Author: spencer-peterson

The idea came to Margaret Hrabe, a reference coordinator at UVA’s Special Collections Library, when she was looking through the papers of Sarah Patton-Boyle, a civil rights activist from Charlottesville. Among them, she found a doodle by novelist and playwright James Baldwin, a pencil-drawn portrait of Boyle next to a few circular scribbles, and what looks like a 6-year-old’s rendering of a kite. 

A drawing from the papers of Jorge Luis Borges, on display at UVA Special Collections.

“It struck me as interesting,” said Hrabe. “Well-known authors had these other talents that weren’t as developed as their writing, but the creative mind goes just beyond one facet.” Hrabe filed the doodle away for future reference, and over the last nine years continued to document drawings by writers when she was following through on researcher inquiries.

Baldwin’s doodle, along with pieces of visual ephemera by Mark Twain, Robert Frost, e. e. cummings, and a host of other modern authors, are the focus of “The Writer’s Art,” the latest showcase of UVA’s extensive holdings on display at Special Collections. The exhibit runs through March 13 outside the entrance of the Special Collections reference desk, and contains 42 original pieces from members of the American literary canon.

William Faulkner, whose residence at UVA put the University’s English department on the map, once said that “the aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves agin, since it is life.” And how does his undated pencil drawing of a World War I French infantry solider, fondly titled le poilu (literally “the hairy one”), arrest motion, which is life? Well, it’s no As I Lay Dying, but it is fun to look at. It’s titillating to see what Faulkner was doing with his pen when he needed a break from penning classics. 

A U-Guide once told me that UVA’s holdings are so extensive that, were the Library of Congress destroyed, the government would make protecting them a top priority of national security. In his apocryphal, semi-apocalyptic vision, G-men are on Grounds at all times, keeping stock of some of our country’s most important historical documents—accounts of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, correspondence between the Founding Fathers—as well as the scribbles from some of the country’s greatest minds. 

One such piece of ephemera on display at “The Writers Art” is a letter from Mark Twain to his friend Edward House, where instead of addressing the letter to “House,” he drew a picture of one. Is taking satisfaction in a joke between Twain and a friend that much different than the obsession with celebrity that drives an issue of People magazine? The two are closer than we’d like to admit, but maybe we don’t need to qualify our occasionally embarrassing obsessions with the minutia that greatness leaves behind.

The exhibit also features a number of more accomplished works of art from less recognizable writers, including watercolor paintings by Henry Miller, and a portrait by Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy, an Albemarle County native and author who wrote the 1888 novel The Quick or the Dead?. But the most compelling pieces featured in “The Writer’s Art” are somewhere between works of art and scribbles in margins. Robert Frost’s fanciful maps of land that his friends John and Margaret Bartlett had acquired in Vancouver, British Columbia, which include his plans to build a lean-to sanctuary and a potato patch on the adjacent property, reflect the geographical and documentary thrust of his poetry. At the bottom of a page of crossed-out prose, Jorge Louis Borges drew a couple dancing and two musicians in mid-serenade, and his ability to render minute scenes is as poignant here as it is in his verse.  

Guy Davenport, a writer featured in the exhibit, wrote that “writing and drawing, distinct as they are, must converge in their root-system in the brain. By the time they are being done they retain their origin. They are both making the creation of something out of nothing.” To test his theory, you’d need to talk to a cognitive scientist, but “The Writer’s Art” is a worthwhile window into what a few great minds were doing in their idle time.

The story of the recession-era concert venue is usually one of declining proceeds and anxious belt-tightening. The same is true for the recession-era nonprofit, and the Paramount Theater is both. When the refurbished 1930s movie palace announced its new leadership at a press conference last week, recently hired Executive Director Chris Eure held that she “wasn’t brought on to save a sinking ship.” The backdrops of recession economics and the competitive local booking climate loomed, like they have over the last four year’s worth of conversations about local music, but the word that Eure and newly appointed Board Chair Mark Giles used most in their remarks was “community.” 

“In a lot of places this building would be owned or supplemented by the city,” said Giles, who also serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors for Virginia National Bank. “But the Paramount is fully owned and supported by the community.” The Paramount reopened in 2004, after $16 million in renovations paid for by The Paramount, Inc., which purchased the building in 1992, and for years it was something of a contradiction: a non-profit venue owned by community members whose ticket prices were too high for much of Charlottesville to afford. Over the last half-decade, message board complaints about $70 tickets have gone down, as the recession drove the Paramount to lower its prices and cater to a larger swath of the community. And if available figures are any indication, the recession economy may have spurred the exact changes that the Paramount needed to stay relevant and financially viable.

“In the beginning,” said the Paramount Theater’s General Manager Mary Beth Aungier to C-VILLE last year, “all the shows were sold out. There was an excitement in town, and everybody involved in the theater was so excited. I think they really wanted to view it as like the mini-Met, like the Lincoln Center or the Radio City Music Hall.” This was in 2004, before John Paul Jones Arena and the Charlottesville Pavilion (Now NTelos Wireless) had opened, before the Southern and the Coran Capshaw-funded restoration of the Jefferson Theater. Even by 2007, when the local booking landscape had started to change, the Paramount had much of the market cornered on high profile acts—that year saw performances by Jeff Tweedy, The Beach Boys, Ryan Adams, David Bromberg, and Dionne Warwick, to name a few. 

The upcoming spring 2012 season is something more akin to what programming has been like since 2009: a show by blue collar comedian Ron White, a screening of Chocolat, a visit from China’s Golden Dragon Acrobats, an evening with chef and restauranteur Tom Colicchio, Moscow Festival Ballet’s performance of Romeo and Juliet, two shows from London’s National Theatre, and so far, a single singer-songwriter, soulful South Carolinian Josh Turner. All for an average of $34, or about 40 percent less than what the average ticket used to cost. 

“It’s never going to be a theater that takes on 80 marquee artists in a year again,” said Aungier. “In fall of 2008, when we had an idea of what the next few years were going to be like, we took a look at our programming and decided we needed to lower our prices and broaden our offerings.” The last few years worth of plays, family events, and movie screenings—including this summer’s showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger, which charged only 25 cents—were a diversified departure from what the Paramount featured during its three-year management deal with SMG, the company that manages John Paul Jones Arena. Under Larry Wilson, SMG’s regional manager, many more nationally recognized touring acts were courted to the Downtown theater. But over time, the big-name, high-cost model became less and less viable.

“We were done in by our own sense of idealism,” said Sandra DeKay, assistant manager of the Paramount, to C-VILLE in 2010. “We wanted to be everything to everybody. And we found out that, not only could we not do that, but we have physical limitations in this building.” 

In the early years, it was the Paramount’s comparatively small 1,040 seats that necessitated high prices. “The artist fees for many well-known acts are simply astronomical,” said Aungier. “Now, we bring in one or two of them a year, and find an angel in the community to cover the artist fee. That’s really the only way we can bring these artists in, and make it affordable, for us and for the community.”

“We’re trying to simplify everything so we have a formula that works, so we aren’t just worried about breaking even,” said Eure, who previously served as the Executive Director for First Night and Recording for the Blind and Dyslexick. “I think they got the formula pretty good this last year.”

Though box office revenues and contributions to the Paramount dropped in 2007 and 2008, the change in programming soon looks to have had an effect on the venue’s proceeds. The Daily Progress reported last week that according to tax records, the theater’s donations increased from 2008’s $562,384 to $762,668 in fiscal year 2009, and proceeds from programming increased from $1.3 million to $1.5 million. 

Arguably, this broadening of programming also put the Paramount in step with its community-oriented goals as a non-profit. For years, the Paramount has given away a number of free seats at each show to military personnel and their families, as well as members of the Virginia wounded warriors program. Since 2004, 86,000 children have come to the Paramount for free programming.

“I think it’s really important that we become community class before we try to become world class,” said Aungier. “And that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Between the two sets that We Are Star Children played at Rapunzel’s Coffee and Books last Saturday night, frontman Gene Osborn gave a shout-out to the band-member moms in attendance, and then announced that if it was O.K. with the rest of us, his band was going to sing a few more songs about sex and death. The hearty applause this drew from fans and Rapunzel’s regulars alike speaks volumes about the appeal of the band’s lush and lighthearted pop anthems. Few other local acts could square being the house band for the Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers with playing the Virginia Discovery Museum’s Discoveroo Family Music Festival, but We Are Star Children’s style is whimsical and technically astute enough to find them appreciation in unlikely places. Last Friday, they opened for Downbeat Project at the Southern, but it was at a small café on a quiet street in Lovingston that they cut their first live album.

We Are Star Children frontman Gene Osborn strummed, versified and contributed the occasional flute solo last weekend at the culmination of the band’s Live at Rapunzel’s show series, which will be mixed into a live album in early 2012. (Photo by Michael Ponzini.)

Though We Are Star Children started playing the occasional show at Rapunzel’s in April of 2010, most of the bands that frequent the venue are blues, folk or roots-oriented. In the early aughts, after Sara Taylor and her father founded the place, players would crowd around a center stage condenser mic, channeling the Grand Ole Opry style of sound reinforcement. That method received a few modern upgrades when Gabriel Taylor moved back to Nelson County in 2006, and started running Packing Shed Records from the upper floor of the former apple-packing shed that houses Rapunzel’s. These days during shows, he tweaks levels on a recording console like a man possessed. Over the past five years, he’s recorded over 500 shows at Rapunzel’s, and describes this labor of love as akin to “catching lightning in a bottle.”

Saturday was the last of three nights in We Are Star Children’s Live at Rapunzel’s series, the final set of rough cuts from which they plan to cull tracks for a live album, mastered by Rapunzel’s Gabe Taylor. The first of two sets they played that evening was downbeat and folk-influenced, full of the kind of songs that caught audience members off guard when the band still went by the name Straight Punch to the Crotch. In a phone interview, Osborn said that he was likewise caught off guard when people started showing up to his shows in growing numbers. “It started off as a kitschy, novel, one-off kind of thing” he recalled. “So initially the name wasn’t too much of an issue.” 

When Straight Punch took on a new name, they adopted the title of their first album, We Are Star Children, but whatever the band began as when Osborne started playing music in town, it’s a very different entity now. He and bass player Zach Snider (who got married to band member Aly Buchanan last year) are the only original members still around, and though the danceability and earnest flavor of the outfit’s early work is still intact, the current line-up approaches Osborne’s songwriting ethos with more of the technical skill it warrants. Solos from Coogan Brennan on keys and Buchanan on trumpet were particularly moody and fluid.

“Scissor Song,” from the band’s 2010 EP Love The Wicked, was a highlight from the first set, and Osborne’s vocal hooks and troubadour-ish delivery were enough to motivate a few Nelson County high schoolers to move up front and dance between rows of chairs. By the band’s second set, for which Star Children reserved all of their most upbeat material, half the audience was up and moving. Of the two-set structure, Osborne said that the band was trying to strike a balance between uptempo and downtemp songs for the sake of the forthcoming live album. “Live recording is a bit of a double-edged sword,” he said. “When you’re in your living room and you put on an album, you don’t always want to feel like you’re at a rock show. But I do think that you can be drawn to something in a live song that you would have passed over in a studio recording.”

A few of the sextet’s newer songs, “Danger Seas” and “Die Alone,” had an anthemic quality that bodes well for their next studio album, which they’ve recently begun traveling to Richmond to lay down tracks for. Though there’s something to be said for restraint, We Are Star Children’s “go big or go home” approach to layered instrumentation and group vocals should pay off on a few of the more momentous songs that are set to appear on their next studio effort, three or four of which had their live debut at Rapunzel’s.

Whatever your opinion on white people dancing, it’s hard not to agree with Osborn when he identifies the feeling at Rapunzel’s shows as “dignified”; the sound was crisp, the clamors for an encore were raucous, the used books were there for perusing, and the post-show mingle lasted much longer than usual. As former Feedback editor John Ruscher wrote of the band’s first album, under its former name, “a live show is a necessary part of getting the full impact of Straight Punch to the Crotch.” Which is still true, but We Are Star Children’s upcoming live album might get you close.