A Little Night Music
Talk about pedigree. A Little Night Music, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, was inspired by the late Ingmar Bergman's exquisite…
Danny Schmidt, with Louis Ledford [with audio]
music A week before his solo set at the Gravity Lounge, Danny Schmidt sat next to Paul Curreri on a sofa onstage while Jan Smith performed his song "Dark-Eyed Prince" as part of the annual King of My Living Room concert. Smith gave Schmidt’s song the slow, measured tempo it keeps on record, her voice […]
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
book "Nothing in the annals of musical scandal—from the first night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to the release of the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the U.K.—rivals the ruckus that greeted [Arnold] Schoenberg early in his career." From any other critic, that statement might sound like an exaggeration, but Alex Ross never pronounces anything in […]
Direct Transmissions from the Hunab Ku [with audio]
cd If colonial legend and Wikipedia are correct, Hunab Ku was the supreme deity of the Mayan civilization. The god, without a physical form, is represented by a symbol (somewhat similar to the Chinese yin and yang) that signifies the solar calendar, balanced forces and an embodiment of the center of the Milky Way, the […]
Will a "Historic" Fifeville be history?
Two years ago when she started the nomination process to list Fifeville as a National Register Historic District (NRHD), city Preservation and Design Planner Mary Joy Scala didn’t think it would turn into a controversial decision. After all, such a designation is largely symbolic: It imposes no design controls on homeowners if they don’t opt […]
Joint housing task force finally meets
A week before Thanksgiving, the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation reported an unsettling statistic. Of any town in Virginia, Charlottesville has the highest average cost of a Turkey Day dinner for 10. While the state’s average is $40.74, our area’s is close to $50. Less than two weeks later, a smattering of local officials and housing […]
Right wing rhetoric v. left wing policy
Ronald Utt meets a waiter in a Slidell, Louisiana, Applebee’s who moved there from California because it’s cheaper. To him, it’s another sign that California is going to hell in a handbasket, with median houses selling for $750,000 in some parts, unaffordable to 95 percent of the population and a working class moving out to […]
Mixing up at Fontaine Research Park
Like most UVA add-ons, the Fontaine Research Park has been built to resemble the Lawn, with a broad, verdant expanse of grass connecting two rows of brick buildings that frame a gorgeous mountain view. But unlike the Lawn—and even unlike other Lawn look-alikes such as the Darden business school—hardly a soul strolls across that beautiful […]
Undergrads push for new major
A motivated group of UVA students is attempting to do something that has never been done at Mr. Jefferson’s university—implement the first student-proposed major. For the past year, members of the student-run Global Development Organization have been lobbying the administration for the creation of a new global development major. While the interested students recognize the […]
Even Singletary's not superhuman
With only 1.2 seconds left, and the UVA men’s basketball team down 70-67 in the squad’s first marquee home matchup against the Syracuse Orangemen on December 5, senior point guard Sean Singletary stood just above the arc. But this time he wasn’t pulling up to hit a game-tying score, nor to pass to a wide […]