Spielberg's Lincoln, which stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, was drawn to the Confederate capital for "Virginia's rich historic legacy, coupled with the remarkable period architecture found in Richmond," the director said in a statement. The $4.6 million Disney and Dreamworks are getting in tax breaks and incentives probably helped, too. It also makes a trend out of filming movies about the Great Emancipator in the former Confederacy. The Conspirator, Robert Redford's lukewarm, "historically accurate" depiction of the trial of Mary Surratt was shot in Savannah, Ga., even though Mrs. Surratt's D.C. boarding house still stands today. (Yeah, we know it's a Chinese restaurant.)

So what do Spielberg, Day-Lewis, screenwriter Tony Kushner, and the other cast and crew have to look forward to when they visit Central Virginia this fall?

• Hardee's, everywhere you look. The chain has 11 locations within the Richmond city limits alone. We hear Mrs. Lincoln was a big fan of the Frisco Thickburger.
• Kings Dominion traffic. If Spielberg is planning on shooting on weekends between Labor Day and Halloween, he'd better be prepared for miles of lousy Virginia drivers rubbernecking their way up Interstate 95. Though it might be fun to see Ulysses Grant liquored up while riding the Intimidator 305.
• Politicians who reminisce about the good old days of openly confronting the federal government, like Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. The feisty AG is a big fan of states' rights and frequently invokes the 10th Amendment in his resistance to all things Washington. Cuccinelli even ordered lapel pins for his office with a version of the Seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia in which Virtus is wearing a chest protector. This seal was last used between 1861 and 1865. Apparently the Confederate States were also fans of covering up.

Spielberg's production values are usually top-notch, and Richmond and the Washington of 150 years ago probably aren't that dissimilar. But this development begs a very serious question: Why is the South playing host to all these movies about its greatest enemy?

Photo by Flickr user Marion Doss using an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license.

Compared to the utter preposterousness that was Lady Gaga at the VMAs, last night's show in Richmond was surprisingly tame. Still, if you've got tickets for Gaga's show tonight at DAR Constitution Hall, you're in for a pretty bizarre spectacle. Lots of photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

The fans were as much fun to photograph as Gaga's performance was:

Full gallery here.

I’ve come to be untroubled in my seeking
And I’ve come to say that nothing is for naught
I’ve come to reach out blind, to reach forward and behind
For the more I seek, the more I’m sought

These lyrics, from Joe Pug’s “Hymn 101,” might as well be the tagline for Pug’s current year-long tour, which has taken him from tooling around the local circuit in his hometown, Chicago, to tailing alt.-country legend Steve Earle’s tour bus on a swing down through Texas and back up toward the Great Lakes. From there, he'll take a brief sojourn to Norway then take up with Josh Ritter for an upper-Midwest tour before heading west for festival season. “I rent a room in Chicago,” he tells me Tuesday after a set in Richmond, “but I’ve probably slept in it about 20 times this year.”

So far, Pug’s seeking has prompted plenty to seek him in turn—not least, Earle himself. “The way I understand it is, Steve’s manager played Steve my album, and Steve said, ‘Yeah, let’s go,’” says Pug. We’re sitting in the green room at The National, in Richmond—I on the slick leather sofa, Joe on the edge of a matching chair adjacent. The furniture looks like it might have been lifted from the set of Scarface, and Pug looks out-of-place in a plaid shirt, faded jeans fraying at the knees, and tan work boots. “It’s cool, a lot of great musicians have come through here,” he says. His tone matches his general comportment: humble, polite—but with supreme confidence lurking just beneath, every so often leaking to the surface like oil from plain earth. He had filled the role of opener that night with consummate deference: playing well, thanking the audience, then helping clear out his gear so the roadies could ready the stage for Earle. I had to wait for him afterward while he hawked his album in the lobby, stuffing a fistful of rumpled bills into his jeans. He’s not a star yet. But when he says plenty of great musicians have come through here, he’s certainly not apologizing for his own presence.

“Bob Dylan is someone I’ve been compared to a lot,” he says when I ask him about his influences, surprising me with his lack of shyness about this fact. (These comparisons are not for nothing: You can hear echoes of Dylan’s sneer, his indulgent harmonica breaks, and his poet-advocate m.o. in Pug’s music. But to liken someone to Dylan implies far more than musical similarities—and musicians, who are generally more sensitive to this fact than their fans, tend to distance themselves from such comparisons.) Pug also counts among his influences John Hiatt, Warren Zeavon, and Beck—“songwriters that don’t really adhere to a genre, they just write songs that connect to people.” But ultimately comparisons will not do, not even flattering ones. “You hear an athlete say they want to get to a point where they’re only competing against themselves,” he says. “As a musician, you want people to compare your music not to other musicians, but to the rest of your catalog.”

Pug’s catalog is currently only seven songs long. He recorded his debut EP, Nation of Heat, for free at a Chicago studio courtesy of a friend who worked there, and put out the album himself last summer. You can’t find it in stores, only on the Internet and at shows. “Your industry and mine are both changing,” Pug says to me, taking a drag in the smoking pen outside the National. That’s for sure. Here’s a guy who recorded seven songs and put them on the Internet, bypassing “the industry” altogether, and now he’s touring with Steve Earle and Josh Ritter. He’s been sought by plenty of labels, but has seen no compelling reason to sign. “I’m making a very good living just doing what I’m doing now,” Pug says, “and I have complete control over what I make.” He says there might come a time in his life where he’ll seek the stability of a label, but he’s in no hurry. “I really want one that’s into what I do,” he says, “not one who wants me to write choruses.”

Yes, it’s a different world: different than the world Dylan and the others played in—different than the world they described, and different than the one that rewarded them with fame. It’s easy to read the lyrics of Pug’s “I Do My Father’s Drugs” to mean that folk’s battle has been fought and won.

When hunger strikes are fashion, and freedom is routine
And all the streets in Cleveland are named for Martin Luther King
You will see me at the protest, but you’ll notice that I drag
I burn my father’s flag

But when I wonder aloud whether a ‘60s-style folk musician can thrive in the 21st century, Pug’s rebuke is polite but firm: “I think it’s sort of a misconception to call it ’60s-style folk,” he says. Pug describes folk not as an era-specific phenomenon but as continuum—one that manifested in Irish troubadours, then southern bluesmen, then the ‘60s discontents. What I take Pug to mean is that the tradition did not end; it still exists wherever there is restlessness and doubt and disillusionment and people who would use music to confront these things rather than to escape them.

In any case, it is far too early in the development of Pug’s music to know how popular it will be. He says he recorded his LP (scheduled for a fall release) with a backing band, meaning the album that will serve as most people’s introduction to Joe Pug might sound much different than Nation of Heat.

Pug’s set in Richmond included two new songs from that album, “Bury Me Far From My Uniform” and “Not So Sure.” You can check them out below, courtesy of Laundromatinee.com:

The National, in Richmond, is a decorous little theater with a semiformal air. But on Tuesday night, when Steve Earle played a set of mostly Townes Van Zandt covers from his new tribute album, peppered with anecdotes from his 25-year friendship with its eponymous hero, the venue assumed the close familiarity of a living room.

Earle’s speaking voice—deliberate, avuncular, devoid of pretense—sounds as though it was engineered for the specific purpose of perpetuating folk legends. When he says he got the idea for the tribute album when one night from his tour bus he saw Van Zandt’s ghost riding his old horse Amigo through the Colorado fog, you take him at his word. At Tuesday night’s show in Richmond, Earle deployed folk’s discursive oral tradition in the service of contextualizing Townes.

Earle had been “stalking” Van Zandt for awhile before they officially met, he explained, during a gig Earle was playing at a Texas dive in 1972. Townes, drunk, was loudly demanding that he play the folk standard “Wabash Cannonball,” a standard the 17-year-old Earle did not know. “He said, you call yerself a country singer and you don’t know Wabash cannonball?” At a loss, and upset at being upbraided by his unknowing hero, Earle launched into a Van Zandt song called “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” a breathless gambling allegory punctuated with the final line,

This is what this story’s told
You feel like Mudd, you’ll end up Gold
You feel like lost, you’ll end up found
So amigo, lay them raises down.

Earle and Van Zandt each played both Mudd and Gold over the course of their lives and careers, imbuing their relationship with the sort of solidarity and candor that made possible the sort of confrontation they had at Earle’s house in the 1980s, when Earle was taking a beating from a heroin habit.

“I had a home at the time,” said Earle. “But there weren’t anything in it. I pull up into my driveway one day and there’s Townes’s truck, and I’m like ‘Oh, boy.’ I knew I was in trouble, getting a lecture on temperance from Townes Van Zandt. He goes, ‘You look like shit.’ I go, ‘I know.’ He says, ‘How’s yer arm?’ I look down and say, ‘Not too good’ … Townes takes out his guitar and says, ‘I wanna play you something I wrote a few days ago.’”

Earle then made like Townes did then and began picking a dark tune called “Marie,” which chronicles the deeply unromantic plight of a drifter-musician couple clawing for dignity in a world that wants to distance itself from them as much as they want to distance themselves from it.

Introducing the songs with these personal anecdotes recruited us into the cradle of Earle’s memory and allowed us to all but shake hands with Townes–to touch his empathy (“Townes was notorious for bringing homeless people home .. then when he didn’t have a home, he brought them home to other people’s homes”), his mischievousness, and his sadness. It made us feel as though we had more at stake in each song, making certain lyrics—such as this one from “To Live is to Fly”—to land a little deeper in the chest:

Everything is not enough
And nothin’ is too much to bear
Where you’ve been is good and gone
All you keep’s the getting there

It was a night for poignant, lyrics-driven folk, as Greenbelt native Joe Pug set off Earle’s weary wisdom with the angsty passion of his opening set. I had been deeply intrigued by Pug since hearing his debut EP a few weeks ago, and I spent some time with him after his set; details in tomorrow's post.

Yes, I did drive all the way to Richmond for a nu-metal band. Each of the bands on last Friday's bill at The National—Mudvayne, Nonpoint and In This Moment—are a real blast to photograph, and so for the first time in my concertgoing life I went to a show more for the photography than the music. Some of the results are in this post, with more at the full gallery.

Musically, I actually like In This Moment's heavier stuff: even if it is fairly pedestrian metalcore, Maria Brink's vocal range keeps things interesting. Unfortunately, their latest album The Dream sees them going all arena-rock, and I'm not buying it. But in concert they played a bunch of the more metal stuff and it was pretty enjoyable. Nonpoint? Color me indifferent. As for Mudvayne, I really enjoyed watching and listening to bassist Ryan Martinie, who's always given the band a bit of a claim to a different sound, and who is an absolute whirlwind on stage. I'm never going to be a big fan, but I enjoyed myself and the stage show was worth the trip.

Here are a couple more of Mudvayne:

Also: The National might be my new favorite venue, anywhere. It's probably most comparable to the State Theatre with the floor cleared of tables, but bigger (1500 capacity, a few hundred bigger than the 9:30 Club). That is, there's a big floor with good sight lines, plus a nice balcony with bleacher seating. Great sound, really professional staff, right in the middle of downtown Richmond. Well, maybe that last part isn't so good, since it's so damn far away, but otherwise, just a fantastic place to see a show.

Nonpoint:

In This Moment:

Again, more in the full gallery.