As soon as we arrived, we walked into a bar full of friends while the storm raged on outside, and I woke early to watch the snow still falling heavily, blanketing the town with an additional layer of quiet. It wasn’t my first Snowpocalypse, but it was still startling to see the fabulous Severine standing in the snow piled higher than her knees.

We ventured out on Saturday morning through Friday’s snowfall into the brightness of downtown, to the Pavilion that looked like a landing spot from the future.

Somehow, the chalkings on the Charlottesville wall survived the drifts,

and Severine and I walked the length of the Mall,

blinking at the whiteness of the snow and the curiously mod shapes of iced lights,

to meet up with Eric, Ben, John, Will, and Dan (watch closely to see Ben’s glasses transition, Sara joined us later).

The beloved Christian’s Pizza was among the few restaurants open and served as the gathering place for Charlottesville news (I am eating a pesto-artichoke-feta slice and a pepperoni with local Starr Hill Jomo) as busy as the entrance papered with flyers.

With a foraging trip to Market Street Wine to talk Grecian grapes with incredibly helpful wine researchers, we proceeded to while away the hours in a big hotel room,

before venturing out that night to Zinc. On the way in, thrown snowballs whiffed; inside, excellent versions of confit with cassoulet, onglet frites, onion soup gratinée, and brussel sprouts with lardons were brought out to the long table at the center of this bistro.

Stories were invented, a Famous Professor stopped by, and we adjourned to decanted wine in a municipal building with a ceiling of possibilities.

I departed Charlottesville around noon on Sunday, when skillful strangers unearthed my car and help push the vehicle toward the road. I find it difficult to leave this town, particularly when close friends convene for holidays, and I am surrounded once again by brilliant literature geeks of the first order.

For the days of this week though, I’m circling further South…

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2. charlottesville and courses
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The next morning, my beautiful sister Kassandra woke early to breakfeast with me the Flying Biscuit—where the grits really are dreamy and an order of eggs and love cakes (black bean cakes with tomatillo salsa, feta, and sour cream) will lift you on the way back to the road.

I also admired my mother’s tomatoes,

lavender,

calla lilies,

Kassandra’s eyes,

and the gardenias that my mother has coaxed into a significant mass—a few traveled with me, perfuming the car as I drove on to Carrboro, North Carolina,

the wonderful town within Chapel Hill, where I sat on the lawn with local peach ice cream and the Weaver Street Market circular detailing local farm produce being featured this week at the co-op.

That night, I laughed with Ben, Jeremy, Seve, and Kyle and their friends at Enoteca in Charlottesville, waking with the sun to wander the farmers’ market that begins here at 7 a.m. on Saturdays, filled with tempting pie cherries this time of year.

My favorite market vendors hugged me and advised I take 81 for a more scenic drive (good advice that I took),

and this is their beautiful jewelry—when at the Charlottesville Market, do stop by and tell them I’ve sent you,

I miss the lettuce from Radical Roots with edible flowers on top of the lettuces and bought some for the road,

stopping by the Goat Cheese Man’s stand with its radishes,

and cheese donations, buying green garlic,

noting these baby carrots as I strode toward the car, keys at the ready for the final stretch to Brooklyn,

into this new apartment, a new job, and a new chapter…

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3. bacon, bourbon, bacorn, and brooklyn

Dar Williams refrains filled the cul-de-sac, and the wireless networks were named “TJistheman”, “PabstBlueNetwork”, and “moonbaker” (the last, perhaps belonging to a baker at Mellow Mushroom pizza near campus).

I thought about how hard it is to leave this place, and the first time I heard the author’s name of the book I was reading, Love is a Mix Tape. Rob Sheffield, like me, was once in Professional English Nerd School at the University of Virginia. Now he’s a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, so perhaps we’re the same type of academic flake. Charlottesville formed us in many ways, but we had to leave the field to use what we learned here.

The best explanation I’ve found for why this particular track of graduate school remains a ludicrous idea happens on page 90 (I will say knowing how to survive on $14k a year is a useful skill in any economy and also that I have close friends who I do not doubt will be successful at this):

My friends and I assumed that we would soon be tenured professors, which is an excellent life goal–it’s like planning to be Cher. You think, I’m going to wear beads and fringed gowns, and sing “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” on the way to work every morning, and then one day, I’m going to get a call saying, “Congratulations! You’re Cher! Can you make it to Vegas by showtime?”

I know I channeled Bob Mackie when I dressed to teach class.

The music scene was different when Sheffield lived in town and the highlight of the summer was the Pavement show, but there are still a few people from Charlottesville who make music; I’ve bought eggs at Dave Matthews’s farm, watched Carbon Leaf rise to national prominence, and wished for better sound in Satellite Ballroom for Dave Berman (of the Silver Jews).

And there are places to buy records like in that book everyone references to talk music and record store culture, but an elegiac tone elevates Sheffield’s book from what could be a trivial subject. Like the wind that whips around town in winter months, the prose reveals a narrator smarting from the death of his wife and the included music must be intimate and loss-y.

MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That’s part of what I love about them. but the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies.

The dialogue between the two, Rob and Renée, flickers at that wonderful level that will never translate for a mainstream blockbuster audience:

“Where are you parked?”
“I walked.”
“What’s a catachresis?”
“A rhetorical inversion of tense, kind of like a transumption. Let’s go.”

Hot.

Even narrating Renée’s “big, messy, epic” life, the author finds room to celebrate that forgotten classic music video “Justified and Ancient”:

a few pages to brood on quibbling couples shopping in the middle of the night at Wal-Mart (173), imagines gonzo names for chain restaurant carb offerings (175), and insists that the songstresses run away from the “Magic Man,” a troubling song I’ve always avoided too (199).

Inexplicably, you leave parts of yourself in Charlottesville. For me, it was the first time that I had a group of friends, a whole group, that mixed and mingled and was largely, incredibly cohesive. My role was to throw parties and feed those that sat on the chairs by the kitchen and, through that, to heal the parts of me that I stayed in Charlottesville to repair, to remember.

The book echoes that sort of affection for the place while voicing a big love for a woman who changed the author. The narrator closes with a meditation on strong women in rock during his tenure in Virginia, wistfully hoping they still exist in pop music. He talks about Renée’s sewing, and how the clothes she made (often to wear at shows at Toyko Rose) fit her body as it became more like the women before her.

And so the mix tape playlists that begin each chapter add explanation to this real woman’s actions rather than reduce her (or the author) to a series of lists, ranked in order. This was a true, I’ll-love-you-even-and-especially-when-your-hips-spread love. Like a really good album, that kind of relationship nudges forth nuances each time you listen closely.

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And I drive with friends out to the country. On Saturday night, we drove to Will’s place to cook together in his apartment inside the post office.

In the sleepy town of Esmont, we toasted to Ben’s new job in California (his work is brilliant) over a celebratory meal of duxelles (I pronounce this incorrectly in the video below) inside tenderloin that Will cooked perfectly.

I sautéed baby kale so tiny it can be eaten raw from Roundabout Farm (if you live in the area, consider their CSA), roasted new red potatoes, and puréed an improvised soup with leeks and jerusalem artichokes for the first course.

Like me, Will enjoys converting friends to a particular food—his arugula salad with lemon dressing, pecans, and Parmesan curls swayed Ben into liking the included fennel for the first time.

In a rhythm sharing his kitchen, the crickets hummed outside the screen door as Will poured a custard filling over the apple slices I arranged in his pâte brisée. Will moves lightly in his kitchen, but is a serious cook, as the tart attests.

After the tart, yoga postures, and wine, we sat picking favorites of four cheeses—Will favored the local Grayson cheese from Meadow Creek that Charlottesville’s Feast stocks, Ben liked a raw milk goat tomme, Tricia the St. André triple crème, and I’ll look for the Stoneyman hard cheese from Everona Dairy again to grate over homemade pasta. Jeremy remained much more interested in the tart (smart guy), working on a second slice.

We took the winding roads back to Charlottesville under a sky dark enough to see stars, and I went to sleep (my friend Helen graciously let me borrow her house while she traveled this weekend) planning another visit to these people I miss and place I still dream about…

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Walking the Chicago Green City Market on Saturday, I saw chestnuts,

striped turkish eggplants,

and the elusive famed yellow beets.

Passing up crêpes (skillyfully made below),

I opted for plummy bread pudding and butternut squash pie (both good Thanksgiving dessert ideas).

The fractal cauliflower seemed to be growing in all directions as you watched,

and there was a tomato that resembled a duck,

and knobbly ends of carrots to wonder at.

The Hillions String Band started up,

and the families gathered around to hear their lively strings.

—–

Flying with cupcakes from Chicago into the District, I drove to Charlottesville and giggled at Helen’s unabashed delight at Molly’s chocolate/chocolate and chocolate/peanut butter (in my opinion, Molly’s is easily the superlative shop in America); Ben, Dana, Will, Jeremy, and Jordan also rode a cupcake high over to the Local for burgers and beers.

Sunday alternated between rain and full sunshine, but nothing dampened the unflagging energy of breakdancing competitors at Crafty Bastards, the local craft extravaganza in Adams Morgan:

A potter spun his wheel,

a onesie had rhythm,

squishy sushi sparred,

and there was a strong tofu contingent for Obama.

I considered monster magnets for all of you lovely kthread readers (which one would you have picked?),

and laughed at the scrawled Pharmacy Bar exhortation as Laura and I walked to the Mt. Pleasant Day neighborhood celebration.

We passed women in striking costumes,

and met the gracious Cameron and Morgan duo in their second pass through the festivities that day.

I always gravitate toward a drumming circle, and Sunday was no different.

Even the members of Batala (the all-women drumming group here) paused to listen as the semicircle kept the beat of this vibrant neighborhood going…

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It was too difficult to choose between the tomatoes

that stretched out in breathtaking rows at Waterpenny Farms and Radical Roots.

I reluctantly left this place of thoughtful people and food, and drove to the District, where I came upon a group of women drumming.

Very inspired by these drummers, I thought about my friend Amanda’s recent post pondering the possibilities for the future of art communities in this area.

For a late lunch, I think there’s quite a bit of artistry in the food here, beginning with a perfectly spiced chili that tops “half-smokes” and hot dogs at Ben’s Chili Bowl on U street.

An unexpected hit of spice and the very finely diced onions recommend a vanilla milkshake,

which paled in comparison, though, to a later concoction with a tender crumb emerging from my friend Laura’s kitchen–a cake glazed with white chocolate that she decorated artfully:

The cake joined an incredible variety of dishes brought by the eleven dinner party guests who arrived at our friend Kevin’s house, including insalata caprese, homemade spring rolls, and fig bruschetta.

Remember when Rachel explained on July 4th how the fig trees behind her house wouldn’t ripen? Now they have (and make lovely bruschetta toppings):

Then, the eternal question: cake or pie?

Fueled by both, Laura and I made our way (via a bar that played exclusively Madonna tracks while we were there) to an art gallery in a hidden alley with skate ramps inside and outside, to see our friend Chris Bishop‘s new art and celebrate his birthday.

My friends Cameron, Morgan, and Nina were worth a rather interesting exploration of the area to find the gallery space itself,

and the dashing Cameron took this picture of Laura, Morgan, Nina (with a rad unicorn necklace), and me as we sat and caught up as the skaters whizzed by behind us.

Perhaps, like the figs Rachel resourcefully ripened, it is only a matter of time until the many pockets of underground art buzzing around the District come to fruition…

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About a week ago, I was sitting in a large room in Budapest’s Novotel Centrum, stunned.

Like the fireworks I watched Friday night from a rooftop at George Washington University in D.C. with my good friend and fabulous cook Laura Hertzfeld (display below; thanks, as always, L),

my understanding of global blogging conversations was being exploded as I listened to fiery bursts from the mouths of impassioned activists and advocates from around the world.

I was attending the 2008 Global Voices Summit, a project that my current employer, the Knight Foundation, funds through a contest called the News Challenge for new ideas in local news delivery.

Global Voices cofounder Ethan Zuckerman (find his thoughtful blog posts here) confirmed my sense that was a conference to be experienced in person (though you can watch the conference video archive and read the liveblogs), echoing what my friend David Sasaki, who leads a project called Rising Voices within Global Voices, had told me about the importance of showing up for this community gathering (click the image from David’s Flickr stream below for more of his wonderful photography).

A matrix of interlocking projects, Global Voices and its associated efforts aggregate blog entries, often with images and video, from networks of authors, some of whom are expatriate bloggers, many of whom are exclusive to Global Voices.

With my academic literary background, I used to associate ‘expatriate authors’ with moveable European feasts and endless mountains and rivers of the twentieth century. I now think of individuals like the Global Voices Summit speakers who chronicle events in areas other than where they reside—in some cases because they were imprisoned or their safety endangered in those regions.

What was once a label for American authors registering moral protests, usually of preference rather than imperative, ‘expatriate’ bloggers take on a very real cosmopolitan ownership of their grassroots reports that, as Ethan suggested at the summit referencing the Reverend Wright incident in the Obama campaign, target specific groups and spread beyond intended geographic and temporal audiences into texts referenced by transnational communities of practice.

To draw this down to a personal level, I’m thinking about the spidering effects of online interactions right now in my dissertation research on local networks of food, currency, and shelter.

Two months ago I moved to Miami, and I now happily build online community during the day for Knight Foundation and reside in a magic cottage.

What I didn’t realize when accepting the job was that my new locale is a ‘food desert’ as far as local produce.

Grown to be exported, sitting on docks and hangars beside imported organic vegetables from Mexico and South America (that the Whole Foods franchise near me stickers ‘local’), it seems sustenance of the vegetal varieties easily crosses borders and food miles pile up in a nonsensical mad tea party ride of whirling exchange (a model that needs to be discarded like the statues deposited in Budapest’s social Disneyland, Szoborpark, that I visited recently with author and blogger Antony Loewenstein):

Intended consumption for these foodstuffs remains far from production areas, and the creators, disenfranchised expatriate farmers, we might say, have little ties with the communities where their greens go.

With my beloved local food culture gone missing, a deep sense of longing has emerged for the farmers’ markets that brightened my weekend mornings for the past five or so years.

This past Saturday, I felt buoyant as I returned to the Charlottesville, Virginia farmers’ market, to sellers I know and farms I continue to support.

Freshly dug potatoes and berries I’d never seen before, wine berries, from Planet Diversified;

the first tomatoes from Radical Roots;

peaches and blackberries that wouldn’t last the day

(we shared them at an afternoon picnic)

all reminded me of the ephemeral nature of consumption, be it literal and from the soil or juicy words from those who work around tenuous low-bandwidth connections.

Like the charcoal grill Laura and I veered in and out of alleys in Mt. Pleasant to pick up from grillmaster Cameron this weekend,

we are all, perhaps, chasing down/modifying online tools upon which to set our prose, flip our marinated arguments beside other composed lines of thought.

As we walked back toward Laura’s apartment at the end of a long day of celebrating, I stopped to watch teenagers setting off sparklers between cars.

Far from the bombastic anthems and expensive fireworks we had gaped at earlier, this DIY model is the one I intend to explore—come back for more kthread on how community cred is quietly replacing trumpeted transactions and svelte intervention models are illuminating packets of change…

Leave a comment after the jump–

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In recognition of Captain America’s return to Charlottesville, we deemed this past Saturday America Day II: Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through.

Like last year’s first America Day, we determined to spend the day doing very American things; this time, relating to music.

(Follow the rest of the adventure after the jump–)

Keicy, Jordan, Dana, and I began the day with a visit to Dave Matthews’ farm, Best of What’s Around, for fresh eggs and a lesson about chickens from Matthew and Suzanne Holt.

As the rest of the hipster musicians dragged product through their hair and arrived at America Day HQ, we took a few band pictures on a bridge (no troubled water in sight) and headed off to a small town. (Ben’s parents live in this same small town.)

Delighted, Nina and Laura discovered a bike a fan had left for them in downtown Waynesboro.

Then we all looked for (caffeination and) non-obvious books about music at Stone Soup Books;

Jordan chose Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, I chose Puff the Magic Dragon, Laura found a book with scores and woodcuts titled My Pious Friends and Drunken Companions, and Jeremy located a Johnny Cash biography by his wife.

We detoured to Ben’s grandmother’s house to visit and she graciously pressed homemade sweet potato pie on us, fueling our journey to Wright’s Dairy-Rite in historic Staunton.

Nina, owner of alternative label of Hoss Records, evaluated our options on the jukebox before seemingly everyone in the diner surprised me with a chorus of “Happy Birthday.”

Riding milkshake sugar highs, we followed a slightly akimbo Statue of Liberty pointing us back to Charlottesville for American Idol karaoke (after Laura accompanied Dana on the guitar piñata),

And in fantastic leggings, Steph crawled the VIP booth at Escafe and directed us to a party at Kiki Bar’s closing night.

A few hours later, the shimmering continued as we toasted Easter with wild hibiscus flowers opening in flutes of cava,

biscuits with butter and jam, carrot cake, croissant pudding, rainbow chard, roasted lamb, potatoes, aioli, iberico ham,

and eggshells dusted with gold and silver that, peeled back, yielded solid chocolate fillings.

With gold dust on our fingers, and locals in the know, we shall have music this year wher’er we go…

For more pictures, see Laura’s Flickr set, my Flickr set, and see the video in HD on Vimeo.

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