Ms. Harding: I just returned from a week away from town to read the July 22, 2008 issue of C-VILLE. In your piece “Read this first,” I think you kindly referred to my fans and their praise for my work. However, I was not totally certain that you were referring to me, as my name is Cindy Janechild, and not Cindy Brainchild. However, it would not be the first time I have been called a different name…Lovechild, Brainchild and more. All very welcome, but incorrect. I self-designed my name in 1975 to honor my mother, Jane Coville. Therefore, the “child of Jane,” Janechild. I would be interested to know if the reference to Cindy Brainchild was to me. And if there was a way to make a correction so that my fans really know who you were talking about.
Cindy Janechild
Charlottesville
Mailbag: Charlottesville’s housing crisis is self-inflicted
Free market housing Recently this paper published an article about the well-documented problem of Charlottesville’s housing unaffordability. It claimed that nearly half the city’s population now pays over 30 percent of income on housing, making it Virginia’s second-costliest city. To a degree
Editor’s Note: Across the digital divide
Editors have always lived inundated by information, but now everyone is. It makes me admire the simplicity of the Lakota, who recorded hundreds of years of history on a single buffalo hide, one picture for each year to cue the memory of a person who had learned the stories over the course of a
Editor’s Note: Hardcore jazz as a musical way of life
I discovered my love of jazz music at a club called the New Apartment Lounge on Chicago’s South Side, where tenor saxophonist Von Freeman held down a Tuesday night residency with his band for decades. A hard-drinking man who had played alongside the likes of Charlie Parker, Roy Eldridge, and
Editor’s Note: Parenthood and summertime
A few weeks back I was sifting through perennials at Southern States and one of two women evaluating tomato varieties within earshot of me said, “I love this time of year. Everything seems possible before the heat, the bugs, and the weeds.” The gardener’s spring hopes and fears in a nutshell.
Editor’s Note: Sports as a metaphor for life
I have a friend who is a sportswriter of the old school, like Frank Bascombe or George Plimpton. He sees the game as a metaphor for every noble human experience from tragedy to exaltation. In that world, Mickey Mantle’s story is about an Okie who conquers the Big Apple with raw physical talent,
Editor’s Note: Free content isn’t really free
Way back when Playboy started, Hugh Hefner expertly surfed the wave of a sexual and social revolution, selling cigarettes and Scotch via Mad Men-designed print adverts paired with corny profiles of topless coeds and Vargas girls. The setup made enough money to get him rich and to pay for
Editor’s Note: Schools come alive after the last bell
Sunday night, I watched a documentary called “Mariachi High,” which follows the fortunes of the mariachi ensemble at Zapata High School in a sleepy Rio Grande border town in Texas. The film is, more than anything else, about how a music teacher with a passion for tradition has created a reason
Editor’s Note: Onward Christian artists
As humans, it’s hard for us to know with any sense of certainty where we are in history. The narrative ribbon that connects age to age is knitted with intergenerational strands that are longer than our lifetimes. But there are moments, ripples in our collective fabric, in which societies
Editor’s Note: Tom Tom Festival take two feels good
You can never go home again. The line expresses a quintessential sorrow embedded in the American dream. You move up and out. You can’t go home again, because you left and became someone different. When you go back, no one will understand you, and the place you idealized can’t ever live up
Editor’s Note: UVA isn’t a place or a thing
UVA employs almost 15,000 people and another 20,000 are enrolled there as students. Of the people who move to Charlottesville for work, nearly every one of them has some connection to the University. The “town and gown” relationship is a false dichotomy left over from a time when being from
Editor’s Note: Make art, not money
There aren’t many things you can’t learn in school. You can learn to be a poet or a cake baker, a philosopher or an engineer, a composer or a chemist, a carpenter or a priest. But, in spite of Jack Black’s best efforts, you can’t learn to be a rock star. There’s irony, I think, [...]
Editor’s Note: Job satisfaction and the economy
The Dow Jones broke records and the unemployment rate found its way to a five-year low last week. Look around and you can tell the construction industry is perking up. Roofs are coming off and going back on all over town. Site prep is moving forward on some major development projects. “Under
Editor’s Note: Pay your teachers
Target fixation is a term I learned riding a motorcycle, but it’s become a useful teaching metaphor. The lesson is basically to look where you want to go, not where you’re afraid of going. I learned my lesson when I almost hit a curb and catapulted into the Delaware River after trying to avoid
Editor’s Note: Contemporary art and the 40 year problem
In the beginning, the city’s visual arts community had two centers, Second Street Gallery and the McGuffey Art Center. The acropolis and the agora. The gallery was a place to recognize inspiration, to elevate its status through the ceremony of formal exhibition. The center was a pure democracy
Editor’s Note: Race in the post-racial America
This past Saturday at the Savannah Book Festival, I listened to Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. talk about his new book Freeman, the story of a freed slave tracking down his wife after the Civil War. During the Q&A, in an auditorium mostly filled with middle-aged white
Editor’s Note: A word on the American dream
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” So go the familiar lines of “The New Colossus,” a parochial sonnet that found its way
Editor’s Note: Creating the creative economy
I had a funny note last week from a reader named Pete, on Facebook no less, who asked me to “keep the faith,” before telling me he liked my commas. 10-4, Pete, and amen. How do my semicolons look? Pete was reacting to the Read This First (he made sure to tell me he reads [...]
Editor’s Note: On health, mental and physical
It is common sense. The body affects the mind; the mind affects the body. But medical science is not a field built on instinct or conjecture, and the variables that need to be isolated in order to support even the simplest causal relationships between mental and physical health are daunting.
Mailbag Jan.8-Jan.15: Guns, guns, guns
Line of fire News is finally getting out of the controversial decision by the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission to build an open air police firing range at the old Keene Landfill in southern Albemarle [“Albemarle County approves new police training facility despite
Editor’s Note: We are living in an editorial world, and I am an…
We live in an editor’s world. I read that, I think, in The New York Times, and since I am an editor, it perked me up. Finally, someone telling me the world is my oyster, stars have aligned, time to make hay, stack wood, etc. When I dug into the message, though, it was somewhat [...]