Virginian

Up men to your posts! Don't forget today that you are from old Virginia. -- George Pickett

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Dave Buschman Art Opening



Paul LaBreque Gallery, 65th St., NY NY April 9, 6-8 PM. Dave is an '85 W&L graduate, Law Class of '93, and, at this point, is pretty sure to be my only friend who will have an NYC art show.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

The New World

I saw The New World this weekend, and I highly recommend it. I thought it was beautifully done and historically accurate. Generally, the reviews have been tepid; here is a collection of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. About half of the reviewers think it was boring, and half appreciated it. Compare these general results with the more artsy readers of the Internet Movie Database.

What broke the tie for me was, of course, the Virginia angle. Every time I go to Jamestown or the Chesapeake, I think about what it must have been like for the English sailors to come ashore, and to set up a fort made of sharp sticks in a swamp, and to meet Indians and slowly starve to death. To me, one of the great promises of film is its ability to reconstruct the past, and this film does it as well as any I have ever seen.

John Smith and John Rolfe are played by Colin Farrell and Christian Bale. Neither one of them are anything special; they are adequate, probably because their parts are underwritten; they both play silent, pensive, passive observers of Pocahontas. (Given the career of John Smith, it is hard to imagine him as passive). Pocohontas (she is never called that in the film; she is either "the Princess or her baptismal name, Rebecca) is played by a first time actress named Q'Orianka Kilcher. She is brilliant and luminous and perfect in the role. Oddly enough, she physically resembles the Disney cartoon Pocahontas.

The story, such as it is, is familiar to any schoolchild; Pocahontas saves Smith, Smith leaves; she is captured by the colonists, she marries Rolfe and goes to England, where she dies. What the film does is very deliberately examine each aspect of the story. The arrival of the English and their initial encounters with the Indians. The capture of Smith and Pocahontas' rescue. The return of Smith to Jamestowne, where the disorganized rabble are at each other's throats, rolling in filth. (Everyone but Farrell, Bale, and Kilcher has historically accurate rotting teeth). Smith is called back to England and Rolfe arrives; Pocahontas is captured by the colonists, Pocahontas and Rolfe raise tobacco and have a child and go to England, where Pocahontas dies. The scenes of Pocahontas in western clothing walking around a hyper-sculpted English garden are an incredible contrast to her scenes in Virginia.

A lot of internet discussion of the film focuses on its director, Terence Malick. I have never seen any of his other films, so I can't contribute to that discussion. I will say, again, that the New World is a brilliant work of art. Go see it on a big screen; judging from the tiny audience on Friday night, it won't be in theatres for long.

Update: Here is a blog post that calls the film a generation-defining event.

Friday, January 27, 2006

Congressional Staffers abuse Wikipedia

This is nice. Congressional staffers (or Members) are altering wikipedia entries; removing unflattering but true facts (like broken term limit promises) or adding unflattering details (such as "smells like cow dung," or "ineffective."

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Restaurants: an unflattering prism for human behavior

Everyone who goes to restaurants needs to read this article. Frank, Bruni food critic for the New York Times, worked undercover for a week as a waiter, and wrote a great article about his experience.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Mr. Carter Burgess

Today's Roanoke Times has an article on a notable Roanoker, Carter Burgess. He was born in Roanoke in 1916 and graduated from Jefferson High School. He was a member of Eisenhower's staff and an assistant to the Secretary of State, he ran TransWorld Airlines for Howard Hughes, and he was ambassador to Argentina. There is an exhibit about Mr. Burgess at the History Museum of Western Virginia at Center in the Square. The exhibit was produced by the George C. Marshall Foundation. Mr. Burgess was a VMI grad, class of '39, and he died in 2002.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Virginia May Repeal the Radar Detector Ban

Virginia is the only state in the Union that bans radar detectors. Apparently there is a serious effort to repeal the ban at the current session of the General Assembly.

Friday, January 20, 2006

Forgotten Roanoke

A couple of fellow Roanokers have set up a nice site called "Forgotten Roanoke." It has some enormously detailed pages about Roanoke landmarks. Here's an example about the Hotel Ponce DeLeon. The site also has a blog. , a good one, that addresses Roanoke's current events. Congratulations to Mr. Keith Clinton and his wife for some excellent work.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Benjamin Franklin

Today is the three hundredth birthday of Ben Franklin. There is a nice, brief appreciation on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Franklin was a corresponding member of the short-lived Virginian Society to the Promotion of Usefull Knowledge.

Route 220

Yesterday I had to be in Monterey at 10 AM and Collinsville at 3 PM, so, with the exception of 7 miles on the north and about 10 miles on the South, I drove the entire length of Highway 220 in Virginia. Here's an earlier post about the Carolina Road. Here is the Wikipedia entry for US Route 220. The Virginia section of the wikipedia article is empty; maybe I will give it a try this week-- I'll need subsections for Highland County, Bath County, Alleghany County, Botetourt County, Roanoke County, Franklin County and Henry County.

I didn't have a lot of time to dawdle; however, I did stop for lunch (eaten in the car) at the Homestead Market, across the street from the Homestead spa entrance in Warm Springs, and I stopped for a second to take a look at the Falling Spring, which is beside 220 in Alleghany County. Falling Spring rated a mention in Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia:

Falling Spring The only remarkable Cascade in this country, is that of the Falling Spring in Augusta. It is a water of James river, where it is called Jackson's river, rising in the warm spring mountains about twenty miles South West of the warm spring, and flowing into that valley. About three quarters of a mile from its source, it falls over a rock 200 feet into the valley below. The sheet of water is broken in its breadth by the rock in two or three places, but not at all in its height. Between the sheet and rock, at the bottom, you may walk across dry. This Cataract will bear no comparison with that of Niagara, as to the quantity of water composing it; the sheet being only 12 or 15 feet wide above, and somewhat more spread below; but it is half as high again, the latter being only 156 feet, according to the mensuration made by order of M. Vaudreuil, Governor of Canada, and 130 according to a more recent account.

(Link)

This page, which also has a picture of the waterfall, notes that the spring has been moved a few meters over from when Jefferson saw it. Natrually, no sign at the falls mentions this fact. I guess that's progress.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

The Richmond Report

At last, a real, professional Virginian blogger takes the field. This is The Richmond Report by Washington Post Richmond reporter Michael Shear (and, occasionally, his co-worker Rosalind Helderman). This blog was announced just after the November elections; it kind of crawled through December; but it seems to have heated up along with the new session of the General Assembly. Although I think the Richmond Times-Dispatch has generally done a fine job covering the General Assembly, they haven't put a lot of effort into web updates. Hopefully the Post's new efforts will push the Times-Dispatch political reporters into the ranks of professional bloggers as well.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Virginian: Quote Whore

Well, I have officially made it. My (honest) praise for the Rockbridge Advocate has been quoted in the January issue, on a full page ad seeking subscribers. I am honored. (Sorry for the poor quality of the scan; my office copier can only do so much.) It reads: "The finest publication in the Commonwealth (internet or print) is the Rockbridge Advocate, a monthly print-only publication... Every issue is a perfect blend of local politics, true crime, W&L and VMI news and history." Posted on the blog, "Virginian," August 2005[.]
Here's the website.

Monday, January 09, 2006

Roanoke Makes Snopes.com

Every time that I get one of those absurd emails that says "SEND TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!" I go to snopes.com and search it out and discover it is a fraud. (The most recent ones I can think of include "Terrorists Steal UPS uniforms" (false) and "WHERE TO BUY YOUR GAS." (also a fraud) . Anyway, I was googling something about Roanoke the other day and came upon this page. Apparently, the picture and caption were so unbelievable that Snopes.com had to print a "yes it is actually true" page!

Sunday, January 08, 2006

The Commonwealth Data Point

The Commonwealth Data Point is a website created by Virginia's Auditor of Public Accounts. If you have any policy wonk instincts, if you are interested in what services the Commonwealth is providing to its citizens, or if you are interested in a detailed look at the demographics of Virginia's citizens, take a look. Apparently this site went up on November 1 2005; I found it today thanks to this post on Bacon's Rebellion, which credits Senator Walter Stosch for this landmark in government transparency.

Friday, January 06, 2006

Rockbridge County Monicans Seek Tribal Status

This is a good article from the cover of today's Roanoke Times. Apparently the Monican tribe has applied to the U.S. Congress for sovereignty, and they think that the 400th anniversary of Jamestown may be their last chance to push it through. The opponents are mainly (and justifiably, in my view) afraid of sovereignty breeding casinos. Meanwhile, accoring to the article, Monacan Chief Kenneth Branham "accuse[s] sovereignty opponents of racism, greed and hypocrisy." Mr. Branham is quoted as follows: "Millions of dollars are going into this [Jamestown] thing and what do we get -- nothing," he said. "We aren't going to take trinkets anymore like in Colonial times. We want the world to know how indigenous people are being treated today. This is the showdown."

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Business Articles

(Sorry for the no-posts for a while; I had an internet-deprived holiday break; I did read a few books though-- I'll post on some of them.)

Here are a couple of nice pieces on the economics of movie theatres and coffee houses from Slate that are worth reading. I wouldn't want to be in either business, for sure.