Last week when I posted this diary about Tyler Magill, the University of Virginia librarian who tragically suffered a stroke caused by a torn neck artery suffered when he took a tiki torch blow in an altercation with white nationalists fascist bastards in Charlottesville, I didn’t know much about him beyond those bare facts. Luckily a friend of Tyler’s, one Jordan Taylor, has posted at Slate.com a fuller and most affectionate portrait of the hero known to Charlottesville as the DJ Velvet Facilitator, who chased, beefy arms upraised, “Unite the Right’s” organizer Jason Kessler from his podium with shouts of “Her name was Heather! You have blood on your hands! You have blood on your hood!”— and in so doing launched a thousand memes.
Jordon describes his friend thusly:
“This character might have seemed like something out of a Coen brothers movie: an autochthonous symbol of dread and vengeance, a golem from Charlottesville’s progressive heart, emerged with his hands raised to silence the outsider who had wreaked so much havoc. This was Tyler Magill, and it was actually the culmination of what had been a long weekend for one of Charlottesville’s most galvanizing cultural forces, a man who was dirtbag left before it was a thing. Tyler has haunted the Charlottesville scene for decades as a popular local DJ for the indie radio station WTJU, bridging the progressive mainstream to the freakier extremes of experimental and DIY culture in the rotating array of venues that has defined the local cultural landscape. Last week, he was admitted to the neurological ICU after a dissection in his carotid artery led to a stroke, leaving in peril one of the most important pieces of connective tissue in the local community.”
Before going further I should say that Tyler is back on his feet, doing fine and posting much weirdness on his Facebook Page.
But I’ll now give the floor back to Jordon.
“One colleague in the library, where he works in the stacks, described Tyler this way: “Out of all 220 of us in the UVA Library staff, he is the one most likely to stand up in a meeting and say something directly to the people in power that they might not want to hear but that Tyler believes to be true and important.”
Tyler’s varied careers speak to the layers of this city’s underground. The Corner Parking Lot—where he was once a parking attendant—like so many of the treasures of Charlottesville, looks like a normal business. But inside it is one of the town’s great islands of misfit intellectual toys. Meghan Eckman captured the worldview and esprit de corps of the attendants in her 2010 documentary The Parking Lot Movie. Within that documentary Tyler expressed an idea that I feel like captures the peculiar vibe of this college town. Yes, this is where town and gown gather, but that often comes with no small amount of friction.
In their painful blandness, the the neo-fascists who advocate for a white ethnostate and who descended upon our town last week have no use for Tyler’s Charlottesville, which is what made his response to Kessler such an iconic moment of the weekend. The bland aesthetic stylings that the supremacists offer is a condensed symbol of the sheer flaccid ugliness of their future. The future that Tyler stood up for was the same culture he airs on the radio, makes with his band Grand Banks, promotes amongst friends, and helped bring to this town. It is a ragged piquant callaloo that hardly appeals to everyone: You may not be into it, but lots of people are happy to know there is a place in American culture where someone has the good sense to play Ornette Coleman after having played woodpecker sounds for minutes on end.”
Peruse the links, friends, to get the full flavor of Tyler’s burgeoning, epic eccentricity.
As long as our Nation produces such fine patriotic misfits such as Tyler and Jordon we will remain safe from the Alt Right hordes.
I would pit this one golem of a UVA librarian against any number of goosestepping Richard Spencer/ Trumpanista enthralled College Republican Frat boy Fascists, because as Hunter Thompson instructed -
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Tyler Magill has had his license for some time….