Living | Spencer Peterson

The idea came to Margaret Hrabe, a reference coordinator at UVA’s Special Collections Library, when she was looking through the papers of Sarah Patton-Boyle,

Living | Spencer Peterson

The story of the recession-era concert venue is usually one of declining proceeds and anxious belt-tightening. The same is true for the recession-era nonprofit, and the Paramount Theater is both. When the refurbished 1930s movie palace announced its new leadership at a press conference last week, recently hired Executive Director Chris Eure held that she [...]

Living | Spencer Peterson

Between the two sets that We Are Star Children played at Rapunzel’s Coffee and Books last Saturday night, frontman Gene Osborn gave a shout-out to the band-member moms in attendance, and then announced that if it was O.K. with the rest of us, his band was going to sing a few more songs about sex [...]

Living | Spencer Peterson

In 2009, when young adults everywhere were happy just to be gainfully employed, Carl Anderson was trying to write the next pop-country megahit. The 22-year-old Virginia native was recruited as a ghostwriter by Ash Street Music after following his erstwhile girlfriend and collaborator Carleigh Nesbit down to Nashville. A few times a week, Anderson would [...]

Living | Spencer Peterson

Troy is Burning may be the first play written by an undergraduate to make it into the UVA Drama Department’s main-stage season in 25 years, but its first step toward production was just another day in the undergraduate grind for fourth-year student Matthew Minnicino. Last spring, Minnicino needed something to bring in to a playwriting [...]

Living | Spencer Peterson

Live music is the great unifier. Whether it’s Madonna singing “music makes the people come together,” or John Cage describing a composition by Lou Harrison (“Listening to it, we become an ocean”), the common denominator of concerts both lowbrow and high is the promise of becoming part of something bigger than yourself. Composer Sergei Tcherepnin [...]

Living | Spencer Peterson

In 1958, composer John Cage gave a lecture titled “Indeterminacy” that would be remembered as a milestone in post-war avant-garde composition. Sitting at a desk in front of an auditorium of people, he read a series of randomly ordered one-minute stories to the accompaniment of electronic scratches, distorted recordings of music and the occasional mashed [...]

Living | Spencer Peterson

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 [...]

Living | Spencer Peterson

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 [...]