Author: spencer-peterson

“A magic trick is like a little story,” said Steven Klein. In Make Believe, a 2010 documentary film produced by Klein and directed by Charlottesville native J. Clay Tweel, magic tricks tell an expansive story, one that the New York Times described as having “all the drama of a high-stakes sporting event.” The film follows six teenage magicians from Japan, South Africa and across the U.S. as they compete to be crowned Teen World Champion by Master Magician Lance Burton at the World Magic Seminar in Las Vegas.

Executive produced by the team behind 2007’sThe King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, Make Believe was Tweel’s directorial debut, and the first feature-length film by Firefly, the production company that Klein founded in 1996. The friends had been talking for years about documenting magicians, when Klein, a former teen magician himself, walked into a magic shop and eyed a group of shy, awkward teenage boys who turned into gregarious showmen as soon as they got their hands on a deck of cards. Klein stepped out of the store, called his executive producer, and said “I think I found the hook. I think it’s kids.”

Make Believe came out on top of its own underdog story when it became the feature documentary winner at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival. These days, Tweel and Klein are shopping around the idea of a fictional remake of Make Believe, but in the meantime, their coming-of-age documentary shows again in town on October 8, the first since last year’s Virginia Film Festival.

Magic tricks are very conducive to being filmed. Are young magicians the same way?

Tweel: As with any documentary subject, you have to earn their trust a little bit. Some of these kids were worried that we were going to show the world how their tricks were done and betray the art form, and we definitely had to set their minds at ease. They all have this love of performing, so even though they might be introverted off-stage, they would eventually open up and really give us some genuine insights. We would tell them over and over that we didn’t need speeches, we just wanted to hear their point of view.

What is it about magic that draws in awkward kids?

Tweel: Magic is this art that you can practice a lot by yourself, and it catches on with people who are already book smart and introspective problem solvers. So say you’re twelve years old and you don’t know how to interact with people. Magic can eventually serve as kind of a conduit to help you ease into conversation. You practice in your room for hours on end, but eventually you have to go out and interact with real people in order to perform the tricks, because you have to show them to people who’ve never seen them before in order to call yourself a magician. So that is where the rubber hits the road, whether you can cut it or not as a magician, and learn to communicate with an audience. A lot of these kids will learn patterns, the kind of spiel that a magician will give while performing a trick. That’s how some of these kids actually learn how to talk to people. They start to improvise off of their own banter, and slowly get comfortable doing it.

Klein: A magic trick gives you a blueprint for communicating with somebody. If you read a magic trick in a book it gives you a script for exactly what to say, but that script is based on the personality of the magician who created it. So these twelve-year-old magicians, a lot of them sound like forty- or fifty-year-old men, because they’re literally reciting words written by these stage personalities. The kids will try these personas on for size, and when their tricks start to really impress people, they relax a bit and start to use their own words, and create their own sense of who they are.

What surprised you most about getting to know teenage magicians from all over the world?

Klein: I was surprised by the degree to which the energy of teenage outsider is similar in Japan or Brazil or South Africa or L.A. That archetype is really consistent in its energy.

Do you know how all the tricks in Make Believe work?

Tweel: Me being the layman with no magic experience, I think there might be one or two that I’m not a hundred percent sure on, but I spent enough time backstage to get an idea of how most tricks are done. Steven probably knows how everything works.

Klein: Well, sure, as in how the physics of the trick works. Similarly, I know how to play baseball, but that doesn’t make the Red Sox any less impressive. I know how most of these things are done, but I would have to practice them for three years to do it at the level of any of the kids in the film. Knowing doesn’t take away from the magic of it. 

At the end of a summer that saw an unprecedented amount of college graduates moving back home and futzing around on Facebook, Class of 2011 grads Josh Luckenbach and Keaton Monger were shooting their first feature-length film in empty UVA classrooms.

Cute Kitten Video (Please Watch) is a comedy that follows two high school students and two inept security officers (played by Luckenbach and Monger) through a tempestuous first week of school. Punch gets spiked, bullies make threats, principals lose it; the generic plot is its own meta-joke, and serves as a scaffolding for one-liners, wonky puns and situational comedy. Think the witty, jokes-first ethos of classics like Airplane with a healthy dose of youtube era silliness.

As students, Luckenbach and Monger were both involved in sketch/video comedy group La Petite Teet, whose members and alumni make up most of the cast of Cute Kitten Video. Local theatre buffs will also recognize Daria Okugawa in the role of Mrs. Peacock and Howie Sheinfeld as Principal Butthole. For a preview of things to come, check out Luckenbach and Monger’s work in “Best Feet Forward,” the winner of the Audience Award in the 2010 Adrenaline Film Competition.

You can watch trailer for Cute Kitten Video on the film’s kickstarter page, and if you’re so inclined, pledge a few bucks toward production costs to keep two young directors out of debt. Eventually, Luckenbach and Monger look to screen the film in Charlottesville, and have it ready for the festival curcuit by next summer.

In Chad Harbach’s debut novel, The Art of Fielding, morning sprints and protein shakes are the stuff that dreams are made of. The book follows shortstop Henry Skrimshander, the rising star of Wisconson’s Westish College Harpooners, as one wayward throw knocks his meteoric rise off course and forever alters the lives of his teammates. Excerpted in Vanity Fair and reviewed almost everywhere, The Art of Fielding has been recieved with the critical hoopla usually reserved for literary hall-of-famers like Jonathan Franzen or Don DeLillo.

Harbach’s novel is the third to come from a founder of the literary journal n+1. It sold to Little, Brown after a bidding war involving seven bidders, eight imprints and a final price in the mid-to-upper six-figures. (The Bloomberg News headline read, “Unemployed Harvard Man Auctions Baseball Novel for $650,000.”)

True to his hometown of Racine, Wisconsin, Harbach’s a fan of the Packers, Bucks and Brewers, although his literary production has Virginia roots. Harbach used one of the early chapters of The Art of Fielding to gain admission to UVA’s MFA program, and an early version of the book as his program thesis. Last fall, Harbach moved back to Charlottesville, and did much of the late-stage revisions to his debut novel in a certain Downtown Mall coffee shop.

Over the phone yesterday, Harbach talked Melville, the writing process and the career-ruining yips.

The Art of Fielding revolves around a young baseball star’s sudden inability to field the ball, which in baseball jargon is called Steve Blass Disease or simply “the yips.” Did writing about the athletic version of writer’s block ever make you anxious about your own productivity?
I think it was the opposite, in a way. I think I was writing about writer’s block from the start, if not really intense, direct writer’s block than just how difficult the process can be. When I’m writing about the struggles that Henry goes through, certainly I’m thinking about baseball and what I know about it, but I’m also thinking a lot about my own process, and my troubles as a writer over the years.

Have you ever watched a baseball player try to play with the yips?
I did, actually, right around the time I was getting started on the book, and it made a deep impression on me. There was a pitcher for the Braves named Mark Wohlers, who had been an all-star closer until this started happening to him. It was amazing to watch. It was a road game for the Braves so there are 30-some thousand opposing fans there, and you would think that they would be cheering wildly about this guy on the other team throwing wildly and screwing up, but everyone was hushed. This guy’s pain was so apparent, and everyone was taking pity on him, but also kind of mortified. Those are emotions you usually don’t get from sporting events. Athletes do everything they can to avoid them.

The Art of Fielding always seems to return to the importance of choosing your cage, so to speak—suffering with a purpose, toward a goal of your own choosing. Is athleticism the most compelling example of that kind of behavior for you?
I think sometimes we underestimate how important sports are to American culture. I think they’ve come to fulfill a place in public life that probably used to be fulfilled by other arts. We really like our athletes, and it’s amazing the kind of devotion and dedication that professional athletes have. Even at the college or high school level, if people were out there writing with the same kind of intensity and the same structural help that our athletes have, we’d be churning out Tolstoys left and right.

Herman Melville also plays a role in your novel—a few of your characters refer to Moby-Dick simply as “The Book.” Did Ahab and the White Whale come to mind when you were dramatizing this kind of self-inflicted, goal-oriented suffering?
Absolutely. In Moby-Dick they call it monomania. Singleminded pursuit is something that relates to a couple different characters in the book. Mike Schwartz, of course, when he takes his team to the tournament because he feels like its the only thing he has left in life. That’s a case for when monomania takes over.

When did you first read Moby-Dick?
I was a sophomore in college and I took a seminar with only a few other students in it, and we just read Herman Melville the whole semester. It was one of the classes, maybe the class that made the deepest impression on me. Up to that point I had been a bit daunted by the prospect of reading Moby-Dick—people were always talking about it in these frightened and reverential tones—but then I realized what a comical and musical and brash and bold book it was. It made a deep impression on me at a moment when I was probably pretty impressionable.

All of your readers have probably seen their share of sports movies. When you were writing The Art of Fielding, did you find yourself having to avoid sports movie clichés, or was it exciting to take on the pre-game speech, the “bottom of the ninth, bases loaded” moments?
I haven’t seen that many sports movies myself, or read very many sports novels. It’s not something I’m so well versed in. Of course, you want to stay away from anything too straightforward or cheesy, but I think I found the obvious arc of the team progressing through a baseball season mostly liberating. You have this very direct line that you can riff off of and play around with. You can do all sorts of things without ever feeling that you’re just getting way off track.

So how ‘bout them Cavaliers?
Well, I did see the game that got them into the World Series last spring.

In 2004 you started the magazine n+1 with some friends, which has since become known for lively cultural critique and engaging narrative pieces. Has the operation expanded much in seven years?
We’ve been expanding but very, very slowly. I think now after seven years we’re at the point where we have two full-time employees, and are even thinking about hiring a third, whereas for the first several years we were really just scraping by. All of us founding editors were working 30, 40 hours a week, and we’ve never gotten paid, so for a while we were just trying to find the time to get the next issue out. Now we’re on a very regular schedule, and we’re also trying to get more books out.

Part of n+1’s publicity comes from the fact that many of its writers have found success outside the magazine. Do you have any favorite pieces from unknown writers that have pitched you blind?
Definitely. Issue 12, the one that’s currently in bookstores contains this long essay which I think is one of the half-dozen best things we’ve ever done. It’s about the "Gathering of the Juggalos," the yearly gathering of Insane Clown Posse fans. I mean it’s just an amazing essay, written by a guy named Kent Russell, who’s very young. This is actually his second piece for us; his first was about his experience growing up with a friend who later did several tours in Afghanistan. We just find it hard to believe that he’s only 24 or something. One of the more recent people who just appeared in the slush pile, and we knew something great was going to come out of it.

What’s in a name change?

As the Microphones, the Anacortes, Washington-based musician Phil Elverum released The Glow, Pt. 2 in 2001, through the tastemaking K Records. The record channeled analogue warmth and a personal style that turned the songwriter and studio whiz into one of indie rock’s most respected. In the decade since, he’s been tough to pin down, leaving K for his own label, P.W. Elverum & Sun, changing the band’s name from The Microphones to Mount Eerie, and his last name from Elvrum to Elverum—with an extra “e.”

Early on, these changes registered to his audience as a reluctance to build upon his best works, like The Glow, Pt. 2. But Mount Eerie’s most recent album, Wind’s Poem, from 2009, was a return to form: It found Elverum joining the quiet sounds he explored in the intervening years on Lost Wisdom, Live in Japan and Singers, with the abyssal darkness of Norwegian black metal—a fascination he picked up after spending a winter in that country.

Through changing names and styles, Elverum’s lyrics have focused on impermanence, and spare, mythic visions of the natural world.

Mount Eerie plays at the UVA Chapel on September 19.

What were you doing when I called?

I was just finishing breakfast and reading, drinking coffee. I had actually lost track of time.

Each of your tours happens with a wildly different iteration of Mount Eerie. In 2009 you came to town with two drummers, and played a very loud, “wall of sound” kind of set, which was perfect for songs off Wind’s Poem. What kind of setup can we look forward to this time?

There’s going to be three people in my band, but no drums this time. Nick Krgovich and Julia Chirka are playing synthesizers and I’m playing guitar. They’ve been in the last couple of versions of Mount Eerie; they played keyboard when we were touring for Wind’s Poem. In May of 2009 we did a short tour without the drummers, and instead of guitar I was playing a vibraphone.

So this is new territory, the first tour we’re playing with the current setup. It’s going to be kind of washy and dreamy. Before making Wind’s Poem I never would have allowed keyboards on my albums. I would always just simulate the feeling of them using other tools that were more in my world. After making that record I’ve been getting more into the feeling of a wall of strange synthetic strings. It’s one of my favorite tones now.

You’re widely known to be a “Twin Peaks” fan, and a few references to the show made their way onto Wind’s Poem. Comparing the start of the series to the end, it’s obvious that David Lynch shot the pilot without knowing anything about where it would lead. What do you make of his heedless improvisation?

I just recently re-watched the series over the last couple weeks for the…ninth time, or whatever. And I was thinking about that, because you can totally tell which episodes David Lynch directed, because they’re the ones where weird shit happens for no reason. I think that he’s an amazing artist, and other people on the show were also good, but just didn’t have the magic or daring to be like, “Fuck it, I’m going to put a 10-minute shot of a donut on prime time TV.”

Is there a Lynchian sense of spontaneity in the way you make records?

In a similar way to the “Twin Peaks” pilot, I never really come to recording with expectations. I don’t know how my music takes the shape it does. I didn’t have any goals going into the last one. Recording is always like feeling around in the dark, and I change things according to how they feel at the moment. I’m in the middle of recording the next record, but I’m taking my time and trying all kinds of different things, so I don’t really know what shape it’s going to take yet.

Your collaborative records and the ones you make on your own are of different lineages—the more traditional recording session versus the long, thematically-cohesive project. Do you keep them separate?

In my mind I do have different categories for them. There’s the ones that take me a year or more of recording to slowly create, and then the side things come together differently, much quicker. I feel like it’s important to have a wide variety of incarnations of work. From outside my perspective, as a music listener or as an art spectator, it’s exciting to see someone else’s work take many different forms and have a cohesive thread that goes through all of them. To be able to pick up on one idea and see it from many different angles.

How is it running your own label? Does being responsible for every step of production and distribution take time away from making music?

Yeah it does, but at the same time it’s my preferred method. It’s a challenge to balance those things, but it’s important to me. Now I have an employee, a friend that’s been taking some of that over. It’s not less work for me, more like expanding the things that we’re trying to do. It’s been exciting figuring out that world, becoming even more independent.

"Between Two Mysteries"

To be a sculptor or a painter these days means living and dying by the photographs on your website. Martha Saunders, who has painted with beeswax for the last decade, often jokes about switching to a medium that’s easier to photograph than encaustic, but she is quick to credit photographer Scott Smith with bringing her work to life online. To the untrained eye, photos of works like “Howling Tracks” and “Song Space” look like abstract oil paintings. A flat, 2D image does little to convey the texture of Saunders’ paintings, or the hours that shespends mixing, carving and melting beeswax to create them.

A Virginia native, Saunders studied printmakingand painting at Maryland Institute College of Art and Virginia Commonwealth University before settling in Charlottesville, which has been her home for the last 13 years. She currently juggles teaching positions at UVA and JMU—where recently, she’s been leading her students in creating scrolls with an old press type—while still finding the time to work in her warehouse studio.

Beeswax has been your medium for over a decade. What brought you to encaustic painting?

When I was in grad school I was actually in a painting program. But it’s hard to make even that kind of division anymore because many of us were working very sculpturally. And when I started drifting more toward sculpture, I started using wax because it can really hold materials. I still like that aspect of it. Encaustic painting—using beeswax as a medium instead of oil or watercolor—it’s an ancient method, but it seems to have risen in popularity lately.

Is “painting” with wax a bit of a misnomer? Are there other steps involved that people don’t usually associate with painting?

Again, it has a lot of common with sculpture. Obviously, wax has to be heated, so you’re always working with heat. But first I have to actually buy pigments. You can get concentrated pigments, or wax that already has color, and you can also mix the two. And before I ever start working with it I have to turn on the heating elements and get the wax to a liquid state. And then I just begin applying it, building up layers of color and texture, and sculpting and reheating surfaces of the painting when I need to. It can feel like an archeological dig; I’ll put 20 layers down and forget what the early ones looked like. And there’s also the collage element. A number of the paintings in the current show are just pigment and wax, but I often include other materials.

Martha Saunders’ "Interior Fog"

Are there more surprises in the studio when you work with wax, as opposed to oil or watercolor?

After this long, there isn’t much surprise in terms of what the material does. But I would say that all of those mediums are unpredictable in their own ways. You’re question is more important to me in terms of surprise as an element you always look for in the studio. I think we as artists are very motivated to stumble across things and to be taken by surprise. “I just made that?” The unpredictable is always welcome, even searched for.

Pretend you’re writing a semi-autobiographical artist’s development novel. Describe an early scene that greatly affects your later work.

I used to love to lay and look at the ceiling of the bedroom my sisters and I would share. I would pretend I was walking on the ceiling upside down. I think a lot of kids do this, but it’s a very important experience, to look at something and project yourself into a whole different kind of space. It’s magic, in a way. I think I also had a tightrope extending from my window that I used to walk around town.

Have you been focused on any specific kinds of images lately?

Recently I’ve been very interested in looking at neurological images. How the brain works—that’s a big subject that I think artists have always been trying approach. I think we’re always trying to explore elements of how we’re in the world.

For your 2001 show, "Mind/Skin," you created hundreds of small tiles that wrapped around a room together. Did you have a different relationship with the work when you were churning out a lot of small pieces?

Yes, it was really different. I’m looking at one piece right now, up on my wall. The whole thing was one of my favorite works, and now I call it a dotted line because people have bought sections of it. It was three feet tall and 90 feet around, and so I liked how it played into the architecture of the room.

At the time I was making the pieces my daughter was very young and I was also teaching, so it was almost like a calendar—not literally, but it marked the time I could fit into do it. I loved the fact that they were kind of insignificant in a way singularly, in that people don’t really appreciate them that way, and it was more about working this kind of huge, fabric-like thing together. I needed a grant to create it, because it took 900 pounds of beeswax. The money helped me expand it and really finish it.

Martha Saunders’ “Intersecting Pauses” is on view at Les Yeux du Monde (841 Wolf Trap Rd., 973-5566) through October 2, She speaks at the gallery on Sunday, September 11, at 3 pm.