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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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, […]
“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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]