Certain mysteries remain unsolved, lo these two decades. To wit: Why did local musician Stephen Barling pen his music column under the name Cripsy Duck? (We know, but if we tell you, then we’ll have to serve you with fried rice.) Why do people keep coming back for more once they decide to move away from Charlottesville? While the answers remain unknown, we consider it our duty to pursue them anyway from time to time. If nothing else, it amuses, and that, among other things, has clearly been part of C-VILLE’s mission for the past 20 years. And so it shall be for the next 20 or more. Why? We just can’t explain it.
Paging through the archives
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“Somebody’s yelling at me. ‘Crispy! Yo, man, Crispy Duck!’ I turn around and am confronted by a bullish man who’s found me out. Drat! My secret identity’s been compromised!
“‘Mission control,’ I’m whispering into my lapel mic. ‘ABORT, ABORT!’
“He’s babbling: ‘Hey man, when you gonna cover my band, man?’
“‘Did they tell you not to do anything on us? I believe they got it out for us.’
“Clearly, the beer has soaked through his paranoia buffer. I spend the next five minutes explaining that, despite conspiracy theories to the contrary, C-VILLE doesn’t have it ‘out’ for anyone. It’s not journalistically proper. And it wouldn’t be cool. Besides, it’s easy enough to generate animosity just by telling the truth.
“‘And by the way,’ I state in closing, ‘it’s criPsy, not criSpy.’ That always gets ‘em.”—Stephen Barling, aka Cripsy Duck, November 2, 1999
Getting covered
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“We’re here because Charlottesville is a place where we can work and live and date and have friends and theoretically copy our files to computer disks without the computer eating them. In most places you have two areas of operation: you and your intimate associates—lovers, friends, family—and a nebulous ‘society’ out there in the distance—the stuff on TV, the stuff in newspapers. In New York, there’s your intimate circle and the untouchable myth of New York beyond. In Richmond, there’s your intimate circle and the untouchable myth of America beyond.
“But in a town of this size with a public space like the Mall, a middle ground opens up. A space where you’re not on intimate terms but still influential, a space between the near and the far. That means Charlottesville isn’t starkly divided between the Somebodies and the Nobodies. Everybody is sort of a Somebody, and nobody is entirely a Nobody. (The down side is that nobody is entirely a Somebody and everybody is something of a Nobody.) The Mall has grown so much in popularity it’s becoming more like a vague outer circle (You should have been here back before people like you showed up!), but you can still learn things about group behavior you can’t learn watching TV.”—Joel Jones. June 24, 2003
