The All Faiths Chapel sits behind the former All-American Truck Stop, dormant since 2010, and it has attracted notice elsewhere. The credo above the door reads, "ENTER TO WORSHIP DEPART TO SERVE."
Justin stumbled upon the teeny tiny church near Doswell. It’s something of a mystery, so naturally he brought his pictures and information for deposit in The Hat. Investigating, Justin photographed a note with an enclosed $5 bill attached to the front door. It reads, “If you rennovate the truck stop, please leave the trees & the chapel intact! Thanks! (Here’s $5 towards it’s maintenance. N.“ This was followed by a phone number.
I called, and it turns out that the “N” stands for Natasha. (She preferred to keep her last name private.) And hers is a story of the great American heartland kept alive by arteries of asphalt.
“I thought if I left a note and the five dollars, it would provoke other people’s interest,” she said. “That they’d try to prevent anything from happening to it.”
Around 1998, she encountered the chapel and remained curious about its origin. The truck stop, she said, was a welcome respite. “Lot of truckers are annoyed that the old places are getting commercialized and turned into McDonald’s and s--t,” she explained. The All American Truck Stop included a great salad bar and this chapel. “There’s something very special about it, almost a glow," Natasha said. "It’s among these trees. I always sought it out when I was up that way.”
About two years ago, Natasha left the traveling life behind. “I think part of me just wanted the challenge of keeping this big thing in the road,” she said. “When I got used to that, I realized it was time to quit.” She’s now pursuing an interest in homeopathy and alternative healing.
“I hope they don’t let somebody come along and flatten that place,” Natasha said. “I really was hoping someone would come along, and there’d be interest.”
The Hat agrees, and in the coming days, I’ll try to find out who put the chapel there, and if anybody is caring for its fate.
Of note this evening: At Candela, the newer space on the walk, there's an exhibition devoted to New York City photographer and poet Gita Lenz, who died at the age of 100 this past January. She lived long enough to see her first monograph of photographs published by Candela Books, the printing aspect of Gordon Stettinius’ newly opened gallery. That volume and the recent Shelby Lee Adams exhibition-between-covers is here, too.
As NPR’s Claire O’Neill put it around this time last year, “It’s amazing — and unsettling — to realize how much of life is left to circumstance, and chance, and being in the right place at the right time. Photographer Gordon Stettinius, for example, just happened to have a friend [Timothy Bartling] who happened to have an elderly neighbor, who happened to have an incredible archive of unseen photographs just waiting to be discovered.”
Lenz’s imagery, at times playful with puns, then as carefully composed as the best abstract art, captured a New York City of the 1950s-1960s fraught with grand nostalgia. What happened to that group of boys with the baseball bats underneath a bench? Who were those young girls by the pool?
Besides the major section devoted to Lenz, a number of other photographers are represented in the second gallery, including an intriguing series by Terry Brown.
At 1708 Gallery there’s an installation of several video artists, "Telling Tales," as well as the gallery's satellite show at the Linden Row Inn, "Constructs XI," with a roster of Richmond front-benchers, including Sally Bowring, Don Crow, Javier Tapia and Reni Gower.
Gallery5 has “Young Artist Expression” tonight, to benefit the Richmond Boys and Girls Clubs, and tomorrow night, it hosts “Dance Your Cookies Off” with the River City Rollergirls.
Meanwhile, Ghostprint has “Chroma Show,” art and illustration by Leslie Herman and Neal Irwin, and Quirk features work by a few of Richmond’s compelling artistic chameleons, such as Matt Lively and Chris Milk Hulburt.
All in all, it should make the for the beginning of a good not-too-cold February evening out.
Last year, through Sugar Shack Burlesque, which Gardner co-founded, she produced 107 shows throughout the country. She’s established a regular Wednesday-night dance party called Shaken & Stirred (at the Delancey), and she’s taking her act to Europe (not for the first time), where she’ll also follow up on her fascination with the history of chess. But that’s another story for another time.
Now, she’s in a movie directed by James Gray, acting alongside Marion Cotillard (lately in this little Woody Allen picture called Midnight in Paris) and Joaquin Phoenix.
Luck, they say, is preparation that meets with opportunity, and this is how it went: “The second assistant director Amy Lynn saw me two years ago in the Berkshires,” Gardner explains. “She contacted me through one of the musicians, and she emailed me a few weeks before Christmas. Would I submit videos and pictures for an upcoming project? I’ve been acting for a while now, and you give them what they ask for, but you don’t dwell on what it may end up being because it may be nothing.”
Then in early January, there came a call to set up a telephone meeting with Gray (Little Odessa, The Yards) and a busy producer named Anthony Katagas. Gray was casting about for information pertaining to a new project, set in New York’s Lower East Side circa 1919-1920, concerning an immigrant woman (Cotillard) who falls into the entertainment underworld and the clutches of a Svengali (Phoenix) who is the manager/pimp for a troupe of performers. This discussion led to a face-to-face meeting.
“I went in with my little 'look book,' and they asked me to help them create this world and act as their conduit into burlesque,” Gardner says. One of the early thrills was meeting with costumer Patricia Norris, whose award-winning credits include The Waltons, Days of Heaven, Scarface, The Elephant Man, in addtion to art direction for Twin Peaks.
“She’s an a-mazing woman,” Gardner enthuses. “She’s a genius. I spent time with her poring over vintage French magazines, researching the general shape of women’s bodies and talking about their relationship to clothes, and who at what level was buying and wearing what.”
Then came the hard tacks of business. Gardner was hired as Bruno’s Girl No. 1, “although on the call sheet it’s backslash 'Sue,' and that’s the name on my trailer,” she, well, giggles. “So I think she’ll be Sue.” Then there was a casting session at the Kaufman Astoria Studios to round out Bruno’s girls, involving Gardner, Phoenix and Norris.
“I called in eight of my dear friends, and from them three were chosen, one of whom is BooBoo Darlin'," otherwise known as Kendra Lansing, who is the former co-producer of Richmond’s Varietease Burlesque. She started dancing in Richmond and was performing here until a year ago, when she moved to New York.
“That was Jan. 23," Gardner says. "They made their selection and we started shooting on Monday.
The project has meant visiting the Tenement Museum, checking out the entertainment collections of the New York City Public Library, and being awake for set calls at 4:30 a.m. in order to get her hair and makeup ready, not to mention getting used to walking in the period shoes and clothes. “It’s all vintage,” Gardner says. “None of it is fabricated.” The clothes change the way one feels. she says. “The shoes force you to walk more on your heel, they’re pointed. The stockings’ elastic bands start cutting into your leg. Me, these days I’d leave my apartment and not comb my hair — these ladies set their hair before they thought about getting out of the house and slept a certain way to keep from flattening it out.”
Finally, the chess thing. It involves artist/chess master Marcel Duchamp and restaging a historic gallery show in December, with chess pieces designed by famous artists. Now that's more than the old bump and grind. Stay tuned.
The Future of Richmond's Past, a collaboration between 20 regional institutions and organizations, including the Valentine Richmond History Center, is inaugurating the 2012 season of the Valentine’s Community Conversations on Feb. 2, from 6 to 8 p.m., with Michael Blakey, the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Anthropology and Professor of American Studies at the College of William & Mary.
Blakey’s 45-minute talk is titled “The Old Racism and the New,” during which he’ll present four questions: Has the appearance of white virtue necessitated distortions and omissions of black history? Has the dehumanization of blacks been required in order to justify the unjustifiable in American history? What current ideas make white privilege tenable in an officially anti-racist post-1960s America? What can we do about these problems?
The discussion generated by these questions is to be moderated by Valentine RHC director Bill Martin and facilitator Matthew Freeman, the president of TMI, a Richmond civic-engagement group.
Blakey is the founding director of William & Mary’s Institute for Historical Biology. From 1992 to 2004, he was the scientific director of the New York African Burial Ground Project involving the interdisciplinary study of 419 skeletons of Africans enslaved in 18th-century New York City.
The choice of speaker and topic is opportune, as it corresponds with the Science Museum of Virginia’s current exhibit, "RACE — Are We So Different?," which runs through April 29. There are a host of programs associated with the presentation. (You can find more information about the exhibit here.)
These are difficult but necessary discussions the city needs to have with itself — because it’s just too easy not to.
scene changed. Art by F.T. Rea
In the spirit of the Biograph, the James River Film Society presents the New Wave masterpiece Breathless on Saturday, Feb. 11.
It'll be shown using a 35mm print restored for the 1960 film's 50th anniversary, followed by the classic but seldom-seen Kirk Douglas “problem Western,” Lonely Are the Brave (1962). Both movies will be screened at the VCU Grace Street Theatre, a block down from the former Biograph. Just 225 seats are available. Don’t tarry in getting your tickets.
In the 1980s, before Netflix, you could attend the Biograph sometimes twice a week to get your head expanded by films you wouldn’t see anywhere else. The monthly flyer came out, you attached it to your refrigerator or bulletin board, and you checked off what you wanted to see.
At the Biograph, I experienced Koyaanisqatsi, the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense (the whole audience danced) and the re-edited, restored, groundbreaking and silent Abel Gance epic Napoléon. I also remember sitting with a girl I had a crush on — she was wearing a bolero hat damp from rain — as we watched Rembetika: The Birth of the Greek Blues.
Then there was the strange Argentinian film Man Facing Southeast. Afterward, on our way to the Village Café (in its original location) to decompress and process, a man in a button-down shirt and khakis grabbed a friend of mine and shouted, “They’ve done it to us again! They’ve trapped us in a Chicago Bubble!” The incident sparked my first (unpublished) novel.
Breathless should be seen at some point in one's film education — if for nothing else than to watch the sparks fly between Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. “It’s the French showing the Americans they can do noir better than us, which we stole from them, anyway," says bloggiste and memoirist Terry Rea, who ran the Biograph from 1972 to 1983. "This is the endlessly reflecting nature of film.” Lonely Are the Brave, though penned by famously blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Exodus, Johnny Got His Gun), isn’t as well known, though it remained Douglas’ favorite film. “It was marketed as an action movie, and though it has action in it,” Rea says, “it wasn’t what the filmgoer of the time expected from a Western.”
Scenes change. Rumors of the Westhampton Theatre's potential closing may indicate the need for a smaller endeavor to serve that group of filmgoers. James Parrish and the James River Film Society are determining whether a new art house can be sustained in Richmond.
Parrish says, “We want to know if the community would support a small place that sat 100 or so people, one screen, at least in the beginning, a place to go to celebrate film as art, and do so with like-minded people, drink and eat and talk about the films, and experience different viewpoints. If the support isn’t there, we’ll keep doing the festival but once a year. We’ll have learned the lesson.”
Parrish, a filmmaker and teacher, ran the bi-monthly Richmond “Flicker” series from 1998 to 2008 and also joined forces with former Biograph manager and film educator, Mike Jones, to create what is today the James River Film Festival.
Parrish, tempered by experience, remains hopeful. He recently attended a convergence of art-house exhibitors at Sundance, where he received both encouragement and reality checks.
His preference is to situate the “storefront cinema” in or near downtown. He’s actively searching and talking to those possessing sympathies. He’s reminded of how in 1926, the New York City Screen Guild showed a restored and edited version of 1919’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The Guild bought the Fifth Avenue Playhouse at 66th Fifth Ave. and inaugurated film art in the U.S. “This was the 'Little Cinema Movement,' " Parrish explains, "and ours is a kinship with how in 1926 there is already the notion that there needs to be a counter or oppositional cinema for stuff other than Hollywood product. It really comes down to providing Richmonders with an option in film where profit motive is not the primary motive. Clearly profit is part of it — filmmakers need money to make movies, digital or otherwise.”
The film society will continue an informal series called “The Golden Age of Repertory of Cinema.” Look for an event next month centered around Louis Malle’s classic My Dinner With André, filmed almost entirely on location at the then-dormant Jefferson Hotel.
And as if on cue, next week at the Grace Street Theatre, the spring season of VCU Cinematheque begins its roster of foreign and classic films. It’s all free and in 35mm.
NOTE: This post has been corrected since publication.
