Jon Bright, Lensman at the Spectacle Shop

“Occasionally when we’re using screwdrivers and we flip off the screws, we’ll accidentally stab our fingers,” says Bright. “Or burn our hands from working with soldering. But in general, it’s pretty low impact.” How did you learn your craft? I went to college. But I got started in second grade when I had to wear […]

Jennifer Maton, Calligrapher, If So INKLined

“They’re normal hands,” says Maton. “The pen I use is fairly smooth, so it doesn’t rub my fingers raw at any points.” Typical workday? I usually start around 8:30am with warmup exercises for the hands, then I’ll begin one of the projects I have for the day, whether it’s wedding invitations or designs, or whatever’s […]

Ben Miller, Tattoo artist at Ben Around Tattoos

“I wear gloves all day long, which keep my hands fairly soft,” says Miller. Tools? For the most part, we use tattoo machines anywhere from an ounce to six ounces apiece. We use pigments. Most of the tattoos we do, we use surgical skin markers to draw under the skin, then tattoo over it. And […]

Jamal Millner, Flat-pick and fingerstyle guitarist

“I have to be careful, think about closing doors and stuff like that more than anyone else does,” says Millner. Tools? A guitar, flat-pick, sometimes a slide.   How did you learn your craft? I started playing when I was a little kid, on the banjo before I picked up the guitar. As far as […]

Kenny Shreves, Race Car Builder at Werkstatt Charlottesville

Fire in the hole: Sometimes when he’s welding, stuff ends up burning. “It happens more often than you would think,” says Shreves. Typical workday? We’re always behind. We begin in the morning, and depending on where we are with the stage of the build, we start fabricating right away. On the weeks that we have […]

Alpha Centauri EP; Corsair

Combine Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, and Robert Heinlein and you get Corsair, one of the most rocking bands in town. The Sabbath part makes perfect sense, as the band originally spawned from the annual local tribute act, Mass Sabbath. A nod to Thin Lizzy isn’t hard either, since guitarists Marie Landragin and Paul Sebring play […]

Just Kids; Patti Smith; Harper Collins, 290 pages

  Some friendships are too beautiful for words. Fortunately, in the hands of Patti Smith, the 22-year bond between her and Robert Mapplethorpe is not one of them.  But Just Kids is more than a memoir of a relationship that started as a romance and later, when Mapplethorpe realized he was gay, endured as a […]

A UVA sorority turns boarding house, while two houses stay vacant

The eight-bedroom brick mansion at 150 Madison Lane, former home to the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, has been vacant since fall. The frat’s alumni board still owns the building, but no new plans have been announced for its use. Last week, Charlottesville City Council approved a special use permit for the former Phi Mu Sorority […]