-to-toe, with just enough pauses between them for the man to sputter out some fragmented answers. It quickly becomes apparent that there’s nothing wrong here, except perhaps for the fact that the man’s riding a scooter through a courtyard where children play.

So Lucas starts asking about the scooter, just to keep talking, switching from grand inquisitor to the type of guy you’d seek out if he tended bar. “Do you like it here? Does the scooter ride good? How about this weather? See any graffiti popping up over here?”

A woman loading up her car in the parking lot yells over to Lucas that this one is a good guy.

“Well, all right, Mr. B____, I appreciate your time,” says Lucas. He follows that with, “If you need anything, let me know.”

Lucas keeps walking, around the corner, then through the courtyard where he sees a family on a porch, their Friday night interrupted with swarming officers in bulletproof vests and pulsing cruiser lights. Lucas seems to know them, and they seem to know Lucas. He stops for a second to talk, to ask what they’ve been seeing around here, any gang stuff, any graffiti, any problem?

Over to the right, on the family’s brick wall, is some graffiti, the letters SFS with a list of names, a roll call. Could be gang-related. Then again, could be kids marking their territory, harmless. This is what’s difficult about pinning down local gangs who are based in one area. What’s the difference between tagging a wall with gang graffiti and innocently repping your neighborhood? The difference lies in the intent, sometimes impossible for the person doing the tagging to distinguish, let alone the cops.

There are two small kids on the porch, chasing each other, oblivious to the flashing lights and men sitting on the curb with their hands behind their backs just a little farther up. An older man on the porch looks up toward the lights, then back at Lucas.

“Is that a stun gun?” he asks, pointing at the black plastic strapped to Lucas’s leg.

“Yeah, that’s a crack-a-lack.”

Up ahead there is a red Buick, its four doors wide open, with three officers searching it. Sharp barks rattle the windows of the K-9 unit parked nearby that’s been called to the scene. The sunlight is getting thin now, as the day turns toward dusk. Meanwhile, Lucas takes one of the four men sitting on the curb, walks him over to a police cruiser and starts to pat him down, all the while talking about the weather. Residents of the complex sit on their porches and watch the whole thing play out.

The search turns up a small bag of marijuana and some ammo or a .22. “Pop the trunk,” one detective tells the other.
 
Out of the trunk comes a long rectangular cardboard box with the words “Shelf Lite” written on it. On it is a picture of a cheap plastic shelf that, from the looks of it, couldn’t hold anything more substantial than half a set of bath towels. But it’s got a strange rattle to it.
 
Out of that box comes an SKS, a rifle that served as a precursor to the AK-47.
 
“This is exactly the shit we’re talking about,” the ATF agent says to the driver, a young man in his late teens or early 20s, “an assault rifle in the projects.”

The driver offers up a weak-ass excuse that most of the task force find hilarious as they’re calling in the serial number on the rifle.

“An SKS for hunting…that’s a good try,” says Hope, laughing at the driver. “Most guys don’t even say that.”

The rifle comes back clean, but the driver’s not getting it back. Hope snaps digital photos of the face of each of the four. Then he tells the one in the backwards Pittsburgh Pirates hat to turn over his hands so his palms face down so he can photograph the tattoos on the back of his hands. They read “Southside.”

The ATF officer points at the embroidered P on his hat as he walks away. “See that ‘P,’” he says. “That’s for the ‘People Nation.’”

The world comes calling

The People Nation is one side of the East Coast gang world. It’s a fragmented world, but it can be broken down into halves. The People Nation is a loose collection of national gangs including the Latin Kings, Vice Lords and The Bloods. On the other side of the world is the Folk Nation, under which various sets of the Crips align. These two nations represent what most people think about when they hear the word “gang.” They have codes, ranks and organizational structures patterned after the Mafia. They are national drug traffickers and droppers of bodies.
 
If the police are to be believed, there are members of various Bloods and Crips sets operating in Charlottesville, and have been for awhile. And if you were to look at some of the tags popping up around town, the graffiti tells the same story.
 
The gangs in Charlottesville, according to Lucas, are mostly based around neighborhoods. Prospect Avenue. South First Street. Friendship Square. Hardy Drive.

“We have members validated who live in those areas or hang out in those areas a lot,” he says, “where we know there’s gang stuff going on.”

The difference between national gangs and the local cliques isn’t just numbers. It’s organization, how well-defined positions within the gang are and how tightly the gang controls its activities. The Bloods and the Crips have their own laws, their own languages, even pledges of allegiance. Local cliques might be able to agree on a name and little else.

But that’s not to say that Charlottesville’s own can’t step into the big time.

In 2006, a federal case toppled close to 30 members of a gang based in the 10th and Page neighborhood. Louis Antonio Bryant, the leader of the Westside Crew or Project Crud (PJC) received two life sentences after being convicted on racketeering charges. Local and federal authorities had spent years making their case against PJC, documenting distribution of crack cocaine and marijuana, regional drug trafficking, shootings and deadly turf wars. This came out of Longo’s initial push.

Bryant and his associates were charged under the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act—known as RICO —a statute that was originally developed to combat the Mafia and is now commonly used against criminal street gangs. Under RICO, federal prosecutors were able to tie together almost 10 years of crime.

Bryant and his PJC crew were all but wiped out after the RICO trial. But the name still rings out. Lucas and the gang task force have picture after picture of graffiti on and around Hardy Drive, the heart of the 10th and Page neighborhood that rep the Project Crud. The letters “PJC” pop up, as do the tags “West Side” and “PJC for life.” The numbers “752” show up too, albeit somewhat less infrequently. Look at a telephone keypad. They’re the numerals you’d punch to spell out the crew’s initials.

And so it goes. Each local clique has its name, its tags and its geographical heart. P-spect is centered around Prospect Avenue. A clique known as 6-N-0 or G-Square is based out of Friendship Court along Sixth Street, a housing complex that used to go by the name of Garrett Square. These are the Eastside and Southside gangs that form a loose affiliation and rival Westside gangs like PJC, Grady Base and Crud Nova, all of which are based around 10th and Page and Grady Avenue.

All of this is true, or it may be to varying degrees. There is the graffiti, there are the jailhouse pictures of tattoos, there are the various boasts of local crews. But outside of Project Crud, which federal prosecutors dismantled over three years ago, what exactly do we call these loose groups of people with common signifiers that could mean, at one moment, a gang, and at another, simple neighborhood loyalty?

And even if someone is snatched up by the police with those tell-tale signs of gang activity—the guns, the drugs—does that make him or her a gang member?

“It’s difficult for me to prove the nexus between the drug dealing and the gang involved,” says Lucas. “Are they dealing for themselves, or are they dealing for the gang? The laws are kind of funny.”

This much, at least, is verifiable. The Virginia code that defines a “criminal street gang” is a clunker of a legalism with multiple roman numerals in parentheses. But what it comes down to is this: A criminal street gang is a group of three or more people with a name, sign or symbol that is formed for criminal activities.

But here is the part that surely would cause Lucas to tear his hair out if it wasn’t already buzzed down—getting caught breaking the law once isn’t enough. The third standard for the definition of a gang stipulates that members, individually or collectively, had to have, at the very least, conspired to commit at least two previous separate criminal acts, one of which has to be an act of violence.

Anything less, in the eyes of the state, is just a group of individual criminals. This is what Lucas is working with.

The local cliques float in a space between what most of us think of as a hardcore gang and a group of people who live in the same place. The line between gang and group isn’t fine; many times, it simply doesn’t exist. When someone throws up a “Westside” or “SFS” tag, what are they really saying?

Metro connect

Questions like these come into sharper focus when the big boys, the nationally recognized gangs, enter the scene. There is documented evidence of Eastside and Southside gangs showing affiliation with the two sides of the East Coast world.

Six-pointed stars pop out alongside local gang graffiti, the sign of the Folk Nation under which the Crips fall. The three dots—dogs’ paws—and five-pointed crowns have also made their way onto walls and sidewalks, signifiers of the Bloods.

There was the Crips tag on the back of the Old Terrace Theater, the word “Folk” written with a six-pointed star in place of the “o.” Next to it the letters “BK”—Blood Killer. Only the “B” is painted backwards, as is the number 5 that makes up the lower leg of the K—signs of disrespect to the Bloods.

Then there is the tag “Blood Nation” slapped down on the sidewalk of Jackson-Via Elementary School. There is the NTG tagged on a Hardy Drive street sign, initials for a Blood set called the 9-Trey Gangsters.

Police Chief Tim Longo believes that Charlottesville is a city dealing with gangs, but is more cautious about believing that there’s a gang problem.

Gangs like the Crips and Bloods don’t naturally form in university towns in the Blue Ridge foothills. For 9-Trey Gangster tags and six-pointed stars to start showing up in Charlottesville, there has to be a connection, something that Tim Sinatra calls “the metropolitan link.”

Sinatra is the executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of Charlottesville/Albemarle. Fifteen years ago, when he was a student at the University of North Carolina in Asheville, he spent time researching how gangs form and operate in mid-sized cities like Asheville and Charlottesville. And he saw a pattern emerge as national gangs started to get toeholds in these places.

“You’d have someone who lived in D.C., and he might be a low-level gang member there or in New York,” says Sinatra. “And they would move from there [to a smaller city]. And he’d look around and say, ‘Hey, there’s no gangs here. I can be king. I’m going to share these signs with them, this code.’
 
“And he’d start with one kid. And it’d be two, then three. And they’d start organizing. If you can’t be king in the big city, you can be king in the small city.”

Sometimes, though, the people you recruit don’t want to join.
 
In 2006, two juveniles were lured off the Downtown Mall and then beaten when they refused to join the Bloods. But this wasn’t a schoolyard beating. One victim needed metal plates surgically placed in his jaw. The other had his front teeth pushed back into the roof of his mouth.

Six teenagers were charged in the beatings, three of whom had the Bloods’ “books of knowledge,” a sort of gang manual with the gang’s history, pledges and list of local members. The attackers were wearing red clothes, including bandanas and caps, according to prosecutors.
 
One of the six, though, didn’t face trial. Indio Martinez was released after the beatings when a juvenile court judge deemed him unfit to stand trial. He would soon be back in front of a judge.

On March 2, 2007, Martinez was involved in a shooting on Prospect Avenue in which Javier Garcia fired an AK-47 into a crowd, critically injuring a 16-year-old. The shooting stemmed from a verbal altercation that began at a local rec center. Hours after the altercation, Martinez, his brother Carmello “Pee Wee” Martinez and Garcia pull up on Prospect in a green SUV. Pee Wee waved the assault rifle at the crowd that had gathered before handing it to Garcia, who ultimately pulled the trigger.

The Martinez brothers came to Charlottesville from New York City. Both claim to be members of the Bloods. Both were involved in the beating that followed the failed recruitment. And both Blood memebers were there that evening on Prospect Avenue, the heart of the P-spect crew, part of the Southside group that have, through various pieces of graffiti, aligned themselves with the Crips.

The summer of the white t-shirts

It’s been six years since Chief Longo put Charlottesville’s gangs on the front page, and nobody’s run him out of town. In fact, he seems downright comfortable in his office on a spring Tuesday morning, coffee in hand, the phone just outside his office answered in two rings or less.

“We don’t have the numbers and cases and population of gangs we see in other parts of the country,” he says. “We just don’t have them here yet.
 
“My fear is that over time we might see more of it. And if we do, you need to be staffing now for it. You can’t wait until it happens because you’ll never stand up a contingent of resources to deal with it if you wait that long.”

Specifically, he’s looking at Waynesboro and Richmond. The guns and drug traffic along I-81. The meth labs “up over that mountain.”

In April, Nathaniel Rivers pleaded guilty to three armed robberies in and around Staunton last year. He is a confessed member of the East Side Skyline Piru Bloods. A year earlier, Rashane Washington and Jordan Strickland broke into a Waynesboro apartment and shot 18-year-old James Gordon O’Brien, an alleged Crips member, and a 14-year old. Both Washington and Strickland were known Bloods members. O’Brien had just been released from jail after doing time for an earlier gang-related shooting.
 
It’s this in-and-out, the flux of people coming into the city that worries Longo. Lucas says much the same thing. The gangs are here, in some form, to some degree. The police for the most part know and track them. But introduce an outside element into the mix along with more organization and a big blue or red banner to wave in the faces of your enemies, and suddenly the game changes.

So what about Charlottesville? White t-shirts. In the heat of last summer, the media couldn’t get enough of them.
After a spate of assaults near Downtown, the media fueled speculation that the crimes, committed by mostly young black males, were gang related. The evidence? Some, if not most of the perpetrators wore white t-shirts.
 
During an on-air interview with Longo, Coy Barefoot of WINA summed up a confused public’s perception of what constituted a gang member in Charlottesville.

“It looks like gang activity,” Barefoot said, “kids sort of wearing the same thing, white t-shirts and jeans, jumping people Downtown and [on] West Main Street.”

As the assaults continued, the news stories piled up, leading some to ask The Question: Does Charlottesville have a gang problem?

“The frustration for me was that while we had a sense of who might be responsible for some of that activity, we didn’t have the ability to make a case,” says Longo. “Most of the victims weren’t in a position to identify the people who assaulted them, other than to say that they were young, they were black and they wore X type of clothing.”

Here Longo pauses and gives a sideways grin.

“By the way, those aren’t the characteristics of a gang. You can’t say, ‘They all have white t-shirts. That must be a gang.’”

He shakes his head, still smiling.

“No.”

One down, four to go

It’s night now, the sun is gone, and Lucas is making his way back to his unmarked police car, which has been sitting by itself under a street light on South First Street. The four men were released, short some weed and one assault rifle, and the rest of the team is getting back into their cars as they argue about where to stop for dinner.

It’s a little after 9pm, and they have four more jump-outs to go. They’ll be at it late into the night.

He walks slowly now, having to go back to HQ and turn over the small amount of marijuana that he’d confiscated. This is the slowest he’s moved all night.
 
He walks on the sidewalk that runs through the middle of the housing complex, and as he passes the streetlights overhead they toss off a cast of his own shadow that revolves around him.
 
Except for the streetlights that are broken, just about every other one. It’s not accidental. The lights are broken with a strategy in mind, to keep those parts of the complex where things happen that people aren’t supposed to see in the dark.
 
The city repairs them, says Lucas, and they just break them again.

He gets to South First, and there is a streetlight that’s not broken, shining its light straight down on the sidewalk by Lucas’ car. He walks slowly but with care, looking for cars that might be following him to his, looking for shadows inside other parked cars. Can’t be too careful in this part of town, early Friday night, the weather just starting to turn.

There’s nothing out there, nobody. He walks on the sidewalk around his car and spray painted on the concrete, directly under the street light, lit up as if on stage are three pieces of graffiti—a three-tine pitchfork, a six-pointed star and the numbers “666” all bunched together.

Just to the left on the gray concrete, the words “Blood Killa” sprawl out, inches from the curb. The “B” is written backwards.

Welcome to the Southside. It’s going to be a long night.