Typical Cville: Overpriced, Overdone Hipness

Friday night on the downtown mall. Depressing: there's not any other option. Upside: therefore, everyone's there. The double-edged butter knife of living in a small town - you get community, but when you don't want it, too bad, it's all you've got. (I am not talking about going to the Corner to surf with the college students, pretending you're still one even though you're not.)

First thing: the "chalk" board. Despite the grumbles I've heard from people about the cuss words crowding it out, I love it. Friday night, it's a center of hub of activity. Then I try to write on it - which turns out to be impossible. Why? Because it's not chalk. It's slate. Ah - now I understand why this took millions of dollars or whatever. You can't erase or write on it with any ease. What the heck was wrong with a cheapo chalkboard??? This is typical Charlottesville. Something that's a great, democratic idea, that should have cost next to nothing -- instead, they have to do it upscale, monumentalish, and then it doesn't even really work. That was my first grumble of the night.

Next, as we skirt around the clumps of hippie-musicians banging out clods of noise together, I wonder, as I always do, Where do these people come from? In a town that's so expensive to live in -- impossible to get a room in a house under 350, let alone your own apartment, buy a house, etc., -- where do all these people, espousing cheapness by the colorful rag-wear and dirt in their hair -- where do they live? What cheap rock in the park do they coagulate under?

Because we took a turn down one of the side alleys to check out the restaurant Kiki, only to gag at the small, chic menu with its large, ridiculous prices, the dissonance between the wanna-be-in-New York eatery and the wanna-be-a-carpenter peasantry making my spleen ache. Yet another overpriced restaurant! Guacamole for 7 bucks! And Bashir's was charging $15 a plate -- and it's not that great! It's hummus, for god's sake!

We keep walking, and there's the hoola-hooping belly dancers causing a hoopla, and there's Blue Light Grill, and it's all very colorful and cacophonic and cheerful, but it's also very ... fake. I don't believe it. The Jefferson movie theater -- the one cheap place on the mall, housing Better Than Television in its basement, the one real hippiesh collective with a presence -- offering no more movies, only its closing notice.

There's only one place I've been that tops this crazy stroll through overpriced retail and overdone hippiness -- Santa Fe, New Mexico. I'm convinced that the angels and demons of Cville are struggling to get this city to emulate that place.

Santa Fe was awful when I went there several years ago -- stores with crappy, half-painted shelves branded by a top designer and selling for thousands of dollars fronted by poor Indians offering up silver necklaces for two bucks. The place was selling itself as original dirt, as honest to goodness pueblo, trying to appeal to the yuppie tourists' desire to chew off the real bone of the Southwest -- but it was all a sham. Even the museums cost money to get in. A bottle of water cost the same as it does at a concert. It was absolutely horrifyingly false. An amusement ride through culture. I'm surprised Disney doesn't own it, dubbing it "Southwestern Land."

...and then Disney could purchase Cville, "TJ Land,"... or has it already?

Of course, the main evidence that the downtown mall on Friday night is a superficial and costly experience (I believe those homeless-dressing hippies are trust-fund babies) is that there's no black people or Hispanics there! I can only imagine - forgive me if I'm wrong - that I'd find them at that burger joint on Main Street (I went once time - delicious, cheap - I was the only white face there) or at the awesome Mexican food place in the back of the store on Market Street... I don't know. All I know is, all of Charlottesville is not congregating here. This melting pot is missing some important elements.

Dumpster-diving democracy is cool because it supposedly is how liberal white folk can show their intellectual leanings. "I drive a hybrid!" Charlottesville is like any 20-something hipster with rich parents who doesn't know who she is yet, but while she's waiting to discover it, she dresses as if she is not rich, but a poor artist, because we love poor artists, they're so much more real than rich suburbanites... if we don't have a passion, we can dress like we have one, right? But at the bottom of it, at the bottom of the soul of "the best place to live in America," is the same core as any other town - money and the making of it. For all our pretentiousness, it's all about class and wealth. It's like realizing that TJ still owned slaves -- glad he was so creative and idealistic and made his house round, but the truth is, he was the original Disney - and he was just as much a creature of his time as we - as Charlottesville - is.