April 4, 2003
4/4/03 Charlottesville, VA We pulled
We pulled into Charlottesville just in time for a quick coffee with our friend Temple, who is in charge of acquisition (and pretty much everything else) for Dave Matthews' film company ATO. I thought ATO was a bad choice for a name, since it is also the moniker for a fairly generic bunch of fratboys at the Alpha Tau Omega house precisely the kind of place Dave would play in the early, early 90s – but they seem to be doing fine. We swapped indie film stories, then Tessa and I walked down University Ave. ogling all the usual bohemian shops and pizza places catering to the proletarian tastes of the college dollar.
I didn't go to UVA nor did I apply – because the rest of my prep school did, and I was hellbent on going where NOBODY ELSE WAS. I needed a complete tabula rasa, to start over without dealing with the erection-laden baggage and emotional dysfunction of my high school. There are several reasons to dislike UVA: their fans drive me nuts, their swimming team is frequently hostile to Coach Comfort, they have an annoying fetish for Thomas Jefferson, and they hate Carolina. That said, their campus is almost as pretty as ours.
It was nice to see the pedestrian mall still hosting a gaggle of skate rats and punk kids. You could take a time machine back to 1981, and see the same 15-year-olds wearing tartan kilts, profanity-laced leather jackets and blue hair. There's a seemingly endless line of 10-year-old kids just waiting their turn to be pissed off, regardless of demographic changes from generation to generation. It does seem, however, like the style of anarchistic disaffection kinda stalled 20 years ago. I mean, I see the shirts, but do any of these kids know how old the Dead Kennedys are now?
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Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole