Charlottesville Breaking News

Sauntering Shadows: Burton offers beautiful identity crisis

Roger Ebert — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:03:04 +0000

TIM Burton's Dark Shadows is all dressed up with nowhere to go, an elegant production without a central drive. There are wonderful things in the film, but they aren't what's important. It's as if Burton directed at arm's length, unwilling to find juice in the story. Yes, the original TV soap opera is a cult classic, but he approaches it as an amusing trifle, and at feature length we need more than attitude to sink our teeth in.

The opening is gripping, creating expectations the movie doesn't satisfy. We learn the early history of the Collins family in America, which would create a fishing dynasty and spawn the vampire Barnabas Collins

(Johnny Depp). Burton is famous for his visuals, and here we have a symphonic evocation of the Gothic sensibility. He shows the erection of the Collinwood mansion, a shriek of architecture, on a hill above the new Maine town of Collinsport. We learn how young Barnabas falls in love with the angelic Josette (Bella Heathcote) and spurns the love of Angelique (Eva Green).

Angelique is a witch. She forces Josette to flee in terror to a cruel stony finger pointing out from a rocky cliff. Waves dash the stones far below. He pursues her, tries to save her, is unable to stop her from falling to her death from the point. This is great storytelling because it's played straight. I didn't expect the whole movie to be pitched at this level, but it sets a note it never matches. Barnabas, made into a vampire by Angelique, is wrapped in chains, sealed in a coffin and buried for 190 years. The story moves forward to 1972, when the joke is that a vampire like Barnabas from the 1700s is out of place. Full Review

The week in review

Hook Staff — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:54:23 +0000

Harshest budget cutting: The Fluvanna Board of Supervisors slashes all funding to JAUNT, Jefferson Area Board for Aging, and Offender Aid and Restoration in a last-minute deal that made the county's property tax rate 59.81 cents per $100 rather than the 68 cents the supes had advertised. According to the Daily Progress, the nonprofit organizations feel blindsided by the move.

Latest library budget casualty: The Jefferson-Madison Regional Library board chops Sunday hours at Northridge, in part because cheapskate Albemarle County refuses to pay its share to the multi-jurisdiction library, and because the library board vows to give workers who haven't had a raise since 2008 and make less than $11 an hour an increase. Aaron Richardson has the story in the DP.

Most counts of animal cruelty: Nelson couple Tracy Davis, 71, and Joyce Davis, 61, rack up 29 convictions between them May 7. Judge Steve Helvin suspended jail time and prohibited the couple from owning animals for two years, the Newsplex reports.

But wait, there's more: Tracy Davis is also convicted of manufacturing moonshine, and possessing a firearm, and faces charges of illegally obtaining bear gallbladders.

Worst spate of crashes: During a 24-hour period in which two people die on Albemarle roads [see related story], Wesley Evans, 34, of Schuyler, slams into a tree early May 11 on Plank Road, the Newsplex reports. Jaws of Life are used to cut him out of his car, and he's flown to UVA Medical Center and expected to be okay. Evans is charged with driving under the influence, and police say he didn't appear to be wearing a seatbelt. And in Charlottesville, a white Dodge hits a motorcyclist at the intersection of Monticello and Carlton roads around 7pm May 10.

Best rescue: The above motorcycle driver Jonathan Lavezzo (also an avid outdoorsman and contractor) is trapped under the white Dodge until six strangers pull the car off him, according to the Newsplex. The car's driver is charged with failure to yield.

Latest soccer coach allegedly trolling for underage girls: Matthew Dakota Sachs, 22, is charged with two counts of using a computer to solicit a minor and two counts of taking indecent liberties with an ostensible Page County minor who was actually an undercover officer, according to WINA.

Dustiest: Telecom millionaire Thomas Sullivan's offer to pave a quarter mile of Blenheim Road at his own expense is rebuffed in a 3-3 Board of Supervisors vote May 9, mainly because Sullivan's neighbors object, according to Charlottesville Tomorrow. In 2003, Sullivan controversially paved 3.5 miles of Blenheim Road. Sullivan's Murcielago Farms breed Black Angus cattle.

Biggest NIMBY: Tea Partier Greg Quinn, who lobbied the supervisors in 2011 to get out of sustainability program called ICLEI, goes before the Albemarle Planning Commission May 7 to object to New Hope Community Church's plans to build in his Piney Mountain 'hood. Charlottesville Tomorrow's Brian Wheeler has the story.

Biggest national splash: Greene County Republican/WTJU radio host Ponch McPhee's editorial calling for armed revolution if President Obama is reelected is picked up by the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, as C-Ville Weekly reports.

Best news for Type 1 diabetes patients: UVA researchers Patrick Keith-Hynes and Boris Kovatchev reconfigure a smartphone to monitor an insulin pump and glucose monitor. Local Justin Wood is the first outpatient to test the "artificial pancreas" that will automate monitoring and maintaining safe blood sugar levels for a disease that can require multiple daily insulin shots.

Best get for Monticello: Gold-medal gymnast Nadia Comăneci will speak July 4 at the historic site's annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony.

Best gets for the Greenbrier Resort: Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson agree to play at the third Greenbrier Classic in West Virginia July 5-8, according to the News Virginian.

The Huguely tape: Court finally allows glimpses of evidence

lisa — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:22:08 +0000

During his trial, spectators could hear George Huguely's interview with police in which he went from matter-of-fact discussion of Yeardley Love "freaking out" to near hysteria and denial after getting told she was dead. In that same courtroom more than two months later, after several media organizations pressed for release of the trial evidence, the public on the morning of May 15 was finally allowed to see the video recording of Huguely.

A couple dozen people, mostly reporters, gathered in Charlottesville Circuit Court to see the one-hour police interview, nearly 200 photos, and about 30 slides of documentation that were difficult to read unless sitting on the front row to better understand what happened before Love was found dead in her 14th Street bedroom early May 3, 2010.

Judge Edward Hogshire did not allow release of any photos of Love's body, nor were any recording devices allowed in the courtroom. In February, Huguely was convicted of second-degree murder with a recommended 26-year prison sentence for the 2010 killing. He faces formal sentencing August 30.

Huguely's police interview starts around 7:53am in a small interview room when Huguely signs a release saying he's been advised of his rights. He's sitting in the far corner of the room, trapped behind a rectangular table up against the wall, wearing a Police band t-shirt and an expression that seems to say, I'm really hung over and why am I here?

In a low-yet-nasal voice reminiscent of James Spader's preppy character in Pretty in Pink, Huguely recounts his past 24 hours. He demonstrates certain parts of his narrative: "She was hitting her head," while banging his own on the nearby wall. "She was freaking out."

He takes a sip of his coffee and says, "She kept hitting her head. I never hit her in the face."

Huguely describes Love as "flopping like a fish out of water." He insists he just wants to talk to her. "She's like"– he pauses as he shivers in imitation of Love– "get away from me."

"I may have grabbed her a little by the neck," Huguely volunteers while miming a loose-gripped choke for Detective Lisa Reeves. "I never strangled her."

Huguely recounts Love's visit to his apartment a week earlier, during which she was "totally freaking out," and hitting him in the face. He tells the initially sympathetic-sounding Detective Reeves that the romance broke up because Love wanted to go to New York after graduation and he to San Francisco.

But Huguely seems unable to halt his tale of the break-up, and, unprompted, describes how Love went to "Carolina" a week earlier. Love, according to Huguely, accused him of being violent and told him she's slept with someone else.

In Huguely's narrative, Love too is violent, having hit him in the head when she comes to his apartment and trying to push him out of her bedroom after he'd kicked the door in. "I just want to talk to you," he insists he told Love.

Huguely seems unaware of how detectives might feel when hearing an over-200-pound man describe "wrestling" on the floor with a woman half his size and seemingly oblivious to the coldness of the assertions: "I tossed her on the bed. She had a bloody nose."

At the same time, he reiterates, "I never struck her." And he shows Reeves scrapes and cuts on his hands and legs. "That's all from lacrosse," he says.

Fifty minutes into the interview, Reeves tells Huguely Love is dead.

"She's dead?" he asks. He stares. He puts his hands on the back of his head, and then under his chin. "How the f*ck is she dead?"

He puts his head down on the table. "She's dead?" he repeats in seeming disbelief. "How?"

"That's why you killed her, because she hooked up with another player," says the detective. "You're here because she's dead."

Huguely reacts like a person in shock, and denies– repeatedly, dozens of times– that she's dead, and maintains that he did nothing to seriously hurt her.

"She's not dead," he protests. "She had a black eye."

Next, he accuses the detectives of lying to him.

"There's no way," he says over and over. He stamps his feet, insisting, "I didn't murder her." He puts his head back on the table, sobbing and sniffling. "She's not dead," he says again as the tape plays on.

As for the photographs, those bits of evidence begin with the Love sisters, Lexie and Yeardley. One from Love's apartment shows a living room decorated with posters of Audrey Hepburn and vintage French advertising.

Her room is neat and clothes are visible. A black and white sweater is draped across a chair. Other garments are pink and red. A computer cord snakes across the floor. Photographs of friends occupy a wall around her bed, and there's one of Love and her sister Lexie on the bedside table. A turquoise bracelet, candle, and lighter are on the same table.

It looks like a typical college-aged young woman's apartment, except for the angry, dark-red stain in the middle of the green pillow on her bed.

The evidentiary photos include Huguely, shackled and wearing flipflops, with rulers beside the scrapes on his leg that look suspiciously like leftovers from kicking in a door.

Photos of his apartment show a fondness for Bob Marley and the Grateful Dead. Empty beer cans and bottles crowd a coffee table.

Huguely's bedroom isn't neat like Love's. Clothes are piled on the floor and spill out of drawers. A remote control, lighter, and pen lie on his tousled bed.

Exhibits of texts show Huguely's unsuccessful attempts to entice other young women that night, the last one around 11:22pm on May 2– shortly before he headed over to Love's apartment.

Thirty slides of trial evidentiary documents were shown for a maddeningly slow minute each for less interesting items like the receipt for Love's Dell laptop.

The same minute flew by on the single screen that showed all the April 30 emails between Huguely and Love, with a reporter able to scribble mere fragments:

She: "Not everything is about you."

She: "You were trying to hook up with Stephanie."

He: "A week ago you said you'd get back together with me and I stop drinking and you hook up with Burns. How f*cked up is that?"

The public gets another chance to see the evidence on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 16.

Pei in The Box: Ten chef brings new menu

Dave McNair — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:30:48 +0000

For several years now, The Box on the Downtown Mall has been a beacon of downtown night-life with its solid music line-up and dance scene vibe into the wee hours, but owner Chas Webster wanted to bring the focus back to the food as well. That's why he's partnered up with realtor-restaurateur Stu Rifkin and Ten restaurant's chef, Pei Chang, to renovate the space and provide new food options.

"The kitchen was expanded, all the flooring and some of the equipment was replaced," says Rifkin. "We also added a drink rail, another register, and an extra soda gun to speed up late night service."

As for Chang's menu, Rifkin says it's just the beginning.

"The feedback we've been getting about Pei's food has been overwhelmingly positive," says Rifkin. "We're offering items you just can't get downtown."

Like a kurobuta pork belly sandwich served with a mix of sake, mirin, and koikuchi, or sweet potato tempura with turmeric, dried shrimp, and nuoc cham dipping sauce. Plus, you can also try some Vietamese-style coffee.

For the late night crowd, there's also a new limited menu available seven nights a week until last call.

Bank battle: VNB titan wants back in (and Craig out)

hawes — Tue, 15 May 2012 00:39:30 +0000

Just days before the annual shareholders meeting, former Virginia National Bank chairman Mark Giles, whose Christmas-time resignation led a wave of defections from the board of directors, has fired a shot across the bow of the ship he once captained. He's offering a "proxy contest," a power battle that might include an attempt to reclaim a leadership role at an institution that's been rocked by hints that it has been run more like a private club than a publicly held company.

"Many shareholders and customers have asked me if I would return to the board," Giles writes in a mid-March letter to VNB chair William Dittmar. "A great board can be a tremendous driver of shareholder value."

Giles goes on to recommend a slate of would-be directors who would be interested in serving only if Giles returns to the board. Conspicuously absent from the Gilesian slate is one of the bank's founders and its largest shareholder: Hunter Craig.

But coming on strong is the second-largest shareholder: Giles.

Having served as VNB's founding president from 1998 until he quietly withdrew from the executive role in 2007, Giles now holds 214,356 shares of the company, about eight percent of the stock.

To banking observer Richard Spurzem, recent moves by Giles clarify the "governance" issues to which Giles so cryptically alluded upon his December 19 resignation. Giles seems to be contending that Craig– who is suing the state to claim millions in taxpayer cash for a flopped real estate speculation called Biscuit Run– is bad for business.

In a government form he filed in May, seven weeks after his letter to chairman Dittmar, Giles complains that unnamed directors holding over 16 percent of company stock– which VNB's own documents confirm as Craig and father-in-law Wick McNeely– have pledged their VNB shares as collateral to an "in-market competitor" bank.

Giles further claims, in what's known as federal form 13D, that "significant business connections and interdependencies among various directors "have quashed the stock's value" and sent a "chilling effect" toward investors.

"I gave that 13D filing a lot of thought," Giles tells a reporter via voicemail. "And I stand by my filing in its entirety."

Spurzem amplifies what Giles hints at: that VNB is populated by Craig cronies, "good old boys" so enmeshed with each other that they've taken their eyes off any corporate board's primary purpose: delivering shareholder value.

Spurzem points out that 14 years after the stock went public, VABK.OB trades for barely 50 percent more than the original issue price and that even that has been propped up by share-buying board members. Spurzem contends that the bank has jeopardized earnings by spending too much on employee salaries, a situation that contributes to an alleged inability to muster sufficient cash to buy other banks.

"Charlottesville is a great market," says Spurzem. "They should be making money hand over fist, and they could be buying banks that are in trouble."

VNB president Glenn Rust, however, disputes such assertions. While declining to address Giles's potential battle for the board other than calling it "unfortunate," Rust says VNB is coming off a strong quarter that saw earnings leap from 11 cents to 19 cents per share compared to the same period a year ago.

"We had a really good first quarter," says Rust. "I'm more about staying focused on the future."

As for the debt-soaked shares held by Craig and McNeely, the latest VNB proxy statement notes that both men have "represented that these VNB shares are pledged to another financial institution as collateral for a loan unrelated to any real estate project or development," a statement that seems designed to downplay any taint from Biscuit Run.

While phone messages left for Craig and McNeely went unreturned, President Rust says that even if any pledging directors defaulted, their VNB shares would simply be sold on the open market like a foreclosed house.

"That's a conversation that keeps persisting," says Rust, disputing the notion that a competitor would gobble VNB. And as for raising money, Rust notes, "We would not have trouble getting access to capital if we wanted to buy another bank."

Chairman Dittmar also disputes things Giles alleges– including a claim Giles made to the government that he received "no response" to his March letter. "I immediately called him," says Dittmar, "and we spoke about it that day."

As for worries over pledged shares, Dittmar says there shouldn't be any. Dittmar says the bank invited multiple lawyers as well as the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to determine whether pledging matters.

"The OCC's view was that if you stop directors from pledging their stock, then they won't want to be directors, and that's a bad thing," says Dittmar.

Rust and Dittmar urge a reporter to buy a share or two, which would allow him entrance to the next shareholders' meeting, which is slated for Monday, May 21 at the Boar's Head Inn. "It might be really boring," Dittmar warns.

Attached Documents:

news-vnb-gilesfiling13d.pdf

news-vnb-2012-proxy.pdf

news-vnb-2012-q1.pdf

Goodbye, Expresso: Venerable food family exits Pantops space

Dave McNair — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:34:42 +0000

About a year ago, the former owners of the famed Expresso Italian Villa on Emmet Street (now The Villa under new ownership), known by countless students and townsfolk for its 2am breakfasts, reprised an even older Charlottesville restaurant icon, the Expresso International Restaurant (whose original site on West Main now serves as a site of El Jaripeo). Up on the hill at Pantops Mountain, owners Margarita and Nick Vlavianos took over the Aunt Sarah's Pancake House space and launched Expresso Italian Restaurant & Pancake House.

"Same menu as the old Expresso," owner Margarita Vlavianos told the Hook, "but no pizza this time."

Since this was the culinary team that a Hook reviewer found back in 2008 to produce the town's best gyros, this was cause for celebration. On a recent drive-by, however, we discovered that Expresso had closed its doors. Compounding our shock and sadness is the fact that Vlavianos had in recent weeks been telling the Hook about the impending arrival of a new pizza oven.

With the phone disconnected, we were unable to make contact with the Vlavianos family, but according to commercial real estate broker Corven Flynn, they vacated the space about a month ago, and the building is once again for sale or lease.

Despite Expresso's struggles to establish a foothold at the location, Flynn contends that it's still a prime restaurant location, particularly with all the development that has taken place on the mountain. As he points out, the site served as Aunt Sarah's for 15 years. And before that, for many years, his own family ran Charlottesville's original Mexican restaurant, La Hacienda, which many fondly recall as "LaHa."

"And that was before all the development, before the hotel across the street went up," says Flynn. "It's zoned highway commercial, so anything can go up there. But the best use for it, with the least amount of investment, is still a restaurant."

Taliban blowback: Fiction tackles reality in debut novel

Dave McNair — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:49:24 +0000

Fathers quietly bring home the burdens and responsibilities of their work, which their children often notice in his tired eyes or a heavy sigh. For local author Mark Saunders, that boyhood curiosity must have been especially complex. When his dad, former U.S. diplomat Harold Saunders, returned home after helping Henry Kissinger negotiate peace agreements between Egypt and Israel, or after having coordinated efforts to secure the release of American hostages during the Iranian Hostage Crisis, what did the young son absorb?

"I don't know how Mark Saunders tapped into the material for his novel," says author John Casey, who has had high praise for Saunder's debut novel, Ministers of Fire, "but it rings true. An instructive but above all exciting book."

Indeed, as a curious young man, Saunders was intrigued by his father's work.

"At some point in my twenties," says Saunders, now 45, "I was reading a pretty obscure book about the Chinese intelligence services, and I stumbled on the fact that the CIA and the Chinese had worked together in the late 1970s to arm the Afghan freedom fighters, the mujahedin, which was something my father was involved with."

From this, the seeds for of a literary thriller were planted. Saunders would come to the University of Virginia's Creative writing program, where he would work on the book, and in the late 1990s he began shopping it around. It was a hard sell. Intrigue about the goings on in Afghanistan, and American and Chinese involvement in training and funding the mujahedin (including a freedom fighter named Osama Bin Laden) was still a pretty obscure subject.

Then history interrupted.

"The whole thing didn't really come together until 9/11," says Saunders, "when everyone realized that the mujahedin were now the Taliban, and we had created them."

Post 9/11, Saunders realized that there were people in the Central Intelligence Agency and in Chinese security whose careers would be ruined if the story of their collaboration with its perpetrators were to surface.

In 2002, the main character of Ministers of Fire, Lucius Burling, a former CIA station chief in Afghanistan in the late 1970s, lives a less covert existence as the American consul in Shanghai; but after the 9/11 attacks his past adventures in the country have come back to haunt him. Meanwhile, a Chinese dissident physicist, whose escape from China was organized by a faction of the CIA, could be selling nuclear secrets.

Still, it would be a decade before Saunders would finally find a publisher, Ohio University/Swallow.

"I’ve been very discouraged at times," says Saunders, "but when I approach the writing because it’s something I love to do, not just to be published or recognized, I get back in the groove again."

Saunders will read from his novel Ministers of Fire at the New Dominion Bookshop on Friday, May 18th, at 5:30pm.

Barefoot's baby: Earless Rabbit jumps out

courteney — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:13:36 +0000

He's best known in Charlottesville as a WINA radio host, but author and historian Coy Barefoot now has an addition to his resumé: co-founder and creative director of Earless Rabbit, an online video site that features professionally produced clips on local topics from music to art to food.

"Earless Rabbit is what comes after newspaper, radio, and television as we know it," says Barefoot, who says the idea– named for the old-school television antennas– grew from his frustration with the interruptions caused by pop-up, banner, and video ads, all of which, he says, are relics of 20th century advertising models.

"The whole idea of a TV commercial is that it's an interruption," says Barefoot, who spent the past year working with his cofounder, filmmaker Kent Williamson, in preparation for the earlessrabbit.com launch.

While the content will indeed be interruption free, earless rabbit is admittedly not always a pure journalistic endeavor. While Barefoot offers his friendly and info-packed history lessons known as "Barefoot Excursions," other folks might pay for their coverage. Businesses, musicians, and artists can pay for professional treatment, which they can then use in their own social network marketing efforts or post to their own websites.

"The commercial of the 20th century is the content of the 21st," says Barefoot. "But not in a vulgar, infomercial kind of way. You tell stories, you give people experience and video that they want to watch."

Katie to UVA: And Monticello gets Nadia on July 4

hawes — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:21:01 +0000

The University of Virginia's 183rd Final Exercises will be held May 20 with a Lawn-centric ceremony begins featuring Katie Couric as commencement speaker. But in another major local speech development, this year's Independence Day celebration and naturalization ceremony at Monticello will feature Nadia Comăneci, the first Olympic gymastic to score a perfect 10 in a routine, something that happened in the summer of 1976, shortly before a soap-opera theme somehow became inextricably linked to her persona.

Ix

Bill Emory — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:16:35 +0000

The Elby Brass Rock-Marching Band performs at the Closing Day Gala of the Tom Tom Founders Fest.
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Commentator Bill Emory puts up a new photo nearly every day at billemory.com/blog.