Chinchilla Café is a concert venue, community center, and animal coffeehouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. Robin Brown, Gabriela Toledo, Eli Draizen, Fabian Garcia, and I Lane Rasberry established it last year in 2022. I want to describe what it is, the shows we have presented, and what we are trying to accomplish by hosting it. See media links for images and other details.
The Chinchilla Café has hosted about 20 concerts of 3 or 4 bands each. Concerts have had up to 100 attendees but 75 is typical. The show format is that the first band is usually local and less experienced, but should have some energy to get everyone hyped up. We check out the bands before booking, either by listening to whatever they posted online, or by getting a trusted referral from someone whom we know and who has been to their performance. The second band is usually visiting from outside town, often Richmond the capital city of Virginia which is an hour’s drive away, but we have had bands on tour from various places including DC, Philly, NYC, and Jersey City. If a band is on tour, then that means they have practiced a lot, are really good, and usually they have recorded some songs or even an album which they are promoting through their social media accounts. The problem with touring bands is that even if they are good, local people will not recognize their names, so unless they are into indie music and actively try to see touring bands, they often are not a draw because they cannot ask their local friends and network to come to the show. When people do see the touring bands, they tend to like them a lot because going on tour gives the performers a lot of energy to play with new enthusiasm. We try to cap at 3 bands to keep shows under 2 hours, but if for some reason there is a 4th band which needs to play, then they get the third slot, which can be for a second touring band, or a band which needs to promote new music immediately, or who for some reason needs to play immediately and requests a slot at an existing show which we did not design for them. Where there are 4 bands then we cut one song’s time from the other bands, meaning 5 minutes, so we still have a long overall concert but we make room for everyone. The last band is the experienced local draw. This is the band that is best known locally, who has their own fanbase, who can call people out to come see them in their own way, and whose fans will come to the concert for all the other music and then get super excited at the end when the band they know plays. This band supports all the other ones not just for bringing an audience, but also for incidental other support, like sharing music equipment in case of failure or need, or helping with sound checks, and for knowing polite behavior like naming and thanking all the earlier bands who played so that the audience remembers their names and looks them up online.
Typical concert goers are indie music fans who want to experience and support the local music scene. We do not charge anything to attend, but we ask for donations with all money going to the bands and none kept for the house. We suggest $10 per attendee but usually collect half that, which is fine because we want people to come even if money is short. Collecting $100-120 per band is typical, which for bands with multiple members who have to travel, maintain their instruments, practice, perform, and everything else is not much money to split among the musicians. I wish we could raise more but this is where we are right now.
There are three areas in the venue: the concert space where the bands perform, an outdoor chill space where we play recorded music and screen the weirdest videos we find in YouTube or elsewhere, and the actual Chinchilla Café area itself where the chinchillas live and where in the morning, there is coffee and chinchilla interaction before they go to sleep for the day after being active all night. We do not serve alcohol because of the complexity that brings. The audience tends to be aged mid-20s and up, with a mix of graduate students living here while studying and who want whatever culture Charlottesville has, and also local permanent residents of any background who like Charlottesville’s music because they live here, it is theirs, and because Cville has a great music scene. I mention ages because this is a university town, and we are not hosting undergraduate parties. The focus at Chinchilla Café is experiencing the music and venue with other people who are doing the same.
The schedule for concerts is doors at 7, with the show advertised to begin at 8 but actually starting 8:15. Sets are 25 minutes with 15 minutes between bands. As described above, typical concerts feature 3 bands, so (25+15)*3 is 120 minutes or two hours. We get people out before 10:30 so they can go out to later events or do whatever they like. Some people chill around a bit longer while the bands pack up, although often the earlier bands can finish packing up after their sets.
The resident chinchillas are an attraction of the venue. The audience comes a bit early. While the bands are setting up in the performance space, guests can hang out either in the Chinchilla Café or the outdoor chill space. If they walk outdoors they pass by the chinchillas and see them. We the human hosts do not usually introduce ourselves as hosts except to ask for donations for the bands, so not all the guests have met us or even know who hosted them. We do turn everyone’s attention to the chinchillas though. We must have had 1000 guests with many of those repeat visitors. However many people have come, all of them have seen the chinchillas and probably half of them have interacted with them either by allowing the chinchillas to sniff their hand, or by giving them pellets or treats, or by making eye contact which the chinchillas like.
Chinchillas have irregular schedules and wake up at different times, but typically, they sleep all day to wake up around 7:30pm. If they are asleep then they cannot socialize, but when they are awake, they have a large chinchilla pen with their private hidden area in the back but an interaction area in the front. Their pattern is to approach the interaction area to try to meet humans. We often ponder what chinchillas think and why they behave as they do, but for whatever reason, chinchillas like to meet new people by sniffing their hands. They want to sniff everyone’s hand every day, but then lose interest in that scent after sniffing it to meet the person. When there are a lot of people attending the chinchillas like to sniff a lot of hands, presumably to gather information about who is there but I do not know why they want to know this. They need naps often even during their waking time, and may retire to fall sideways in slumber after as little as 30 minutes of socializing.
For those familiar with dogs as pets, it is common knowledge that dogs are reactive to opportunities to get treats. Dogs want treats and repeat patterns of behavior to get them. Chinchillas like treats too, but they are a lot more moody, and if offered a treat they will come if they feel like and decline if they do not. Continuing the comparison, dogs rarely refuse treats when offered. It is likewise with food. I feed the chinchillas on a consistent schedule. They have hay to eat always, but get pelleted food in the morning and evening. They really like hay and pellets both. After watching them for years they still seem inconsistent to me for eating extra hay somedays and being less interested in pellets when I serve them. Most people are unfamiliar with chinchillas so I will share something that all chinchilla caretakers know: they are extraordinarily picky and their food selection process is inscrutable. This is most apparent when they are eating hay. To eat, they approach the manger of hay, individually select each blade or strand of the hay, and thoroughly examine it. They grab by clamping with their mouth, then transfer to hold the hay in their hands, then they examine it visually and by smell. We have all as humans examined the hay ourselves, and some is broad, some is thin, it can be more crisp or flexible, there are different parts of the hay plant in the mix, and it can have other variation in appearance. None of us know the chinchilla evaluation process, but whatever the case, half of the hay they throw on the ground in rejection and to trample on it. Discarded hay is unwanted by all chinchillas, and they cannot be fooled into accepting hay which failed another chinchilla’s inspection. This epic judgment repeats daily. The three chinchillas consume about 50 pounds of hay a year, so are actually just eating the tastiest half of that. Concert goers can watch this dining spectacle, imagining gourmands at a fancy restaurant who somehow discern that only some bites of the food they are served meet their standards, and who shovel other portions of their meal onto the floor with intent to stomp on it.
The most common question which concert goers ask about the chinchillas is “OMG are those chinchillas? I did not think the Chinchilla Café would have actual chinchillas”. Yes, they are chinchillas, and they live here. Answers to the other common questions are as follows: Pip is the dark one and he has the colors of a wild chinchilla, and he was born in November 2010 so he is 12 years old. Napoleon the white and gray one is a mosaic chinchilla, and Starr Baby is beige. Napoleon and Starr Baby were both born in 2016 but they are not related. They are all boys and they are best friends who play with each other every day. We got them all from a chinchilla rescue. Chinchillas typically live for 15 years but can live for 25, and it is necessary to have multiple chinchillas because they need to sleep together, groom each other, chirp and get chirps in response, eat together, react to each other running around, and hump each other. A lone chinchilla will miss that and it is not ideal. We do not know how they behave in the wild as few videos exist, few scientific papers are published, and we know of no tourism to visit them in Peru. Visiting them in the wild would not be easy as they are nocturnal and shy, so someone would have to find them in remote areas at night when they are actively trying to hide. Chinchillas are rodents. Sometimes I tell people that chinchillas are a hybrid animal like a mule, and that they are the offspring of a rabbit and a squirrel. The chinchillas have never visibly reacted to the music of the concerts. We watched them closely in the beginning. The music seems far enough away from them to not disturb them. None of the chinchillas have ever bitten anyone, but all of them could if they wanted to do so and we all agree that their bites would be very dangerous.
So the concert guests see the chinchillas before the first concert, then again after the intermission following the first concert. By this time everyone knows there are chinchillas in the venue, and everyone has learned what a chinchilla is. We also hype up that the chinchillas do a show in the intermission before the last band plays. People get curious about this, and we call them in during that intermission. I have a large container prepared with dust. I recruit a volunteer, typically someone who has been curious about the chinchillas, to give the container to the chinchillas in their pen. People who have not seen before do not suspect what will happen, but what happens is a big chinchilla bath. They are predictable for their enthusiasm to take a dust bath, and they always deliver. When the bath is there they stop whatever they are doing and hop to the bath. They jump in and roll around wildly, all three at once. People take videos and pictures, and everyone likes this. I have been watching chinchillas for years and I still watch every bath I give them. It never gets old. Chinchilla baths are interesting every time. After the bath the last band plays.
It took five of us to establish the Chinchilla Café. Briefly, Eli and Robin are active concert goers. Eli is a drummer who has been in a couple of local bands, and went to local shows as a child in Oakland then onto whatever was available as he lived in various cities in adulthood. Eli has good taste in band selection, and he set up the social media accounts which recruit bands and promote shows. Calling Eli the promoter is probably best, but he also has kept the venue mostly rock, original music, and has made calls about who has quality music and is cool enough to play here. Eli also set up the performance space by collecting speakers, the mixer, and sharing his drum kit with the bands. Robin did undergraduate studies in Cville and now is nearing the end of graduate school, and has been going to local bands throughout this so knows them. With Eli, Robin also does band selection and has kept the quality of music high, but primarily, Robin makes Chinchilla Café a community center by recruiting nonprofit activist organizations to present their causes. People come for the shows, but when they come the activists also get their attention. Some organizations which we have featured include F12, the local anarchist bookstore; Cville Area Harm Reduction, which provides public health education on using drugs more safely and who distributes Narcan to counter opiate overdose; Arm Trans Women, which hosts gun classes for general education or to get concealed carry permits and which especially trains the LGBT+ community. Robin also announces other community events at other venues, and makes sure that Chinchilla Café has enough Rainbow flags to communicate that we are the queerest venue in Cville. Gabby is not particularly interested in concerts, but she does like to party, and is the person in a friend group who organizes the fun and turns it up to push people to have more fun. Fabian has a background as a club promoter in New York City but is not playing that role here. Instead he is the designer who makes the concert posters, and in turn those concert posters have set the aesthetic for the venue as they are the art, they set the colors and style of venue lighting, and also cause the photos people take to have a certain appearance. My role is chinchilla caretaker but my aspiration is venue archivist. I am the writer here so I will speak for myself.
The reason why a community concert venue like ours needs an archivist is that local artists and the entire community benefits from digital media presence, but even super savvy amateur social media users need professional support to manage basics. My view is that all the local bands have deficient online presence. I think that any communication worker could follow a process which takes a few minutes per band but which would greatly promote each band individually, and also better interconnect the network of the music scene, and improve the reputation of the city. Technology changes rapidly, and what I am doing matters now, but also what I do could be irrelevant with advances in AI anytime in the next 3-15 years. My vision is that every city should have a funded arts coordinator, perhaps through a grant to a community center, and that the arts coordinator should arrange the kind of archiving I am doing. Here is what I do: I create Wikidata items for the bands. The Wikidata items designate the band’s city of origin, whether Cville or touring, and also list all the bands social media accounts that I can find. I also make individual Wikidata items for each concert we host. That Wikidata item includes Fabian’s concert posters because he makes art with free and open copyright, and the item links to the bands who played there. That means that the bands who play get a permanent record of playing at least at this show, and they also can find the poster we used to advertise them. The current norm is that most venues treat concert listings as ephemeral, so we have permanent records of the bands playing at our place and those bands can use the record to promote themselves if they advance or just reminisce at any time in the future. I am trying to get more and better photography of each band, because too often these poor bands do not have any good photographs of themselves online. By putting those photos in Wikidata there comes to be a free and open photograph of them for anyone to use, like for promotion at any future booking, and they do not have to clear copyright with a photographer because the photo is there licensed for reuse for any purpose. Since all big tech companies and AI companies of any size continuously slurp everything wiki, and since all of this is Linked Open Data, it means that in Google and everywhere else all the bands’ social media accounts are interconnected and optimized for all other platforms to find and present to users. Also, because of that location data, the technology can answer questions like “show me artists in Charlottesville” then present a list of the artists. Without structured data, tech platforms cannot easily promote local artists.
I lack experience, and I have little evidence, but I think Charlottesville has a better music scene than many comparable cities. I am just guessing, and neither have I visited other similar cities nor do I have any data, but the music here is good and I have thought about why. Charlottesville is small enough for bands to all know each other and for audiences to be aware of all the venues, so we have interconnectedness and competition for excellence here which is not possible in bigger cities. Also Charlottesville is relatively wealthy because it has the University of Virginia and the regional medical center from the medical school, and also for various reasons there are some large tech companies in Cville. The extra money puts extra amenities in circulation – not enough which is why we established the café, but some perks – and those make for a better arts scene. What I regret about all this is the lack of data. We are compiling the first structured data list of the bands in Cville, and we have 60. I would guess that in a year about 200 local bands play at least 3 shows. Although the government is supposed to support the arts, not long ago the technology did not exist to count how many artists there are, nor was their any way to track their popularity. What we are doing for bands could be repeated for any kind of art, including visual arts, performing arts, or whatever else, to track what happens in the city and also to showcase that Cville has a great arts scene. This should happen for every city. I am on hiring committees at the School of Data Science, and when people ask about the Nazi riots we hosted a few years ago, I wish I could counter by showing evidence that the community response to that unfortunate event was the promotion of local art and artists as a way of protecting ourselves from fascism. Those who move here to accept jobs, such as at the School of Data Science, should think of the city for its contemporary arts scene which I can demonstrate with this data.
Fabian has his own style for concert posters. He would need to explain it himself, but in the 90s and 2000s in NYC he was a club promoter, and designed ridiculous weekly advertisement cards then with the help of a professional artist. In that time computer design was different and there were analog aspects. Fabian developed a style of his own then though, and in the age of mobile devices, he makes several digital artworks a week. We both like photographing the chinchillas and have 10,000+ pictures of them hopping around. He selects the best of those, recolors them wildly and puts the chinchillas into abstract landscapes, then positions promotional text around this.
Eli primarily manages the social media accounts. He responds to booking requests from bands. It makes sense to us that local bands find out about us as a venue and they proactively seek cool places to play, so they write to us. We always wonder how far-away touring bands have heard about us, but do not always have time to ask. Robin posts to social media also, including Fabian’s posters if Fabian has not, and also reacts to messages. Gabby in the midst of this invites cool people to attend, sets up games around the café including a bucket of art prompts on paper and a dry erase board with pens where people have to draw what prompts them. The night starts with an empty board and ends full of art.
About our personal histories – Fabian and I are boyfriends. We were living in New York City when I took a position in the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia in 2018. Fabian does hair for movies and television, and as there is no movie industry in Cville, he stayed in NYC while I moved here. We have a long distance relationship and take the train to see each other monthly. He comes for certain concerts.
I met Gabriel in 2018 when I moved to CHUVA, which was a Charlottesville cooperative housing complex for 20 people in operation from 2007 – 2021. It closed during the COVID pandemic, so in addition to the loss of community housing, our town lost CHUVA as a community center. I was secretary at CHUVA from 2018-2021 when it closed, while Gabby had the role of fun officer. As fun officer she organized the parties. CHUVA was great for the space it had and its community, but by requiring the consensus of so many people, there were some limits to what kinds of events we could do. We could not get organized to have concerts for example, and even regular outdoor movies were sometimes challenging to coordinate without disrupting other activities and people’s daily lives.
Eli and Robin were housemates elsewhere in another large home with multiple people. The situation there changed also, so they wanted to establish another venue with options to host guests. Eli and I had both been in the School of Data Science since 2018. Robin I met as Eli’s friend and also through the labor union which would eventually become the Communication Workers of America – United Campus Workers – Virginia chapter – University of Virginia unit. I became housemates with Eli and Robin. Gabby started visiting us. Collectively, we started talking about CHUVA, labor activism, the loss of community centers in the pandemic, the local music scene, and whether we could establish a venue to bring people together for fun and greater purpose.
The convergence that we had was that we all wanted to host parties; we all are extreme activists for civility, human rights, and community empowerment; we all were at a point in our lives where we have both the skill to manage parties and the capacity to do so; and we can contribute financially to this as hosting parties has a labor and financial cost. Again, we take donations, and we give all the collected money to the bands. We pay for the venue, provide the light and audio equipment, arrange printing, we clean and maintain the venue including restrooms, buy decorations, replace things like chairs and tables which get damaged with 100s of uses, supply water and some light snacks, and of course present the chinchillas at their best which we would do anyway, but we have tried to make their pen more photogenic for the humans who all want pics of them.
Chinchilla Café like any community center is vulnerable. We have no permanent space and due to market pressures may have to leave at any time. We are all volunteers and if too many of us go, we may not be able to recruit other volunteers in the same mindspace with compatibility and capacity to join the organizing team. We get no funding, not that we want it exactly, but if there were sponsorship then we wish we could have commitment to host events in a more permanent community center, and have more administrative support to make for easier booking and quicker communication with the bands, and also to better integrate our community center with other local community centers, the city event calendars, and other nonprofit organizations and campaigns which we could showcase. We also have a significant community of partygoers and guests, and having a network is valuable. For many people they start by wanting an evening of entertainment, but to have a community center means they meet friends with whom they might not otherwise connect, they learn of activist causes they might not find otherwise, they hear music which has local flavor which could not come from any other city, and they make the memories that make living in this city pleasurable in ways that are different from experiences in any other. Chinchilla Café will not last forever. Eli just got his PhD and will get a job outside of Charlottesville. Robin gets her PhD this summer and will move on. Gabby already has her PhD and plans to move in the next year. I have longer term plans here, and there are other people who volunteer to present these shows, but neither I nor Fabian want to be leads in administration. Eli has served that role, and while we can continue without him, when enough of us are gone it is not going to be the same.
We identified a demand for a community center in Cville which hosts concerts. Many of the bands who played with us would likely have played one fewer show had we not provided the space, and for a lot of volunteer bands like these, one fewer show can be an existential crisis that can dissolve the band. As a community center we are not a bar, and not a commercial venue, so when we host a band it is not transactional and there is no stress on them to be part of an investor owner’s business cycle. We are not a neutral space; we are a queer space which does community activism, so when anyone plays at our place, they are also protesting and taking a stand for community rights. A typical commercial venue has no values, as the norm in business is bland neutrality and facelessness. It feels better to play at our place. At bar venues it is sometimes the case that the audience is out to socialize and drink, and incidentally, there is a band playing. For our venue, almost everyone in the audience there to see the bands and so are excited, jumping around, and cheering them on. The people who are not there to see the bands are there to see the chinchillas, but that crowd is also very supportive of the bands and make for good audience members.
Concerts are the main events at Chinchilla Café but other events are significant. We all drink coffee, and guests are welcome in our animal café weekend mornings when the weather is nice are good times for guests joining outside. Chinchillas can be aroused to interact and be petted till about 10am when they are soundly asleep for the day. On warm non-rainy Friday or Saturday evenings last year we hosted a summer outdoor movie series from late spring to early autumn. We plan to do it again this summer. We have a projector and a movie screen in the back yard. We have some picnic blankets and chairs, or people can bring their own sheets to lay out and watch movies. We typically do horror of the sort which thrills but which is not disturbingly violent, so we do not want to see people getting hurt but we do like to see them getting eaten or having monster encounters. We have hosted some classes, including a gun class by the previously mentioned Arm Trans Women. Sometimes we clear the concert space and digitally DJ dance parties. We cook our own pizzas by making sauce, rolling out dough, and baking them out. Pizzas happen most weeks with us making 10 of them. The default Chinchilla Café pizza is vegan, oddly shaped crust because it is DIY with whomever shows up, with mushroomy sauce containing lots of rosemary minutes before the end and lots of garlic raw going in right at the end. We do bell peppers, kalamata olives, chili peppers, pineapple, tofu that we season and pan fry, and some basil and arugula leaves. The most common variation is with vegan cheese. Anyone who wants meat can have it but they have to bring their own carcass because we do not supply that.
That’s my perspective of the café! The others would describe it in a different way.