Charlottesville Podcasting Network
Lectures, radio shows and more available on-demand
Audio features and interviews on the arts, centered around Charlottesville, Virginia.
Storytelling and musicmaking are two of the themes that weave through the nine plays selected by Live Arts for its upcoming sixteenth season. Artistic director John Gibson announced the selections last night at a preview party, and I stopped by to find out what’s coming up.
Sean O’Brien, the Executive Director of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership talked with Coy from the set of “Evan Almighty” which was filming in Richmond. Sean’s first cousin John Michael Higgins plays one of the leads in this new movie. Sean shared some behind-the-scenes observations from the movie set.
Last year, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation selected a Charlottesville man as one of this year’s 25 MacArthur Fellows.
Terry Belanger is the founder and director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He was chosen for “raising the profile of the book as one of humankindGuv,!v,,us greatest inventions.”
Shortly afterwards, Sean Tubbs took an elevator ride to the sub-basement of Alderman Library to speak with Belanger about the school.
This podcast concludes with music from Magnatune. The track is Daniel Berkman’s “Folkways” off of the album Calabashmoon.
Soundscape fans may be intrigued by MacArthur’s selection of Emily Thompson, an aural historian.
On Monday, March 27, the Satellite Ballroom will show a 1922 silent western called Big Stakes. But, the room will be far from quiet, as an electic trio from Boston called the Devil Music Ensemble will be providing the soundtrack. I recently spoke with guitarist Brendan Wood about the group and present this preview.
This podcast is supported by the Daily Progress and their new set of blogs.
On the February 19 edition of WNRN’s Sunday Morning Wake-Up Call, Rick Moore was visited by members of Charlottesville’s Offstage Theatre. The show covers the differences between traditional and ‘offstage’ theatre and features a profile of the group’s upcoming season. The show is filled with small readings from a handful of the groups humor-filled one-act plays. full of talent and laughs.
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The outcry among many in the Muslim community over images of the prophet Mohammed continues to smoulder. It isn’t often that a cartoon can prompt such a reaction. Jen Sorensen, the Charlottesville-based creator of Slowpoke Comics, says the biggest negative reaction she got is when an offended reader offered to pay for her retirement. Sean Tubbs recently met with Sorensen at Court Square Tavern for a chat about her work and her take of the cartoon crisis.
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This year marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Charlotte Bronte, the author who gave millions of school children something to read with the publication of Jane Eyre. The novel is one of the most common in the English language, and the Rare Book School is honoring Bronte with a look at the ubiquitous nature of this classic in a special exhibit in the Rotunda called Eyre Apparent, which features a look at the depth at which the novel has penetrated pop culture, and to show that there’s much more to a book than its text.
Barbara Heritage is curator of collections at the Rare Book School. I met her recently at Alderman Library while she was putting the exhibit together and asked her to describe a shelf containing much in the way of Eyre paraphrenalia.
 Gregory Orr |
Gregory Orr’s life could have been spent mired in tragedy. He shot and killed his brother during a hunting accident when he was 12. His mother died two years later when his family was on a missionary assignment in Haiti. To escape a sense of despair and anguish, Orr became involved in his late teens with the Civil Rights Movement and traveled from upstate New York to Mississippi in 1965 to serve as a volunteer. He was quickly imprisoned for breaking various laws
set up to deter protestors, and was subsequently beaten by police officers.
The University of Virginia poet often recalls these events in his poetry, but it wasn’t until 2002 that Orr wrote about the experiences in prose. That was in a memoir called The Blessing. Sean Tubbs spoke with Orr in his office last month for a conversation about his career, the difference between poetry and prose, and about the time he spent in Mississippi forty years ago this summer.
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Have you ever been to a village or town in Virginia that was simply called University? If you’ve ever eaten at a place on the Corner, the answer is yes. Local author and journalist Coy Barefoot interviewed countless people who remember what the five-block stretch of businesses just outside Grounds and produced a book called The Corner: A History of Student Life at the University of Virginia. Barefoot was the featured speaker of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society’s Last Wednesday Speaker Series on July 27, 2005. The monthly event took place at the Senior Center.
Comic books are traditionally drawn by an artist who uses pen and ink to depict action on a page. These days, many people might be surprised to know that comics are often touched up with Photoshop. But the characters in a new graphic novel coming out this month from Charlottesville artist Colin Whitlow are real people, captured using a digital camera, resulting in a cross between a film and a comic. I talked with Whitlow earlier this month in his office in the University of Virginia’s Studio Art Department, where Whitlow is an Anspaugh fellow.
Superheroes like Spiderman, Superman and Batman have made a lot of money on the big screen, but sales of the actual comics have been declining for decades. This Saturday’s Free Comic Book Day is an attempt by Diamond Distributors to remedy that by giving people a taste of the power of comics.
Two stores in Charlottesville are participating in the giveaway, including Atlas Comics on the Seminole Trail. We stopped by to get the low-down.
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The Charlottesville Podcasting Network is proud to debut a new series of feature reports on the cultural and spiritual life of the South Asian community in Central Virginia. Our reporter Deepak Singh has worked for the BBC, and currently calls Charlottesville home. Deepak will be producing regular stories, and we will eventually have a dedicated podcast for the South Asian community.
This introductory piece gives us some insight into the nature of Sufi music.