Yeardley Love and former boyfriend George Huguely, who has been in jail since her death May 3.

When murder suspect and UVA lacrosse player George Huguely spoke with police in May, he allegedly described an altercation with former girlfriend Yeardley Love in which her “head repeatedly hit the wall,” and his lawyer called Love’s death “an accident with a tragic outcome.” Now, the defense is trying to prove that.

Lawyers for Huguely were in a Charlottesville court December 15 seeking access to Love’s medical records, a request the prosecution calls “a fishing expedition.”

Although the medical examiner determined that Love died May 3 from blunt force trauma to the head, Huguely’s attorney, Fran Lawrence, argued that the cause of her death was unknown, and that’s why he subpoenaed records from UVA Athletics Department, UVA Student Health, and from the Charlottesville-Albemarle Rescue Squad, the last of which Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman had already agreed to enter the court record.

Amphetamines were found in Love’s body, according to the toxicology report, in an amount that would be consistent with her prescription for Adderall, a stimulant widely used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, said Bill Gormley, who (more)

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Video still from Kara Crombie’s Portraits 1.

Have you played with smart-phone apps like Hipstamatic, Shakeit, or Poladroid? They tap into our collective nostalgia for Instamatic cameras by creating the illusion that our phones’ hi-tech digital photos are old-school Polaroid pictures, replete with strange colorcasts and blown-out highlights. Ironically, such flaws conjure an ideal world of perfectly mowed lawns and backyard barbecues.

The cultural connotation of the Polaroid palette is something Kara Crombie uses to good effect in her video, Potraits 1, now screening at the University of Virginia’s Niche in the Fine Arts Library. (Word to the wise: although the posted artist’s description refers to Crombie’s Aloof Hills, the Niche piece is a different work.)  Crombie’s 10-minute short depicts scene after scene of lush green landscapes and peaceful streets, marked with the icons of idyllic American life: a stars-and-stripes mailbox, white picket fencing, a backyard picnic table, etc.

But the details of these scenes— the glowing whites and the yellow-green casts— imbue them with a dreamlike quality. Crombie digitally enhances and combines images to create these surreal ideals, crafting suburban or bucolic locales that are literally too good to be true. She overlays her scenic creations with a continuous soundtrack of ambient noise and tweeting birds, punctuated by the occasional barking dog.

Every few scenes, Crombie introduces another layer of unreality by superimposing single figures into her landscapes. Each character faces the camera, silently talking and making small gestures, seeming at once to be in the setting but not of it. For instance, a hipster in a hoodie crouches in a serene forest glen, or a melancholy woman wearing a black dress stands poised in sunny meadow, her hair perfectly still despite the breeze.

Always Crombie is attentive to minute details. She often restricts a shot’s movement to a flitting butterfly or leaves lifted by the wind, introducing just enough motion to distinguish the scene from a still photograph. At other times, she combines time-lapse photography with video, so a pond in the background flickers in what otherwise appears to be a real-time shot.

Crombie deftly uses color not only to nudge viewers’ nostalgia but also to create connections between juxtaposed locations. For example, the yellow roof of a jungle gym echoes a woman’s yellow tracksuit from the previous shot.

Crombie’s Portraits 1 mesmerizes with visions of an idealized world, even as its figures remind us that in reality, such places do not exist.

Kara Crombie’s Portrats 1 is on view through January 3 at The Niche in the Fine Arts Library at the University of Virginia. Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library, Bayly Dr. (across from the School of Architecture). For more information, visit http://thelibraryniche.blogspot.com.

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A rendering of UVA’s new Ruth Caplin Theatre.
Willam Rawn Associates

Last month, UVA held a ceremonial ground-breaking at the future site of the Ruth Caplin Theatre, a three hundred-seat, 20,500 square-foot “thrust stage” theater that will rise beside the Culbreth Theater on Culbreth Road— courtesy of Ruth Caplin, 89, and husband, Mortimer Caplin, 94, who donated $4 million for the $13.5 million addition to the Drama Building and whose lives have been as drama-filled as the plays and films they hope to nurture.

UVA alum and former law school prof Mortimer Caplin is a legend in legal circles, a still-practicing tax lawyer who served as IRS Commissioner during the Kennedy Administration and briefly into the Johnson White House, during which time he made the cover of Time magazine. As a law prof at UVA, he taught future U.S. Senators Ted and Robert Kennedy. And he’s a lover of the arts, it seems.

Indeed, back in his UVA student days in the 1930s Caplin was president of the Virginia Players, and appeared in a number of UVA productions, including the title role in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

“The theater will clearly advance artistic values cherished by UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson— music, dance, architecture, painting,” said Caplin in remarks prepared for the October 21 event, which he attended with his wife. “It’s our hope that it will enrich the studies of all University students, making the arts not only a part of their course work, but a part of their lives.”

So what’s a thrust theater? It has a stage that opens and extends into the audience, which allows theater-goers to watch the performance from three sides, allowing for more intimacy. In addition to theater productions, the facility will be used (more)

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Stanley Nelson discusses his documentary after the screening of Freedom Riders.
PHOTO BY DEBRA COHEN

At 10am on Saturday, with a day of screenings left to go, the Virginia Film Festival broke its all-time box office record, Festival director Jody Kielbasa announced before The Last Picture Show.

Bigger and better was the unofficial theme at this year’s fest, Kielbasa’s second but the first on which he really could impose his vision. (Last year, he inherited the “Funny Business” theme, a festival tradition that had pretty much run its course, and which he immediately ditched.)

Attendance jumped 25 percent over last year to 23,750, as did ticket sales, ringing up at $90,158.

Kielbasa also unveiled a new logo that says both Virginia and Blue Ridge Mountains, although one wiseacre we know sees a bondage theme in the celluloid wrapped around the state.

And Kielbasa did make us suffer, with more movies— 132— than ever before, making it even harder to choose what films to cram into the November 4-7 fest.

Innovations we liked a lot: The emphasis on contemporary foreign films and the “Six from ‘60,” a way to screen classic movies from 50 years ago. We’re hoping next year has “Six from ‘61.”

Adding a box office at the Main Street Arena on the Downtown Mall made it really convenient for us at the Hook a block away.

And Culbreth Theatre used to be a wasteland for food options. This year, the upgraded Fine Arts Café made it possible for famished filmgoers to find the sustenance to carry on.

Attracting star power has always been one of the toughest lots of (more)

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Although UVA President Teresa Sullivan allowed VQR editor Ted Genoways to keep his job, she’s called for University-wide changes by which “employee complaints about their supervisors can be taken, registered, and followed up.”

FILE PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

The same day the Hook published a cover story [Conflicting Tales: The unfolding tragedy at the VQR] on the conflicting tales surrounding what went on at the Virginia Quarterly Review before the July 30 suicide of its managing editor, UVA released an anticipated audit report (with responses written by UVA President Teresa Sullivan) on the magazine’s finances and management that presents even more conflicting information.

While editor Ted Genoways and other staff members will not be losing their jobs, unspecified “corrective action” will be taken regarding Genoways’ handling of VQR finances, his poor management style, his failure to provide his staff with the information they needed to do their jobs, and his failure to adhere to UVA policies in the treatment of his staff.

While Genoways hasn’t yet responded to the Hook for comment, he told the New York Times that the report lacked “a clear statement of the facts.”

“I suppose they don’t want to state my innocence too plainly, because it makes their actions — cleaning out my office, canceling the winter issue — look panicked and ill-considered,” Genoways told the Times. “But I think moving on will require greater honesty.”

The report concludes that while complaints were received about Genoways’ management of the magazine, no “specific allegations of bullying or harassment” were made before Morrissey’s death. However, as the report later recommends, “the current structure for receiving employee complaints needs to be re-evaluated by the University.”

In addition, what was revealed about the inner workings of the magazine has prompted the creation of a University-wide “task force” to “strengthen the institution’s policies and structure with regard to acceptable workplace conduct,” which includes “developing a structure within Human Resources in which employee complaints about their supervisors can be taken, registered, and followed up.”

Essentially, the report appears to have ignored the numerous complaints made after Morrissey’s death, as well as charges of harassment made by one former VQR staff member, 30-plus-year veteran Candace Pugh, in 2005. However, as UVA spokesperson Carol Wood points out, the audit report covers operations at the magazine only during the last two years.

“I can’t see any situation in which Molly [Minturn] and I would work with Ted [Genoways] again,” says VQR assistant editor/circulation manager Shelia McMillen.

FILE PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

The report did cite reports of Genoways “not being courteous or respectful with some contributors and colleagues,” and “problems with certain employees” in the past, but concluded that no reports “ever seemed to rise to the level of a serious, on-going concern.” However, that conclusion appears to conflict with comments made by Genoways himself, who has said (more)

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On Monday, October 18 head over to the Miller Center to hear E. D. Hirsch, Jr., founder and chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation and professor emeritus of education and humanities at UVA, address the question: how can the U.S. reform its educational standards and curriculum?

Hirsch is the author of “The Knowledge Deficit,” which solidified his reputation as one of our most influential education reformers. With “The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools,” Hirsch argues that a content-based curriculum is essential to address inequality. A book signing will follow his Forum, which begins at 11am

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Film fest director Jody Kielbasa offers 100 movies in four days, and says there could be more.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

You read what’s hot at Sundance, at Toronto, at Cannes, and wonder, when will these movies come— if ever— to Charlottesville?

Good news. This year’s Virginia Film Festival brings more festival darlings from around the globe, and kicks off with the eagerly anticipated Black Swan, the new film from the director of The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky, and starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, and Winona Ryder.

On October 7, festival director Jody Kielbasa unveiled the headliners and highlights for the November 4-7 fest, which runs for the first time without the constraints of themes, like last year’s “Funny Business” or the previous year’s “Aliens!” with an exclamation point. “There seemed to be no love lost around that theme,” Kielbasa says he discovered.

He’s upped the typical 80 screenings to 100 movies in four days, while slicing (more)

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UVA claims that Cuccinelli’s action chills academic freedom.
FILE PHOTOS

A little over a month after losing a bid for a wider trove of documents, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has renewed his demand for emails sent and received by controversial climate scientist Michael Mann when he was at UVA, the Washington Post is reporting. This has been a hot topic

inside and outside the academy because Mann is the creator of the famous “hockey stick graph,” which predicts a spike in global temperatures.

“Dr. Mann’s Hockey Stick graph is based on suspect data,” Cuccinelli says in a statement. “Others have shown that random numbers can be put into Mann’s algorithm, and they always produce a hockey stick graph.”

The University has tapped into private funds to cover the $352,874.76 in legal fees it has thus far incurred, according to UVA spokesperson Carol Wood.

“University leaders are disappointed that the institution must continue to litigate with the Attorney General,” said a statement arranged by Wood, “but will continue to stand for the principles the University has articulated since the C[ivil] I[nvestigative] D[emand]s were first put forward in April– and to support academic communities here and elsewhere.”

–last updated at 7:46pm

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UVA Police Lt. Melissa Fielding and UVA Dean of Students Allen Groves discuss the alleged assaults.
PHOTO BY COURTENEY STUART

A hastily organized press conference to address three recent alleged attacks on UVA students may have raised more questions than it answered, as UVA Dean of Students Allen Groves and UVA Police Lt. Melissa Fielding admitted they did not know the identities of two of the three assault victims— and couldn’t be sure, therefore, if assaults had even occurred.

September 28, three days after new UVA president Teresa Sullivan’s “Day of Dialogue” to address violence in the wake of the Yeardley Love murder, Groves sent a message to approximately 23,000 UVA email addresses cautioning students to be extra vigilant in the wake of the alleged ssaults. (more)

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For the September 24 Day of Dialogue, the Rotunda columns become a public art project called “Lines of Darkness and Light,” a meditation on the death of Yeardley Love.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

Almost five months after the University of Virginia reeled from the brutal murder of one of its own, an air of mourning still pervades the Lawn. Columns of the Rotunda are clad in black veils on one end, and on the other, a preponderance of black-clad students, faculty, and staff stream into Old Cabell Hall for the start of the university’s Day of Dialogue: Toward a Caring Community.

The day is a continuance of a discussion that started May 3, said UVA President Teresa Sullivan. That was when the death of fourth-year Yeardley Love, a beautiful lacrosse star, rocked the university community and became a national story. Her former boyfriend, George Huguely, another lacrosse player, is charged with her murder.

“In a real sense, we are picking up from where we left off last May,” said Sullivan. “Those of us who weren’t in Charlottesville last May experienced Yeardley’s death from a distance, and even at a distance, it was heartbreaking.”

The September 24 Day of Dialogue was initiated (more)

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Katie Baines, “tightrope.”

“These shouldn’t work” was my first thought while standing in Ruffin Gallery looking at Katie Baines’s recent paintings. A visiting faculty member in UVA’s art department, Baines creates shape-strewn abstracts, combining numerous techniques from airbrushing to stenciling to brushwork, in colors that would normally clash but somehow mesh. And work, they do.

The best approach, I discovered, is simply to yield, allowing each of the 10 acrylic-on-panel paintings to unfold. After a few minutes, Baines’ visual vocabulary begins to make sense. From piece to piece, she deploys a similar set of elements— thin parallel lines fluid in their irregularity, waving polyps, scalloped borders, stenciled shapes and their echoes, etc.— that unite her complex compositions and move the viewer smoothly from one small event to the next.

For instance, in “glowing cell,” overlapping vertical rectangles of brown, orange, ochre, and olive drip down like stylized stalactites in the top left corner and have their colors repeated in boxes of lines, reminiscent of topographical maps, at the bottom of the painting. The earthy colors occur again as curving ochre shapes with diffuse olive edges that enliven the interior of a purplish cell— its hues as varied as a bruise— at the heart of the painting. Meanwhile, two small tiger-striped cylinders of red and chartreuse occur in an egg shape placed inside the “line boxes” but also have twins afloat in the purplish cell stenciled with overlapping ovals.

Nothing in Baines’s paintings happens in isolation— there is always a call and response between the elements. Although abstract, her compositions are rife with animated drama arising from the cartoon-like interplay of shapes and colors. In “tightrope,” forms of pale blue, yellow, grey, rust, brown, and orange seem to hang from a slack aqua line, while below, their “shadows” appear to rest beneath a frosted dome. In the background, a white line suggests a horizon above what seems to be a dark body of pooling water edged by stylized swamp grass.

Baines’s paintings are like poetry; each work contains a number of stanzas that resonate with each other and circle back to variations on a chorus. Although her techniques are distinct, the dizzying complexity of her compositions and playful “everything including the kitchen sink” approach to palette recall Wassily Kandinsky’s abstracts. The longer one looks, the more “aha” moments emerge and entertain. And what at first may have caused head-scratching suddenly makes brilliant sense.

Katie Baines’s recent paintings are on view through September 17 at Ruffin Gallery. Ruffin Hall, 179 Culbreth Road. Katie Baines will give an artist’s talk at 5:30pm, September 15 in Campbell 160. 924-6123.

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At UVA’s new Transitional Care Hospital, Michelle Hereford stands under a ceiling-mounted lift that can transport obese patients from bed to bathroom.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

UVA’s newest hospital building acknowledges a cruel fact of life: Americans are getting fatter— much fatter. At the swanky new Ivy Road facility designed for long-term acute care, 11 of the 40 rooms can handle patients weighing up to 1,000 pounds, thanks to heavy-duty beds and overhead electric lifts.

“It is very innovative,” says Michelle Hereford, associate chief at UVA’s new Transitional Care Hospital. “It decreases injuries and helps with patients being mobile.”

On a reporter’s recent tour of one of the so-called “bariatric” patient rooms, it’s evident that the room is bigger than usual. So are the beds, which are reinforced and capable of holding patients who might qualify for the record books.

Overhead, a monorail-like ribbon of steel snakes across the ceiling. That’s the track for the  Pinnacle brand overhead lift, an electric winch-equipped device that can lift a half-ton patient out of bed and all the way to the bathroom.

Bariatric medicine is booming locally. An estimated 20 to 24 percent (more)

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Still from Man Ray’s L’Etoile de mer (The Starfish).

In association with its exhibition, “Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens,” the University of Virginia Art Museum’s Man Ray Film Series presents “Man Ray: Filmmaker,” which will screen the following five short films by Man Ray: Retour a la raison (Return to Reason); Ballet mécanique; Emak-Bakia; L’Etoile de mer (The Starfish); and Les Mysteres du Château de Dé (The Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice). Discussant: UVA Art Museum curator Matthew Affron. Campbell Hall 160. 924-3592.

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Following the suicide of Morrissey (inset), UVA president Teresa Sullivan has commissioned a “thorough review” of VQR management.
HOOK COVER

With the story behind the suicide of the Virginia Quarterly Review’s managing editor Kevin Morrissey making national news and new UVA President Teresa Sullivan intensifying her probe of the troubled journal, new information arises about the quandary facing Morrissey, including his own unwillingness to file an official complaint.

President Sullivan approved a financial audit two weeks ago but announced a broader examination Thursday, August 19, about three weeks after the suicide and one day after an in-depth article by Dave McNair appeared online, airing concerns about VQR’s questionable hiring practices, strange emails, dwindling finances, potential conflicts, and prior bullying allegations.

Now, there’s new information uncovered by McNair that shows that UVA had taken steps to educate employees and fight office bullying, but the University stopped short of enacting policies.

Former UVA President John Casteen, whose office long supported the award-winning VQR, has thus far declined to enter the fray. Meanwhile, while an alienated staff puts together the fall issue, embattled VQR editor Ted Genoways, who has retained a lawyer to fight the bullying allegations, remains on leave with a Guggenheim fellowship.

“They are trying to play you,” says Genoways lawyer Lloyd Snook in reference to those asserting the bullying allegations, which, because they involve personnel matters, he declines to specifically discuss. “We are looking forward to the investigation that President Sullivan is calling for,” says Snook, “because we assume that in that investigation, we will actually have some specifics to which we may respond.”

Multiple sources indicate that Morrissey, before taking his life, sought help from various UVA departments, including Human Resources, the President’s Office, and University Ombudsman Brad Holland, who— citing confidentiality agreements— declined to discuss Morrissey’s case.

Holland laments the fact that UVA has no formal anti-bullying policies in place and hopes Sullivan’s probe might lead to enacting some. It was Holland who, a little over a year ago, led (more)

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Yeardley Love and the man accused of murdering her.
PHOTO UVA ATHLETICS

In the days before the brutal May 3 slaying of UVA lacrosse player Yeardley Love, she and her former boyfriend George Huguely had an argument in his apartment that ended with Love hitting Huguely with her purse, according to statements from a Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sister who was there.

The contents of Love’s purse scattered, and later— once Love realized her camera and cellphone were missing— she asked her friend to go back to Huguely’s to retrieve them. The friend returned with only the camera, according to heavily redacted affidavits for warrants to search the two computers recovered in Huguely’s apartment at 230 14th NW for stored— or deleted— emails referring to Love between April 3 and May 3.

The warrants were filed August 17, and Judge Paul Peatross ordered them temporarily sealed. Only redacted versions of the affidavits have been released.

Among the information blacked out are the names of at least two of Love’s friends, who recounted hearing about an email Huguely sent Love. One of the friends was in a hotel room in Chicago with Love, who read it to her. Apparently the email was so gripping that Love read it to her friend out loud again (more)

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What happened at the VQR?

HOOK’s 8/19  COVER

On John Casteen’s last official day in office as the president of the University of Virginia, a tragic story, one fit for the pages of the award-winning literary journal that he nurtured, began to unfold.

That Friday, July 30, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, 52-year-old Kevin Morrissey, took his own life. Since then, UVA has shrouded VQR behind a wall of silence, changing the office locks, launching an audit, and even routing all incoming telephone calls to the University’s public relations office.

A Hook investigation reveals that behind the staid, Thomas Jefferson-designed exterior of VQR’s headquarters swirl allegations of financial recklessness, conflicts of interest, and a bizarre pattern of management-by-email that drove a staffer to quit. Some say there was also a pattern of bullying that may have pushed a fragile man into tragic oblivion.

What’s more, according to a former VQR employee, University officials have known about some of the personnel problems for at least five years.

An ambitious editor

A group called the Workplace Bullying Institute minces no words about the situation, suggesting that Morrissey’s boss, VQR editor Theodore H. “Ted” Genoways was a bully and that UVA was “unresponsive.” But if Genoways has been cast as the problem, he also appears to be a key source of VQR’s success.

Hired in 2003 at the tender age of 31, Genoways arrived with high hopes and high praise including President John Casteen’s enthusiasm for his “energetic intelligence and visionary thinking.”

He transformed VQR— long known for publishing poetry and short stories on black & white pages— with punchy, magazine-style theme issues and loads of full-color photography. Along with the new look came an expanded mission including hard-hitting non-fiction such as Toni Morrison’s account of the long road to racial integration and an on-the-ground exposé on the capture of Saddam Hussein. Just three years after Genoways arrived, Casteen’s enthusiasm seemed justified as the journal won two National Magazine Awards, bringing new prominence to VQR, and to its young editor.

For Maria Morrissey, however, the older sister of the late Kevin Morrissey, the success also brought heartache. Based on information she gathered from VQR staffers, University officials, police, and her brother’s own notes, Maria Morrissey portrays Genoways as someone who created a work environment so hostile it became unbearable.

“Our family is convinced,” she says, “by all that we have learned since Kevin’s death that, were it not for Genoways’ relentless bullying, Kevin would be alive today.” (more)

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Film festival director Jody Kielbasa wanted a new logo that really said Virginia.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

When the Virginia Film Festival got new director Jody Kielbasa last year, it was inevitable the 22-year-old film festival would see some change.

For the 23rd film fest, which runs November 4-7, Kielbasa unveiled a new logo August 16 and announced that acclaimed director Peter Bogdanovich will be the 2010 Film Fellow.

Bogdanovich made some of the quintessential movies of the ’70s, including The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon and What’s Up, Doc? Also a film critic and historian, he’s written 12 books on film.

The new logo is “an homage to the Blue Ridge Mountains,” says Kielbasa, as well as making no doubt this film festival is in Virginia and a “destination festival.”

Other changes festival fans can expect this year: no more themes, such as last year’s “Funny Business,” and fewer classic movies.

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