If Gary Green does his job well at the Paramount Theater, nobody will know. As the theater’s audio production manager, he analyzes how sound waves produced by artists will be affected by rising temperature and humidity as audience members fill the space. He knows how voices sound in each microphone, and where the Paramount’s resonance […]
Photographer Clay Bolt is drawn to species he calls the oddballs and little guys. Working internationally with organizations such as National Geographic and BBC Wildlife, Bolt is a natural history and conservation photographer. “What sets me apart from a ‘nature photographer’ is that a lot of my work records life cycles and tells stories of […]
The Front Porch’s Emily Morrison wants artists of all backgrounds to find peace at the roots music school she founded in 2015. With help from friends, Morrison began the school in a back room in her home and soon moved into a space at Mountaintop Montessori. Last June the nonprofit moved into the old Michie […]
One year ago, Claire Hitchins took a leap of faith. While volunteering on the West Coast, Hitchins sat in her room and recorded her music for the first time, with the help of an old laptop and GarageBand. Within a few months, the award-winning podcast “On Being” featured Hitchins and her music, and her SoundCloud […]
On December 24, 1906, Reginald Fessenden transmitted the first wireless public radio broadcast. It included Christmas songs, stories and, in Fessenden’s words, his own “not very good singing.” Today’s listeners have many—usually very good—derivatives of Fessenden’s holiday work, and here in Charlottesville the programming at local FM radio stations is no exception. “Our perspective is […]
Men’s fashion and the military have a lot in common, if you ask Derek Questell. After serving in the Marines for 10 years and four deployments, Questell now tailors custom clothing from his Charlottesville home, calling the enterprise Tailored Quest. “It’s in my blood, my Italian heritage,” says Questell. “My dad gave me my first […]
Zack Worrell and his team at Monolith Knives are carving out a name for themselves in the handmade knives market. From a studio on Worrell’s Ivy family farm, once owned by Meriwether Lewis, Worrell, Alan Bates and Nick Watson create culinary and field knives. Recently, they have been “breathing life” into folding knives, as Bates […]
For Lauren and Stephen Stonestreet, good hospitality runs in the family. As cicadas hum and the neighborhood sounds of 10th and Page reach the porch of their 1925 farmhouse on a Sunday afternoon, the siblings share stories of traveling missionaries and artists visiting their grandparents’ home near Charleston, West Virginia. They say these memories of […]
The sun casts honey-colored hues across White Hall’s stretch of the Blue Ridge Mountains as Gina Sobel plays a gold Stratocaster at Restoration’s summer concert series. It’s too hot to play inside the restaurant, she says, as muddied jazz and rock ‘n’ roll reverberate across the restaurant’s patio. A native of Northern Virginia and a […]