Return to lender

Last month’s news of a $2.4 million check-kiting scheme, perpetrated by John C. Reid and allegedly other executives of Ivy Industries against Albemarle First Bank, cast the story in sharp terms: A local bank would have to recover from a sizable fraud. A study of recent SEC filings by Albemarle First, however, indicates an institution […]

Meet the mouth

Liberals like to think, conservatives like to have their opinions thrown back at them,” said cartoonist and writer Ted Rall during his speech to a packed auditorium in the Albemarle County Office Building on Wednesday, March 26. The wild cheering that followed this proclamation, however, seemed to contradict Rall’s claim. The Charlottesville Center for Peace […]

Fishbowl

What is it good for? Protesters answer: War is good for civil action March 20, 2003, was another date, like September 11, 2001, destined for infamy. So believe those who took to Charlottesville streets on March 20, despite the downpour, as bombs rained down on Baghdad. Drenched, they marched from Downtown to UVA and back […]

The road more traveled

As area residents trickle through the open door of Charlottesville’s Mt. Zion Baptist Church, the words “Peace Be Within Thy Walls, Prosperity Within Thy Palaces” hang in a stately arc over the podium. The March 10 meeting, organized by the church’s pastor, Reverend Alvin Edwards, is just one in a string of reactions to the […]

Minding his business

On February 3, Albemarle County School Board member Ken Boyd announced his plans to challenge incumbent Charles Martin for the Rivanna District seat on the Board of County Supervisors. Urged by his constituents to run for a seat among the Supes, Boyd says he feels he could be of greater use to the County in […]

Buddha with Chutzpah

Roberta Culbertson is not the first or only person in Charlottesville to discover, with the help of Eastern philosophy, that, as she says, “everyday stuff is spiritual. Every moment is a spiritual moment.” Indeed, the mystical and airy influence of a one-world approach to living has taken firm hold here. Just look at the meditation […]

Fishbowl

On February 26, UVA sophomore and Student Council presidential candidate Daisy Lundy was assaulted in what police described as a possibly racially motivated attack. By that evening, a cluster of emails and outpourings about the widely reported incident had been dispatched campus-wide, including this confronting question by undergraduate Tiffany Chatman: “Still think racism doesn’t exist […]

What they don’t tell us

One of the most striking aspects of life in Third World countries is information starvation. Because they’ve learned not to trust their state-controlled media, people in authoritarian backwaters carefully debrief newcomers. What’s going on abroad? What’s going on here? Did you get any foreign newspapers or magazines through customs? News is a component of infrastructure […]

For the record

The first sign of change at Spencer’s 206 is the pert display of DVDs at the register. They’re the right kind of DVDs, of course—Dylan’s Don’t Look Back, the Heads’ Stop Making Sense—but they signal the sort of infusion of new merchandise that says “reinvestment.” Then there’s the tidier aspect of the Water Street shop—actual […]

Lab Rat

I am an open-minded fellow. But when I heard I was going to be interviewing an 18-year-old high school student who had organized poetry readings at Mudhouse and was now hosting events at Live Arts, certain unpleasant associations crowded my head, despite my best efforts to banish them. I knew poets in high school—they wore […]