Biscuit Run: To phase or not to phase

Whatever mistakes might be made by the county in rezoning for Biscuit Run, they at least want to avoid the mistakes of Hollymead—where huge swaths of green land were made red, causing erosion and sediment-control issues for neighbors and watersheds; where the commercial property was built long before residential, undercutting the principles of the county’s […]

Stocks and bondage

Dear Ace: I was walking on the Downtown Mall the other day and I saw a guy in stocks in front of Zocalo. What’s the deal?—Thor Churr

Keep Your Silver Shined

A week after their annual Valentine’s Day show, Devon Sproule and Paul Curreri sit side-by-side at Café Cubano, looking mostly at each other while they speak with me about

The Violet Hour

stage It’s April 1, 1919, and John Pace Seavering has a problem. This idealistic young member of the Lost Generation has used his share of the family fortune to set up a publishing firm in Manhattan (think James Laughlin of New Directions Press), and finds his office crammed with manuscripts. His less privileged Princeton classmate, […]

“Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Sterne, A Retrospective”

art There’s a stereotype, an unfortunately potent one, that says artists do their best work before they’re 40, then enter a period of fading talent. When you walk into the Hedda Sterne retrospective, you joyfully confront an artist who utterly shatters that myth. While she’s at it, the now nonagenarian Sterne debunks the one about […]

Selling the Places29 plan

At Agnor Hurt Elementary, local citizens got their first crack at the Places29 Northern Urban Area Master Plan when they were split up into small groups to discuss the county’s grand design for the territory that stretches from Hydraulic Road clear up Route 29 past the airport. A county staffer—who for the evening became a […]

Red Dirt Alert!

This ugly-looking hole in the ground will someday (a year from now) grow up to be Pantops Park. Not in fact a park at all, Pantops Park will be home to another Virginia National Bank

Ostinato with Red Wizard and Horsefang

music The press release for the show at Outback Lodge declared that “this will be the closest thing to hanging out in the old Tokyo Rose basement you’ve felt in a while.”  Since the Rose stopped hosting shows a few years ago, several venues have offered great alternatives, but none have provided a comparable atmosphere.  […]

Crash into me!

There are 156 miles of roads in Charlottesville. Add about 87,000 licensed drivers to those twists and turns-housands of moving parts in a small space—physics (and common sense) tells you that nothing good is going to come of it.

Red, yellow, green

Red Light: Stop! After trial runs in Northern Virginia and Virginia Beach, “photo-red” technology—a system of cameras designed to snag pictures of red light runners—seems poised to make drivers around the state think twice about arriving at busy intersections “fashionably late.” Virginia’s House of Delegates approved a preliminary version of the legislation on February 5 […]