Author: spencer-peterson

Bill T. Jones and Frank London perform at UVA this week

The Virginia Film Festival kicked off two much-anticipated UVA artist residencies last week. On Sunday, Choreographer Bill T. Jones returned to Grounds for a screening of A Good Man and "One Hundred Migrations," two documentaries about his dance productions—the latter of which was the Lincoln bicentennial piece that started his relationship with UVA in 2008—and Grammy-winning trumpeter and bandleader Frank London, a newcomer to the University, spoke following a screening of The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground, a film about the groundbreaking Klezmer band of which he is a founding member. 

For Jones, whose major honors include a MacArthur "Genius" Grant and two Tony Awards for Best Choreography, this visit completes the three-part UVA residency of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and when it culminates in a performance of "Serenade/The Proposition" at the Paramount on Friday, it will also conclude the company’s three-year international tour of the production. Upcoming residency events also include a screening of "Still/Here" tonight at the Jordan Conference Center—a documentary about Jones’ creation of a piece based on his work with the seriously ill—and a Medical Center Hour discussion of the film tomorrow at 12:30. On Thursday, a free ticket will get you in to a work-in-progress showing of "Story/Time" at Culbreth, a dance developed with UVA professor and composer Ted Coffey that flirts with the art of storytelling. For an even sneakier peak at "Story/Time," Jones and company are holding open rehearsals from 5-6pm tonight and tomorrow, also at Culbreth Theatre.

The trailer for "A Good Man"

London’s residency isn’t as full of opportunities to hear the man speak—yesterday he took part in the last one, a roundtable called "Frank London’s Transnational Sonic Stew: Klezmer as Post-Modern Phenomenon?"—but the capstone of his residency is still yet to come. On Thursday night, London plays with the UVA Klezmer ensemble, which, according to ensemble leader Joel Rubin, has been practicing a music sent in by London all semester.

The Klezmatics – "A Glezele Vayn"

Monticello Avenue mural gets dedicated today

The Charlottesville Mural Project is dedicating its first mural this afternoon, at 4pm on the Monticello Avenue side of the Ix warehouse. Local artist Avery Lawrence, CMP director Ross McDermott and their little helpers have been hard at work on this 3,160-square-foot endeavor for the past few weeks, so if you can’t swing by to hear Mayor Norris speak on the city’s support of public art, and possibly smash a bottle of champagne against the hull of the Ix (fingers crossed), then make sure to drive slow and get an eyeful next time you head down Monticello.

How does she look?

First Fridays, Emperor X and Sonny Fortune

Pretending for one second that the Virginia Film Festival isn’t in town, filling an entire weekend with truly great films and opportunities to hear from the directors and stars who brought them into being. There wouldn’t be much going on this weekend, right? 

Wrong! The first Friday in November upon us, which means art openings at galleries downtown and throughout the city. Michael Nye‘s showing at CitySpace Gallery, "About Hunger and Resilience," pairs large-print black-and-white photographs of people who’ve gone hungry in America with intimate, gripping five-minute audio stories from the subjects. While it might do the exhibit more justice to block off an hour or two and come alone—there are over 20 stories, and you can only listen to them through headphones—the exhibit will only be up until Monday, November 14. While you’re downtown, Second Street Gallery has an installation of prints by UVA art professor Dean Dass, and The Bridge/PAI has a series of photographs up called "What’s Cooking in the Kurdish Kitchen?" McGuffey, WVTF, Chroma Projects and a number of other spaces are also opening their doors, so pick up the print issue for the full First Fridays listing.

Pepper Lewis, whose story you can hear at CitySpace.

Tonight, the noise/punk/folk project known as Emporer X comes to the Tea Bazaar, a one-man act by Floridian C. R. Matheny, whose precice, lyrical, heartfelt songwriting should do right by any Mountain Goats fan. Matheny is known to bury his recordings in out-of-the-way locales and post their GPS coordinates online. According to the internet, many of the unmarked purple cassette tapes containing his latest album, Western Teleport, are still scattered across North America. Cool!

C. R. Matheny of Emporer X mightily weilding a port-a-mic.

Music critics drop Sonny Fortune’s name in the same breath that they mention Coltrane, Cannonball and Parker. The legendary jazz saxophonist played a sold out show at UVA’s Brooks Hall in January, and if you were one of the unlucky few who missed it, the winds of Fortune have turned in your favor. Joined by Bob Butta on keys, James King on bass and Nasar Abadey on drums, Sonny returns Sunday for an encore performance. The show starts at 7pm, and doors-only tickets are available at 6. Given how quickly Fortune sold out in January, it would behoove the committed jazz fan to get there early.

Viewing Virginia through the Virginia Film Festival

The Virginia Film Festival is upon us again, back with a vengeance (and an iphone app). Over the past few weeks, enough ink has been spilled about the festival’s headliners and heavy-hitters, and if last year was any indication, it might be too late to score tickets to many of them (Melancholia, The Descendants and JFK were sold out weeks ago). But as with any year at the VFF, you can have an equally good time sticking with lesser-known films, and this year, the local emphasis is such that you could fill an entire weekend with silver screen depictions of the Old Dominion.

The first locally-focused documentary on the schedule, We Are Astronomers, screens at 4:30pm today. The film follows fourteen months in the life of local rock group Astronomers, culminating in their May CD release show at the Southern, and should pair well with Alchemy of an American Artist, a guerrilla-style doc about the "fantastical, sometimes brutal mind" of local musician Christian Breedan.

For a local doc that’s already generated a bit of national buzz, Preacher will definitely be worth checking out. The film, which grew out of a 2007 C-VILLE story by Jayson Whitehead, tells the story of Bishop William Nowell, who preaches at New Covenant Church, on the corner of Grady and Preston. Also noteworthy among locally-focused docs is Growing Up Cason, which traces the four brothers who founded the City Market back to their family’s depression-era roots. Trolley, a short film by Jülide Etem, contemplates—you guessed it—the free trolley, suggesting that the transit service "lays bare the segregation and alienation that is inherent to any modern urban area." 

A scene from Preacher.

For stories about other Virginia communities, the Documentary Shorts Program—which screens today, at 3pm—has short pieces on Richmond’s first Tea Party convention, the declining oyster population of the Chesapeake, the life of a Virginia death row executioner and Worthington Hardware in Staunton. The Loving Story delves into Virginia history with the story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple who were arrested for their union in 1958. With a mixture of found footage and interviews, the film follows the couple through the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case that would lead to the legalization of interracial marriage throughout the U.S.

Categories
Living

Stephan Said brings it all back home

When the first wave of protestors took to Zuccotti Park in mid-September, few could have predicted that the Occupy Wall Street movement would soon spread throughout the globe, but Iraqi-American singer-songwriter Stephan Said can claim some prescience on that front. Said’s sixth album, Difrent, released on September 20 on his own Universal Hobo Records, has in its liner notes a call for “a nonviolent international movement for a more equitable society.”

Iraqi-American singer-songwriter Stephan Said, who has worked with antiwar movements since the 1990s, brings his message to the Southern on November 6.

“The timing seemed perfect,” acknowledged Said (pronounced Sy-eed), who, beyond forecasting the Occupy movement, went on to become one of its most prominent balladeers. During the second week of the Wall Street protests, Said led a crowd in reciting “Aheb Aisht Al Huriya” (I Love the Life of Freedom), an Egyptian civil rights anthem he covered during the Tahrir Square demonstrations and made available online to “all those who are nonviolently working to build the international movement for a more just society.” Said played a Zuccotti Park show after a rumored Radiohead concert failed to materialize, and in October, he helped a 92-year-old Pete Seeger lead about 1,000 demonstrators in “This Little Light of Mine.”

So when Said plays the Southern on November 6, the seated show should have a special resonance with Charlottesville’s own Lee Park occupiers (assuming they’re still out there braving the cold). For Said, who spent a lot of his youth in Nelson County, “getting to know every nook and cranny of those hills,” the concert will be something of a homecoming. Though he hasn’t yet filled the shoes of an oft-quoted piece of Billboard Magazine praise—“the closest thing to this generation’s Woody Guthrie”—Said’s advocacy for the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements have made him into something of a household name as an American protest singer.

But Said hasn’t always enjoyed the support of a popular movement. On September 11, 2002, he released “The Bell,” one of the first major antiwar songs that came in the wake of 9/11. In a political climate in which an offhand denunciation of war with Iraq inspired the public burning of Dixie Chicks records, the viral popularity of “The Bell” found Said effectively blacklisted from touring in the U.S., as most bands and managers could no longer afford his name on the bill. In 2003, the same year that Dave Matthews covered “The Bell” on a solo tour, SWAT teams were called on Said during a public radio-sponsored show in Tucson, Arizona.

In response to his own trouble retaining a booking agent, Said started the non-profit Universal Hobo Touring, organizing concerts at student rallies and benefits for peace. In 2003, aside from releasing New World Order, his fourth full-length solo album, Said collaborated with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine to launch Protest Records, a web archive of contemporary protest songs. His current project, Difrent, which shares its title with his latest album, is a broadcast platform meant to “brings numerous organizations working for equality, peace, and environmental sustainability together with artists for releases that support initiatives having a direct impact on communities worldwide.”

As the handmaiden of Difrent the organization, Difrent the album has a decidedly more world-music feel than Said’s earlier work. It’s also the first album Said released under his given name. Raised with his stepfather’s last name as Stephan Smith, he tried to reclaim the name Said in his early twenties, but was told by record company executives that “there was no way I was going to have a career in the U.S. with an Arabic name, as if the very idea was a joke.”

But in the end, Said is grateful for the experience. Raised as an “all-American boy who went to St. Christopher’s school and liked to fix up classic cars,” Said grew up without “the armor necessary to deal with anti-Iraqi prejudice when I was hit with it as an adult. But that gave me a very unique perspective after I took the name Said, to see how drastic people’s assumptions about me changed.”

Stephan Said’s songs paint in broad, goodwill-affirming strokes. “Take a Stand,” off of Difrent, finds him at his most tackily genial: “We all know that we’re all one family / A couple green leaves growing on the same tree / All we ever wanted was to be free / Can someone please help me with some harmony?” But as cheesy as this kind of language may sound, it resonates with the storm-weathered possibility expounded across generations of protest music. One can’t help but think that Woody Guthrie would be proud.

The Mock Star’s Ball, Experimental Dance, St. Vincent and Charles Wright

Last year, The Southern rang in All Hallow’s Eve with a two-night rock ‘n’ roll resurrection called the Mock Star’s Ball, wherein a handful of local bands got dressed up and played entire sets as classic rock groups. Charlottesville’s previous rock-related Halloween tradition Mass Sabbath had pretty much run its course after five or six well-attended years, and as a spiritual successor, Mock Star’s did a good job of upping the ante and boosting the camaraderie. This year, the ball is back and bigger than ever, with a lineup that goes a little something like this: Friday night stages Astronomers as The Smashing Pumpkins, Corsair as Thin Lizzy, The Invisible Hand as The Beastie Boys, The Sometime Favorites as The Killers, Borrowed Beams of Light as The Clash and Hunter Smith and the Dead Men as Bruce Springsteen. Saturday night casts kings of Belmont as Pink Floyd, Pantherburn as Violent Femmes, The Eli Cook Band as Nirvana, Sinclarity as U2, Superunknown as Tool and Evil Eye as Fu Manchu. A mere $15 gets you into both nights, which should tide you over on Spinal Tap-style humor until next Halloween weekend comes around.

 Borrowed Beams of Light lusting for life at last year’s Mock Star’s Ball. 

Tonight, UVA’s Dance Program puts on a second performance of its Fall Experimental Dance Concert, which is made up of a number of short pieces by student and faculty choreographers. According to a press release, the show “reflects a multitude of artistic visions from exploring various states of mind and trance, to the amusing dynamics between a couple at an evening party, to manifesting a sense of play and harnessing youthful energy.” If that’s not enough to bring you out to Culbreth, know that all three of the people this writer knows who attended last night’s performance are going again tonight. The concert begins at 8pm, and has a third showing Saturday evening.

If Sunday afternoon finds you in a literary state of mind, New Dominion Bookshop is putting on something a bit out of the ordinary. Poets Charles Wright, Olivia Ellis and Mary duty are coming together to present poems from an anthology called Poems of the American West—think Robert Frost’s “Once By the Pacific,” Charles Bukowski’s “Vegas,” Nanci Griffith’s “Lone Star State of Mind” or Thom Gunn’s “San Francisco Streets.” Fardowner’s favorite Chamomile and Whiskey will be there, putting these real and mythical visions of the American West to music. This grab-bag of a show starts at 4pm, and won’t cost a penny.

C and W recording “Wandering Boots” in a Nelson County Barn.

The Jefferson’s lineup is notable this weekend, both talent-wise and because of its cross-generational appeal. Passion Pit on Friday, Stephen Stills on Saturday, St. Vincent on Sunday—if you’re going to be at one of these, you know who you are. With that, Charles Wright, reading poems on PBS.

Catch an early Hitchcock film for 25 cents

The Paramount has something special tonight for the cinephile on a budget. At 7:30, 25 cents will get you a ticket to The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, an early silent film by Alfred Hitchock, screened with live musical accompaniment by Matthew Marshall and the Reel Music Ensemble.

Hitchock’s third film, based on a classic suspense novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, follows the hunt for a Jack the Ripper-type serial killer in 1920s London. Any Hitchcock’s fan will recognize early examples of what would become his trademarks: an innocent man framed, skewed camera angles, gloomy lighting, anxiety, dead blondes. Should be a nice prelude to next weekend’s Virginia film festival, which will screen a number of refurbished classics from the Library of Congress Film Registry—National Velvet, The General, Terrance Malick’s Badlands, Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—all hosted by Ben Mankiewicz of Turner Classic Movies.

Dave Matthews launches California wine line

What pairs better with steak, AC/DC’s Australian Black Shiraz or Kiss’s Miramonte Cabernet Sauvignon? Was 2006 a good year for Motörhead’s Chilean Merlot? Does Silk Degrees sound better after a bottle of Scaggs Vineyard Rosé?

Now that Dave Matthews has made another foray into the wine business, DMB fans can ask these questions and more of The Dreaming Tree, a range of California Chardonnays, Cabernet Sauvignons and “red crush blend” wines named for a track off of 1998’s Before These Crowded Streets. Though Dave is no amateur when it comes to wine—he founded Albemarle County’s own Blenheim Vineyards in 2000—this time, he enlisted the help of award-winning Sonoma County Winemaker Steve Reader. The Dreaming Tree range is available throughout the U.S. for about $14.99 a bottle.

Reader on Dave: "He approaches his music and his fans similar to the way that I approach my wines… be genuine, be honest and give them the best show that they can have."

Categories
Arts

The holy rites of St. Vincent

The weather on Mt. St. Vincent is ruled by inconstant winds. In the songs that Annie Clark makes as St. Vincent, somber verses are never more than a lyrical twist away from sardonic, and anxiety seethes at the edges of even the most cheerful baroque pop moments.

Singer and multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark, known onstage as St. Vincent, plays the Jefferson on Sunday, October 30.

Though Clark’s songs are playfully capricious, her career has risen untroubled for years. Born into a large Catholic family and raised in a Dallas suburb, Annie Clark left Berklee in 2003 to join the Polyphonic Spree, then toured Europe as part of Sufjan Stevens’ band before releasing her critically acclaimed solo album, Marry Me, in late 2007. The sudden popularity of her sophomore effort Actor—an ornately textured album of songs written as pseudo-scores to some of Clark’s favorite moments in film—was recently superseded by Strange Mercy, an album more dark, personal and aggresively guitar-driven than the previous two.

When I spoke with Clark over the phone, she explained some of the stylistic developments at work in Strange Mercy, and the stories behind them.

Your first album and your latest are both named after title tracks. In what state was Strange Mercy the album when you wrote “Strange Mercy” the song?

Non-existence, pretty much. I wrote “Strange Mercy” before I wrote all the other songs on the album. Once I had that title I thought “O.K., I’ve got a theme,” and once I had a theme I was able to write a lot of other songs with instances of strange mercy in them.

The chorus of “Surgeon,” the fourth track on Strange Mercy, is a quote from Marilyn Monroe: “Best finest surgeon, come cut me open.” Is there a story behind stumbling upon that quote?

A bit of one. I went off to Seattle last October to just have a month of solitude, a writing retreat. At one point I had been in the studio for 12 hours a day every day for about two weeks. And then out to dinner alone, hotel rooms alone, just very much in my head and in that way, and I was getting kind of frustrated and feeling like things weren’t really going as well as I had hoped. So one day I just broke early from the studio  and said “to hell with it, I’m gonna go drink.” And by that I mean I was going to go have dinner, have a couple glasses of wine and just read a magazine to get my mind out of making music for a second. So I just picked up a Vanity Fair and read that quote from Marilyn Monroe, where she was referring to Lee Strasberg the acting coach, and I remember writing it down very big and circling it a few times. So the next day when I had a bit more wind in my sails I went into the studio and wrote “Surgeon.”

Throughout your work, especially in 2009’s Actor, acting seems representative of the greatest triumphs and risks of the artistic process. Marilyn Monroe would seem to embody that, as the archetypal doomed starlet. 

I think it’s a fair claim to make. In “Surgeon,” there are elements of what I know about her life, her struggles with depression, but much of what’s in that song comes from my own experience. It isn’t completely dedicated to her, or something like that. 

The instrumentation on Strange Mercy sounds as if you were trying to take cold, synthesized instruments and make them warm. What took you in that direction?

I think with every record that I’ve made I’ve tried to give myself very specific parameters and directives, because creativity kind of comes from limits as opposed to allowing yourself any indulgence. So with the previous record, Actor, I had used all these woodwinds and violins and real orchestral instruments and was going after this sort of film score thing, and it seemed like a fun challenge to break away from the organic. I’m a guitar player for the most part, so I don’t really know anything about synthesizers, only the most cursory, Wikipedia knowledge. And it was fun to be out of my element in that way, and to approach something with a lot of naivety.

Innovation often comes from naivety. Do you have a first artistic memory from childhood?

The first one I can remember happened at the beach with my family. And I should say that I’m not really a beach person, none of us are. We’re Irish and pale and I don’t know why we thought a beach vacation was for us. I know I preferred to be indoors, and Jaws had also come out a few years before, so there was no way I was getting in that water. I mean what did they think I was, stupid? So I remember spending a day at the beach collecting trash, like Coke cans and Popsicle wrappers, and spending all day indoors making simple machines out of them. Things like how to fill an ice pop wrapper with air using other pieces of beach trash.

Categories
Living

The Charlottesville Mural Project begins work at Ix

Charlottesville’s largest piece of public art received its inaugural brushstrokes last weekend, as a 3,160-square-foot wall on Monticello Avenue became the first canvas of the Charlottesville Mural Project. By the time that Ross McDermott and Avery Lawrence add the last layer of paint, the north side of the Ix complex will be one of the most eye-catching blocks in the city. As for the Mural Project—well, so much for humble beginnings.

A mock-up for the Charlottesville Mural Project’s first piece, by local artist Avery Lawrence. Photo by Ross McDermott.

Last spring, photographer Ross McDermott founded the CMP with Greg Kelly of The Bridge/Progressive Arts Initiative and Sarah Lawson of CommonPlace Arts, with plans for at least two murals a year—one done through community outreach, the other by an artist. McDermott and Kelly then travelled to Philadelphia to meet with the directors of the city’s famous Mural Arts Program, and tour some of the over 3,000 images that the organization inspired within the city. 

“There’s mutually symbiotic visions behind the project,” said Kelly. “Ross came to me with this drive to cover walls and beautify the city, but we decided to meet with the folks at MAP, because they’re really good at incorporating the communities that surrounds the walls, which is very important to us.”

In April, the CMP announced a design competition for the Ix wall, and local artist Avery Lawrence’s design—which features a menagerie of multi-colored, intertwined hands squeezing, tickling and pinching one another, with a few giving an amiable thumbs-up—was chosen from over 30 submissions by an eight-member jury that includes Mayor Dave Norris and Beth Turner, UVA’s vice provost for the arts.

“I wanted it to be pretty, but I also wanted complexity,” said Lawrence. “You’ll be able to drive by and understand it from that perspective, or walk right up and stand below an enormous 20′ hand.”

And while any mural with multi-colored, intertwining hands risks giving off the warm-fuzzy, “We Are the World” vibe that is so prevalent in public art, Lawrence’s piece is flirtatious and provocative, even after the selection committee asked him to up the whimsy and downplay the tension when creating his final draft.

McDermott and Lawrence outline at night, via projector.

“I think what Avery came up with really embodies the diversity of the city and its relationships, whether they’re mutually beneficial or awkward or playful,” said Kelly. “That’s sort of how community works. The figures in the piece are alien in their skin tone, but you get the point very quickly that there’s a diversity of age and ethnicity, which makes it a beautiful first mural to have.”

So far, work on the mural has mostly been done by McDermott and Lawrence, with help from friends and a few local high school students. Supplies were financed by the Ix Complex, Blue Ridge Building Supply, Benjamin Moore Paints, United Rentals, and Gropen. They hope to finish up in three weeks, and invite any and all to come lend a hand, although participants under 18 will need to have a parent sign the waiver. 

In the future, McDermott and Kelly hope to work more with local communities in planning and creating murals, but were hemmed in by time constraints this first time around. Over the coming year, they plan to work with kids in Westhaven and Southwood to plan smaller murals for basketball courts, and for local Boys and Girls Clubs. A mural is also being planned with the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library and Charlottesville High School, which will invite a group of students participating in the Big Read program from Charlottesville High School to design a school mural based on themes from their assigned book, Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya. According to a press release, the CMP also hopes to work on a large mural in Vinegar Hill. The proposed wall wraps up Market Street, below the McGuffey Art Center.

A work in progress. Photo by Ross McDermott.

McDermott and Kelly hope that the Ix mural will make it easier to find support for future works. By being done with prior approval on private property, it has already avoided minor controversy of the kind surrounding the student-created mural of two Native Americans next to Random Row Books, the subjects of which may or may not be leering at the Lewis and Clarke statue and its diminutive Sacagawea.

“Murals can be contentious,” said Lawrence. “They can be very divisive. People inevitably call them a waste of time and money. Putting paint on a dilapidated building; does that make a community better? Is that going to solve some social issue? I just like the idea of a community having something to look at, even if they’re not necessarily proud of it. A mural ideally excites people, and gets them thinking about what art means, in their community and in their lives. But I do hope this one can be inspiring in some way.”