Tag: eric hurt

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Arts Culture

PICK: 9 Pillars Hip Hop Music Video Showcase

Stage to screen: For the second year in a row, the Virginia Film Festival is screening works by local hip-hop video directors and rappers during the 9 Pillars Hip Hop Music Video Showcase. Curated by Cullen “Fellowman” Wade, who compiles a wide variety of styles within the genre, the showcase connects some of the most prolific creative work in the community to a broader audience. The lineup of eight music videos includes King Gemini’s “Play Me,” directed by Ty Cooper; J-Wright ft. Scottii’s “Memories,” directed by Kidd Nick; and Damani Harrison’s “One For George,” directed by Harrison and Eric Hurt. A discussion with filmmakers follows the screenings. Virtual access pass required.

Through 10/25, $8-65, content becomes available October 21 at 10am. virginiafilmfestival.org.

Categories
Arts Culture

Done talking: Damani Harrison drops ‘One for George,’ a three-part collaboration with local artists

Damani Harrison on the set of the "One for George" video shoot. Image: Jason Lappa

Damani Harrison is done talking.

The activist, musician, and all-around C’ville art community anchor recently orchestrated the release of an ambitious three-part creative project he calls “One for George,” and he wants the work—a hip-hop song, music video, and portrait series—to speak for itself.

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“Woke up this morning to a post / Another black soul getting choked / The whole damn nation on the ropes / Please tell me how the hell can I cope,” Harrison raps in the song’s opening lines.

Why is Harrison done talking? According to his “One for George” collaborators, whom he asked to speak about the project on his behalf, he’s more interested in action. According to his collaborators, he’s so “busy fighting racism on all levels,” he’s tired of talking.

“One for George,” at any rate, speaks volumes. Before Harrison went media-silent, he told it like this: Producer Lekema Bullock shared an instrumental track he wrote in the wake of the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis. The track opens to a warbling melody overlain with Floyd’s final cries—“Please… I can’t breathe”—before giving way to a methodical snare and haunting vocals handpicked by Bullock to “represent my pain and how I was feeling.”

“I was devastated. It was senseless,” Bullock says. “I normally don’t turn to my music when I’m upset. But I wanted to honor George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and all the senseless murders that have happened to date.”

The act of police brutality against Floyd, which sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the nation and around the world, had also inspired Harrison. “It only took about 20 seconds of listening to the song before words started gathering in my head,” he said in a social media post shortly after the “One for George” release. The song’s lyrics were on paper three hours later, declaring “we won’t be silenced no more,” and recorded about 48 hours after that.

Harrison’s longtime collaborator Mike Moxham stepped in to record and mix the track.

“I would never want to speak for him, but I got the idea he felt like it would be easier to get the emotional content down if he wasn’t recording it himself,” Moxham said. “When you try to convey heavy emotional content, the last thing you want to do is worry about technicalities.”

As Moxham went to work mixing the final recording, layering a backup vocal with heavy distortion over the original to highlight the angst-ridden rhymes, Harrison brought in others to carry out his vision. Video producer Eric Hurt and photographers Jason Lappa and Ézé Amos joined the team. Seven days after Harrison’s lyrical inspiration grew from Bullock’s beat, the “One for George” team was on set shooting a music video.

The video focuses on Harrison, performing in stark black and white against a fire and smoke-filled backdrop. Interspersed with the performance are images of hate—enslaved people and police brutality, but also homophobia and broad xenophobia—and local activists standing with Harrison and the equality movement writ large.

“We didn’t want to go too broad,” Hurt says. “It’s mainly about the African American struggle, but Damani wanted to make sure it wasn’t just that.”

The music video shoot, which according to those on set took on a peaceful protest, almost festival-like atmosphere, went down one week after Harrison had heard Bullock’s beat. Lappa sat the activists featured in the video for still photo portraits.

“Still images have an impact. It’s a persistent view,” he says. “There’s something in those photographs that is real, visceral. This subject is real and visceral.”

One week after the video shoot, the crew had released the entire project, with the photo series posted to an Instagram account, @oneforgeorge.

“Everyone just came together. We all knew this was bigger than us,” Harrison said on Instagram at the time. “This wasn’t easy for any of us. It wasn’t easy to relive trauma. It wasn’t easy to confront demons. But everything told us to go forward. We have to go forward.”

Where does the “One for George” project go from here? Moxham says the group hopes for organic exposure for the art series. Bullock hopes social media influencers might take up the mantle and help push the message: Folks all around the country, including Charlottesville, stand with those who’ve been killed. They are hurting along with all those families.

To a person, the “One for George” crew says they’re hoping for real, sustained change in the way this country confronts racism. Some signs indicate they’re not alone. A survey by online research firm Civiqs shows countrywide support for the Black Lives Matter movement has reached as high as 53 percent in the months since Floyd’s murder. The number had hovered around 42 percent for the two years prior, up from below 40 percent at the time of C’ville’s own civil rights horror, the white supremecist-driven Unite the Right rally in 2017.

Will support continue to grow? The way Bullock puts it, it has to. The Black Lives Matter movement, he says, is really about one simple thing: “Stop killing us,” he says. “Black Lives Matter at its core literally means, ‘our lives have value.’ That’s it. Our lives have value. Stop killing us.”

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News

Historic conservation at center of controversy

Though a number of residents want to preserve the historic character of their neighborhood, Woolen Mills is already home to many modern houses. Matteus Frankovich / Skyclad AP

A proposed historic conservation district in Woolen Mills has the neighborhood divided. While some residents are pushing for a neighborhood association-requested ordinance that would promise protection of their historic assets, others say the drafted rules concerning additional construction in the area—for both big and small projects—would require them to jump through too many hoops.

The neighborhood, named after the Woolen Mills factory that produced a combination of wool, cotton, flour and lumber from 1830 to 1962, is home to an array of millhouses dating back to that era. Today, about 475-500 homes exist in the neighborhood, and 82 properties owned by 68 residents are located within the proposed conservation district, according to John Frazee, chair of the Woolen Mills Neighborhood Association.

Frazee has lived in the neighborhood for 12 years and spent five years on the neighborhood association board. He lives two houses outside of the proposed conservation district that namely protects properties on Chesapeake, Riverside, Steephill, Franklin and East Market streets.

“Personally, I feel that the concept of a conservation district is a positive one for a neighborhood like ours,” he says. “I feel it affords a reasonable amount of protection for the integrity of what comprises our neighborhood, even though it is very mixed in terms of architecture and history.”

He says the largest point of contention for some residents is the proposed ordinance, which as currently written, and if interpreted strictly, would require them to receive approval from the Board of Architectural Review before building anything onto their properties. And doing so comes with a price tag.

“This has been a working-class neighborhood since its inception,” says Barry Umberger, a Woolen Mills resident of 35 years who lives in the proposed conservation district. He says building any type of addition is already costly—and if the ordinance passes, hiring an architect to draw plans and having them reviewed and approved by the BAR, a step that would cost from $125 to $375, are an added burden.

Additionally, he says the overlay of the proposed district is arbitrary—his house, and those surrounding it, are nearly identical, though both he and his neighbor are included in the proposed perimeter and the four houses behind him are not.

“I think we should have the right to opt out,” he says.

Eric Hurt, who also resides in the proposed district, agrees. “The only real compromise is for people to do what they want with their own property,” he says. “I just don’t think neighbors should be vying for rules on other neighbors. The city does that and we don’t need more of it.”

Mary Joy Scala, the city’s preservation and design planner within the Department of Neighborhood Development Services, is aware of neighborhood concerns. She is currently rewriting the ordinance to make it more specific before City Council votes on whether to adopt it.

“It was ready to go to City Council for adoption in December and then some of the residents took a closer look at it and became concerned about exactly what was required or not required,” Scala says. “One of their big concerns, which I agree with, is that the ordinance was a little bit vague about precisely what required approval and what didn’t.”

For example, neighbors raised questions about whether they’d need approval for structures like birdhouses or chicken coops, and the answer, some residents say, seemed up to interpretation.

Louis Schultz lives in the proposed perimeter and is concerned that the city may not be operating legally in other historic districts because some property owners have been permitted to build without the required approval. He says, “It’s fine, in some ways, if [the ordinance] doesn’t really affect you because someone doesn’t enforce the law, but that’s not good government at all. Ignoring the law for my benefit is really not something that’s reliable in the long run.”

The proposed historic conservation district is intended to prevent the demolition of current structures and to review proposed new buildings and structures to “make sure they fit the character of the district,” Scala says.

Historic conservation districts—two of which already exist in the Martha Jefferson and Rugby Road neighborhoods—are similar to, but less intensely regulated than, architectural design control districts, of which there are eight, including North Downtown, West Main Street and the Corner.

Within the next five months, the proposed ordinance, which requires a zoning text amendment, will go to the BAR for recommendation. It will then be sent to the planning commission for a recommendation and City Council for the final vote.

“I think historic conservation districts are really useful and important because there are a lot of historic neighborhoods in Charlottesville where you would not want to see buildings demolished without any kind of review,” Scala says. “It’s a mechanism to protect a lot of neighborhoods without getting in there too much.”

Updated January 19 at 9:15am to clarify Louis Schultz’s remarks.