What is it good for? Protesters answer: War is good for civil action March 20, 2003, was another date, like September 11, 2001, destined for infamy. So believe those who took to Charlottesville streets on March 20, despite the downpour, as bombs rained down on Baghdad. Drenched, they marched from Downtown to UVA and back […]
They called it an incubator: the upstairs of the Charlottesville Tomorrow building on West Main Street, space leased to University faculty whose ideas no longer quite fit the contours of academia. To move into one of the six offices subsidized by UVA’s Patent Foundation signaled progress for a new biotech company. It meant that early-phase […]
As area residents trickle through the open door of Charlottesville’s Mt. Zion Baptist Church, the words “Peace Be Within Thy Walls, Prosperity Within Thy Palaces” hang in a stately arc over the podium. The March 10 meeting, organized by the church’s pastor, Reverend Alvin Edwards, is just one in a string of reactions to the […]
On February 3, Albemarle County School Board member Ken Boyd announced his plans to challenge incumbent Charles Martin for the Rivanna District seat on the Board of County Supervisors. Urged by his constituents to run for a seat among the Supes, Boyd says he feels he could be of greater use to the County in […]
On February 26, UVA sophomore and Student Council presidential candidate Daisy Lundy was assaulted in what police described as a possibly racially motivated attack. By that evening, a cluster of emails and outpourings about the widely reported incident had been dispatched campus-wide, including this confronting question by undergraduate Tiffany Chatman: “Still think racism doesn’t exist […]
Since the first cave dwellers plunked a rock against a wall for purely expressive reasons, music has been social—even sometimes political. Like any art form, music offers an individual’s take on the surrounding world, one that is in turn absorbed and cast back into the world by an audience. Every song, no matter the subject, […]
One of the most striking aspects of life in Third World countries is information starvation. Because they’ve learned not to trust their state-controlled media, people in authoritarian backwaters carefully debrief newcomers. What’s going on abroad? What’s going on here? Did you get any foreign newspapers or magazines through customs? News is a component of infrastructure […]
The first sign of change at Spencer’s 206 is the pert display of DVDs at the register. They’re the right kind of DVDs, of course—Dylan’s Don’t Look Back, the Heads’ Stop Making Sense—but they signal the sort of infusion of new merchandise that says “reinvestment.” Then there’s the tidier aspect of the Water Street shop—actual […]
Books and writers certainly get their due starting at about this time of the year as the Virginia Festival of the Book ramps up. Local authors who have been holed away surface to share their year’s work in one way or another, shedding temporary (and sometimes unwanted) light on a solitary process. But there is […]
I am an open-minded fellow. But when I heard I was going to be interviewing an 18-year-old high school student who had organized poetry readings at Mudhouse and was now hosting events at Live Arts, certain unpleasant associations crowded my head, despite my best efforts to banish them. I knew poets in high school—they wore […]