Where Not To Go In DC

According to the Tea Party of Maine, you should not ride the Yellow or Green lines of the DC Metro.

If you are on the subway stay on the Red line between Union Station and Shady Grove, Maryland. If you are on the Blue or Orange line do not go past Eastern Market (Capitol Hill) toward the Potomac Avenue stop and beyond; stay in NW DC and points in Virginia. Do not use the Green line or the Yellow line. These rules are even more important at night. There is of course nothing wrong with many other areas; but you don't know where you are, so you should not explore them.

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Places I have been to recently which are on those lines include Dukem Ethiopian Food on U Street and Oyamel Cocina Mexicana, home of the cricket taco. On the other hand perhaps Tea Partiers are better off not stretching their culinary palate in that way.

From the Official Maine Tea Party DC Tourist Guide, they offer this helpful piece of xenophobia on why DC is so unsafe:

DC's population includes refugees from every country, as the families of embassy staffs of third world countries tend to stay in DC whenever a revolution in their homeland means that anyone in their family would be in danger if they went back.

For those teabaggers who are tempted to try some ethnic food, they do offer this suggestion:

Libertarianish Virginia economics professor Tyler Cowen extensively explores and reviews restaurants, especially Northern Virginia Asian fare, at http://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/

I like the idea that a professor has to be identified as 'libertarianish' so as to remove the taint of taking ethnic food suggestions from an actual member of the educated elite.

So, teabaggers, please by all means avoid anything in DC interesting or tasty. All the more for me.

Wasted At The Wine Festival

Last weekend we braved the icy pit that is post-Snopocalypse Washington DC to go to the D.C. International Wine and Food Festival. Held in the lobby of the Reagan Trade Center (ironically, the largest government office building in the district), there were over a hundred wineries pouring samples.

Knowing that I had no hope of remembering how many wines I sampled or even what they were, I took to videoing a short clip of me sipping each wine I sampled. Count along as I go through them:



As you can see, there was more than wine there. The food portion was on the balcony overlooking the main floor and was the most disappointing portion of the show. But the wines were the draw. Spain was the most prominent exhibitor with several tables and dozens of wineries.

Our favorite was Red Cat from Hazlitt 1852, a winery on the Finger Lakes. They served their wines over ice with a fruit garnish billing them as picnic or hot tub wines. I don't have a hot tub, but I will definitely hunt down a few bottles this summer.

And while I didn't feel any less sober after three hours of wine sipping, we did take the precaution of riding Metro back to our hotel. Definitely the way to do this type of event.

Chin-chin.

We Remember

Inspired by the beautifuls post by Claude and Alex, I feel compelled to post my own tribute to those that have given their lives for our liberty.


World War I Memorial


World War II Memorial


Korean War Memorial


Vietnam War Memorial


Flowers for the fallen.


Never forget those that didn't make it home.

Yellojkt At The Newseum

One of the many interactive features to do at the Newseum (when I'm not stalking Maureen Dowd or sneaking up on George Snuffleupagus) is the Be A Reporter station. They have a whole area with a bunch of green screens where you can make your own news video. Some of the scripts are blander than others. This one for the White House backdrop was actually very timely when I made it two weeks ago. Stevie Wonder had just been honored by President Obama.

Unlike a lot of video kiosk type souvenir gimmicks, this one is pretty reasonably priced. After making the video, you can get a 4x6 print of a screen capture with a link to the video. I've downloaded mine and then uploaded it to YouTube, as a lot of people have.

As a Press Pass member at the Museum, I get unlimited takes at the video booth. While I read the script verbatim this time, the temptation to monkey with the text is nearly irresistible. Maybe next time.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What news story should I cover next time?

Multiverse Techno Sidewalk

This weekend we were back in DC to hit the museums we didn't quite get around to on our birthday weekend. First we went to the Pompeii exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in the East Building (the funky triangular building). I want to thank malnurtured snay for tipping me off to that. We are going to Italy in a month and this was a nice sneak preview of what we hope to see while there.

Next up on our agenda was the Newseum, which I have been to but my wife hasn't. Rather that go back out into the cold I decided we should take the underground concourse over to the West Building. Between the two is a moving sidewalk that has a light display that looks like special effects from Stargate. The tunnel is filled with over 41,000 programmed LED lights and it's a real piece of art called 'Multiverse' by Leo Villareal and will be on display until November.

I had downloaded it to my computer and wondered what sort of music to set it to. I knew it had to be artsy and modern. I couldn't find my Kronos Quartet plays Phillip Glass album, but then I ran across a bunch of techno my son had left on the computer. The music I picked turned out to be done by XsToRmEr1 and was under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, so now I don't even feel guilty about using it.

I just wanted to share the trippy juxtaposition I put together to show that you never know what you are going to stumble onto in DC while searching for gelato.

Giga-Inauguration Fun

(Click on picture for full image in a browseable new window.)

The other day the Achenblog linked to this amazing Gigapan picture of the inauguration ceremony. It is 1,474 megapixels large and was stitched from 220 different images. You can zoom down to the individual person in the crowd. It’s like spying on people. So I screen captured a few familiar and not-so-familiar faces and made some guesses as to what they were saying or thinking at that very moment.

	Dubya: Can we just get this over with? I have some longnecks in Midland with my name on them that I have to get to. Cheney: I’m going to get that George Bailey if it’s the last thing I do.
	Michelle: That man is sooooo fine. And he is getting lucky tonight.
	Bill Clinton: Can anyone see me scoping out Michelle? Hillary Clinton: If you had just kept your big mouth shut, that would have been me.
	Al Gore: So this is what one of these ceremonies looks like. Enjoy your moment in the sun kid, but call me when YOU have a Nobel Peace Prize. Tipper Gore: Sigh. Would Michelle mind if I ‘borrowed’ him for a night?
	John Roberts: He’s going to make me do it again. I just know it. John Paul Stevens: Is it safe for me to die now? Clarence Thomas: Wake me when it’s over.
	Cameraman: Doing the crowd shots at Mardi Gras is much, much better.
	Guy: Yeah, I know Obama is the other direction. I’ve got four more years of looking at his mug. Girl: How did I even get dragged down here? I could be somewhere warm and indoors instead.
	Bandmember: Yo-Yo Ma gets to play a backing track, but I’ve gotta hold this brass horn for two hours. Life is not fair.
	Groupie: Front row center is so worth it.
	Random Person In Crowd: I got up at 4 a.m. for this view?
	Secret Service Agent: If anything happens today, we are all so fired.
	Barack Obama: That is MISTER President to you from now on.

BonusTimeWaster™: Find in the giga-image where I took all my captures.

Obamabration

As my last post shows so clearly and definitively, I attended the Inauguration Kick-Off Concert aka ‘We Are One’ yesterday. I had been waffling all week but I finally talked my wife into coming along. Knowing that I had no intention of standing for six hours in the cold to get a front row view, I made a strategic just-in-time schedule.

We left the house about 11:30 and drove to the New Carrolton Metro station. The station itself was chaos since nobody seemed to know how to use the ticket kiosks. We grabbed my wife a SmartTrip card and boarded a completely empty car. It stayed nearly empty all the way until L’Enfant Plaza when it completely filled with transfers. We got off at the Smithsonian station Mall exit and joined the general herd of people heading west. Along the way we passed all sorts of vendors sell every imaginable type of souvenir. It’s good to see the entrepreneurial spirit alive and well.

We crested the hill that the Washington Monument is on (which was well guarded by a highly armed SUV) to see the Promised Land only to not quite make it. Right beside the World War II Memorial was a security screening tent but the line for it wrapped up towards Constitution. Right there was also the end of the line for another screening tent along the south side of Reflecting Pond area. That line moved briskly, but it stopped cold after about five minutes. By now it was about 1:30. Someone wandered by saying they had stopped letting people in.

We abandoned the line and went with Plan B. We headed back to the hill of the Washington Monument. What had been a stream of pedestrians fifteen minutes earlier was now a crowd waiting for the concert to start. We picked our way through the throng until we reached a place where both the Lincoln Memorial and a huge Jumbotron were visible. From there we hunkered down and waited.

Just before 2 o’clock they started showing pre-recorded warm-up clips of Obama on his train ride and performers preparing for the show. Just a little before the official 2:30 start time, the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson came out and gave a wonderfully nuanced invocation. I can’t do it justice, but the full text is here.

Then the guests of honors arrived to fanfare (of the common man) and sat on the side of the stage. Bruce opened with a gospel-choir backed performance of “The Rising.” You really couldn’t see anything on the stage from where we were except for a band of red where the choir stood, but the video screen was fine for watching the show and the sound was booming.

You can get the whole thing on HBO.com so I won’t recap it all here, but let it suffice to say that the atmosphere was electric. The show was well-paced and highly diverse. There was gospel and rock and soul and classical and even country performers. After what happened to the Dixie Chicks, you have to give credit to Garth Brooks for showing up which is why he might have gotten the longest set.

In fairness, Jennifer Nettles is lead singer of the country band Sugarland, so that made for two representatives of both kinds of music. Also one of Garth’s songs was “Shout” which was done originally and better than The Beatles by The Isley Brothers. One of my audience neighbors was mentioning that to someone and I confirmed the trivia. One of these guys had come from California but cheered whenever Chicago was mentioned.

Also, Bettye LaVette was a big hit with the African-American women of a certain age dressed in their finest Sunday furs surrounding us. And Denzel Washington drew sighs of appreciation from the distaff half of the audience. His appeal is truly pan-racial.

There was a lot of understated symbolism in the show. A lot of the songs were about America even if I don’t think of “Little Pink Houses” and “American Pie” as patriotic flag-waving numbers. The most subtle point was that after a poignant clip piece on Marian Anderson who had sung at the Lincoln Memorial after being blackballed by the DAR at Constitution Hall, Josh Groban and Heather Headley (Tony Award winner for the titular role in Aida) sang “"My Country 'Tis of Thee", the same song Marian Anderson sang. The nattily dressed men backing them up were members of the Gay Mens Chorus of Washington.

U2 was the only group to play as a full band even though the pit orchestra included a full rock set-up. And Obama brought down the house. He very nearly upstaged Beyonce who did the closing version of “America The Beautiful”.

The show ended at 4:30 sharp and the vast exodus began. Rather than rush the crowded Metro station, we strolled down to the Smithsonian Castle to take our first bathroom break in six hours. Not that we couldn’t have stopped along the way. The entire Mall is literally walled in with portajohns for the big day. And dozens of video and sound towers have appeared like fifty foot tall mushrooms.

From there we leisurely strolled the length of the Mall and caught the Capitol building all festooned with flags in the twilight. Just past Capitol Hill we waited about a half hour for a table at congressional aide hangout Tortilla Coast. While waiting we overheard some people with a horror story about having a hard time getting out of the Metro station because of so many people getting in. By the time dinner was done it was 7:30 and the Orange line was empty again as we headed home.

Once home, we replayed the HBO broadcast to see if we missed anything. The images looked sharper on the hi-def HBO broadcast than the monster jumbotron, but HBO’s sound surprisingly had more drop-outs than we had heard live. Sure we could have stayed at home and watched it but it’s the difference between being at Woodstock and renting the movie. When history is being made, you just have to be there.

BlatantFlickrPlugging™: As usual, lots more pictures can be found here.

Rooms With A View

I love theater, especially the big brash Broadway musicals, but I also like seeing smaller productions. I recently went to see a two person show called Rooms: A Rock Romance. Set in proto-punk Scotland and New York, an ambitious singer meets a reclusive guitarist and the join up to take the music world by storm. But other things happen along the way. The show is part Once, part They're Singing Our Song, and just a dollop of A Star Is Born.

It's those other things that make up the quick-paced (eighty minutes with no intermission) show. The tongue-in-cheek punk rock numbers are hilarious and spot-on.

The show is being presented at MetroStage, a big warehouse looking space at the edge of Alexandria. Any further north and it would be part of the power plant. The space itself is just perfect for intimate shows like this. I was surprised that the Saturday matinee we saw (if 5 pm can be called a matinee) wasn't fuller, because the show has been getting great reviews.

The show has an off-off-Broadway history and I kept wondering how it would do in a bigger venue. I'd hate to see the great rapport between the actors get lost in a bigger place or see the show padded out to a longer playing time. The size and pace of this fast, furious, funny musical is just perfect.

It plays a few more weeks in DC and then moves onto Rochester in upstate New York with the same cast and band, so it's definitely a room worth a view.

Building A Museum

Washington DC has a lot of museums. A lot. One of the biggest ones in physical size is the National Building Museum. It sits several blocks off the Mall and is located in what used to be the Pension Building. The Pension Building was built in the 1880s as a central place to process Civil War veterans’ benefits. The huge open floor in the center was originally banks of desks and files. Nowadays, the building is a traditional site for the quadrennial inauguration balls.

For a huge building it’s a little light on exhibits. It has two permanent exhibits, one on building materials and one on the history of Washington, DC. The centerpiece of the DC exhibit is a pair of models showing how the DC Mall looked around 1902 and how it would look after the Mall as we know it was built. Looking at the model reveals subtle differences between the plan and the execution, but over a hundred years later, the general intent is the same.

The big temporary exhibit is a retrospective of Eero Saarinen, the architect behind Dulles Airport, JFK Airport’s TWA Terminal, and the St Louis Gateway Arch. The exhibit also includes examples of his furniture which is positively Jetson-like. Seeing all this 60s architecture and furniture was like walking through an Austin Powers set. For all the attempts to define the future, this branch of Modernism looks positively dated.

All the swoopy curves and bright white surfaces have a Tomorrowland feel. That future with flying cars and meals in pills that never quite arrived. It's amazing how forty years of time have dated a look worse than Art Deco or Gothic or even Neo-Classical. We now look back on this era and marvel at how new the future looked.



In the center of the building center was an activity inspired by the Gateway Arch. There were 21 numbered foam blocks. The goal was to stack them to form an arch. It looked easier than it was. If the blocks weren’t perfectly aligned, the arch would tip over and collapse. It took my dad and I to hold the blocks while my wife handed us blocks to add and even after that, it only stood unsupported for a few seconds before collapsing.



After exhausting the exhibits and the gift shop, we walked over to find my brother and his brood at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Here the Memorial Day weekend tourists were out if force. Crowds of visitors made walking through the exhibits nearly impossible.

So if you ever want a large quiet place to take in some history, give the Building Museum a try.

Shaking Hands With George

My post a while back about stalking Maureen Dowd was anti-climactic because I never actually met MoDo. At best I got a curious and/or nervous look from here as to why I was taking a pictures. The person I did manage to meet was George Stephanopoulos. Like any celebrity, he is smaller than he appears in television, which is mighty small indeed. Despite his bushy eyebrows, he has never lost that boyish whiz-kid look he had as one of Bill Clinton’s inner circle.

Producing his Sunday morning show requires a fair amount of physical energy. The show is recorded in the smaller of the third floor studios of the brand new Newseum right next to a large staircase the runs up and down the height of the building. Right after the Roundtable segment, while the panelists are moseying over to the green room for the web post-interview, George and an assistant race up the stairwell to get to sixth floor for the Weekly Funnies segment.

I had been standing outside watching all the guests go by when he came out for the next segment. As he went past, to break the awkwardness of me staring at him, I said, “I really love the show.” I felt like a groupie hanging around the back door of a Hannah Montana concert.

He stopped and said “thanks” and continued on up the stairs. Once he gets up to the roof terrace (and these are tall floors), he sets up overlooking the Mall of DC. From there he points out a landmark and introduces the late show comic clips. After that, he does the closing remarks and the show wraps.

But that doesn’t mean he is done. I wandered back through the museum looking at some of the exhibits and when I got back down to the third floor I noticed a group hanging outside the door to the studio. I glanced into the studio and saw George sitting at the desk talking to the camera.

I wandered over to see what the crowd was for. Before I could find out, the door opened and a guy wearing tons of badges ushered them in and I wagon-trained along. I don’t like looking like a tourist even when I am being one. Even though I had a camera case over my shoulder, I had dressed for the day in pleated khakis and a nice earth-tone button down shirt. I looked positively Al Gore-ish.

This group that was on a private tour was also dressed pretty nicely for a Sunday morning in Washington. They turned out to be a group of VIPs from a company that owned several network affiliates. Everybody tip-toed back into the electronics filled back of the studio with all the cables and cameras. In addition to Snuffleupagus (as cruel bloggers call him), there was the guest wrangler and three or four production people.

George was doing drop-in interviews with local stations. The producer was on the phone and would tell George who they were going to talk to next. George would then sit there repeating the name and city of the local anchor he was about to talk to. The camera man would count down the feed and then George would turn on the charm. He’d make news-show happy chat with the local newscaster and pimp the panelists and topic for the day’s show which obviously hadn’t aired yet in that market. While I was in there, he talked to LA, Atlanta, and Miami.

Between the drop-ins, he would walk out from behind the desk and schmooze with the big wigs. The topic of the day was (and still is) when will Hillary throw in the towel. He would just shrug and reply to the effect of “when she is good and ready.”

I tried to stay as inconspicuous as possible. As he came around shaking hands and being introduced to everyone, it became inevitable that he would reach me. I just stuck out my hand and introduced myself. He said, “That’s right, we met outside.” He had remembered me from the hallway.

Once all the on-air promotions were done, the tour continued on over to the master control room, but I ducked out the other direction before anyone could notice me and call security.

The whole time I was there, George was nothing but polite and professional to everyone. That included senators, news columnists, corporate guests, and me, a nosey blogger that had wandered in off the street. Say what you want, but I say George Stephanopolous is a class act.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: When have you wandered into someplace you didn’t belong and were you caught?