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, then destroys [...]
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 5,000-word interviews with Jim Brown on [...]
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 for high school kids [...]
The Virginia Quarterly Review names W. Ralph Eubanks editor, eyes happier days
The Virginia Quarterly Review completed a total overhaul today with the announcement of W. Ralph Eubanks as editor. The hire leaves the prestigious literary magazine with a full leadership team for the first time since the highly publicized suicide of its managing editor, Kevin Morrissey, in July 2010. “It is an honor because of the [...]
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 advertise their own watersheds. Think about [...]
Editor’s Note: Who’s lobbying for small farmers?
When I was 9 or 10, I was asked, by a member of the foreign press corps attending one of my parents’ cocktail parties, what I wanted to do when I grew up. I answered that I wanted to be a lobbyist, which provoked laughter first, and then puzzled amusement. Why on earth would I [...]
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 to the new [...]
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 town meant your social caste [...]
Ecology of mind: UVA symposium aims to revive the interdisciplinary thinking of Gregory Bateson
“It takes two to know one.” One of the many riddles that Gregory Bateson–the anthropologist, philosopher, biologist, psychologist, and high priest of cybernetics–left behind when he died of respiratory disease at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1980 after a lifetime of cigarette smoking. Bateson was a titanic figure at 6’5″, intellectually intimidating, capable of [...]
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, [...]
Can Charlottesville singer-songwriters make a living in the file-sharing age?
“Why isn’t Charlottesville Athens?” James Wilson said, repeating a question I had posed to him. “They have R.E.M. We have Dave Matthews. We both have about the same amount of venues, same size. It’s a tough one. It really is.” It was clear, watching Wilson, that it wasn’t the first time he’d considered the subject. [...]
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 contract” signs are [...]
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 a [...]
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 in an old schoolhouse, a rabbit’s warren [...]
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 women, the conversation turned to the subject [...]
Editor’s Note: Love is all you need
I watched the Grammys last night. Well, I watched the first hour of it anyway, which is about all I could manage. I’ve been interviewing singer-songwriters recently and have been thinking a lot about the chances they have at success in today’s music industry. There was Taylor Swift, the child bride of Nashville, former teen [...]
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 inside the Statue of [...]
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 [...]
Whisky town: Can a craft distillery movement make a permanent home in Central Virginia?
Rick Wasmund and Dan FitzHenry sit at a small table in a Stay Charlottesville rental house arrayed with plastic cups holding fluids of hues that range from clover honey through amber to the color of cherry juice, a natural reddish brown. You’ve heard about the surge in the craft distillery movement? Now you’re in it. [...]
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. Time, perhaps, to treat the [...]
Editor’s Note: The Tao of city planning
Last week one of our online contributors, Jim Duncan, predicted that 2013 will be the year the real estate market turns. Jim is a Realtor with Nest Realty, so he’s not exactly a dispassionate observer, but market indicators around the country and locally are supporting his claim. Prices, at least in the residential market, are [...]
Hiromi Johnson passes on an ancient Chinese martial arts tradition one student at a time
There are times as a journalist that you know you’re not going to get the story. You’re going to get a story, but you’re not going to get the story. That’s how I felt going into my interview with Grandmaster Wang Fu-Lai: Taiwanese martial arts master, lineage holder of the Cheng-Ming system, and the teacher [...]
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 [...]
Editor’s Note: War, gun violence, and the New Year
A new year. Time to think about time and how it slips past. A few weeks back, the subject of an interview, Elliott Woods, posed a question: How has America changed over the past decade? He was asking about how the country has changed since we went to war, but sometimes questions, like rivers, are [...]
Guinevere Higgins wants to help you grow food in your backyard
It’s a few days before the winter solstice and the temperature is 55 degrees. Guinevere Higgins—founding board member of City Schoolyard Garden and co-founder of Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest—stares down at an arugula patch that’s been flattened by Fern, one of her two dogs. “I think they actually like to nibble on it,” she says. [...]
Editor’s Note: War and the culture of violence
As we make final preparations for the holidays, 68,000 U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan. On Christmas Day, some might get a decent meal and a little booze at a base where they can Facebook relatives; others will be stuck in inhospitable outposts littering the remote countryside. They’ll wake up, in the morning or evening, [...]
Portraits of war: Elliott Woods wants Americans to look their returning veterans in the eye
Elliott Woods grew up in Gaithersburg, Maryland, the son of a Navy doctor. He attended a prestigious Catholic boys’ school in Bethesda, a Washington, D.C. suburb dotted with exclusive country clubs and peopled by physicians, lawyers, and deal makers. A self-described “rambunctious kid who had some disciplinary problems,” Woods was forced to withdraw from high [...]