Eighth Street SE - the new weekend White Way

 The more famous  White Way, the Great one, is Broadway where the night light show is incomparable around Times Square. theater district.  Our DC SE strip hardly compares in color although in fair weather on weekends a few blocks are thronged with enough evening crowds to resemble a tourist invasion....even if there are no comparable theaters here  and the sole entertainment venue soon to open is a Miracle movie house for "family fare."

The landlady hoping to rent the gorgeous gray Victorian structure that is Shakespeare Theatre Company's present headquarters says she is having a hard time finding a new tenant for when STC moves on to the planned Bard complex being built in Southwest DC next to Arena Stage. She happens to be - longtime Capitol Hill residents take note - daughter of the man who owned District lock and hardware store, now occupied by Ted's Bulletin. Now THERE's a very good tenant, she says of the latter.

What does  this  portend for future businesses in the area? Do small family owned operations have no chance?    When is enough enough? Hard to predict when property taxes keep going up and local residents keep  hyping the advantage of a TraderJoe's coming next year- another chain store enterprise. Will TJ pretend to have neighborly feelings or faith and should they?

Keep On Truckin' DC!

     One year ago this month the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities put out an open call for artists to submit proposals for truck art - yes, large murals to wrap around the sides of recycling trucks. (http://dcarts.dc.gov/page/designed-recycle)

 Yes, Movable Art! Beauty amidst waste! 

(At left: "French Trip" by artist Erin Curtis.)

Ten of these colorful murals have been rolling (and clanking) through the streets of Washington and are expected to be there for two years as another example of public   art work funded by DCCAH. (Remember the elephant and donkey sculptures that still may be found occasionally, mainly in residential spaces.) You have to be lucky to catch a sight of one of them, as even the chosen creators themselves have found, but they make a dazzling display when you do. Large dimensional mainly abstract designs covering all sides of these monster vehicles - a reason to stop and pause while  hard-working collection men (any women?) drag and tip the blue recycling bins into back bins that  open and shut  automatically like a mighty maw.

Artist Pat Goslee submitted a dream-like painting entitled 'Tale of Three,' inspired by some recycled fabrics in keeping with the general theme. (She found detritus such as netting on city streets.) "The fabric of life as a field of interconnected energies," she writes. "Three small seed forms - each representing significant family roles: parent, child, sibling...." intended to 'invite the viewer to dream and to make imaginative associations." 

 Recycling is "'a key part of the cycle of life' she adds A digital image of the original painting was printed large on vinyl material similar to what is used for ads on Metro buses.
She felt honored to be selected, she says, calling the project "an interesting way to use an existing work of art. Its public art, it addresses an important environmental issue." Those chosen received $2500 for their effort.

   Only problem is Goslee has yet to see hers in action...

Easy Times in The Big Easy

Also known as Crescent City, NOLA,  but NOT the capital of Sportsman's Paradise as license plates dub the state (Louisiana)..
And what a city it is, especially  between seasons, as I and my friends found it the second long weekend of January, starting on the 6th - officially the first night (Twelfth Night, Epiphany, if you follow church calendars) and first parade of Mardi Gras with a casual ambulatory march honoring Joan of Arc, New Orleans' patron saint (she liberated the citizens of Orleans, France, from the British in the 1400s) , that included bagpipers in Scottish dress, great numbers of costumed folk heroes (cardboard, foil, fanciful touches of all kinds), horses with knights aboard, and  even angels fluttering their wings. Brassy and solemn at the same time. Spontaneity on every side of the evening procession witnessed by residents and tourists in equal number. This was  a legitimate 'crewe' or Krewe as the traditional celebratory groups or clubs are known. Mardi Gras itself is Feb. 5-9, with Fat Tuesday the last of Carnival before the first day of Lent on Ash Wednesday.
Famous if seemingly unlikely folk of all sorts put down roots in past days, including the French  painter Edgar Degas who lived  here in 1872 visiting the American branch of his family for five months at a key time in the city's cultural history. And British architect  Benjamin Latrobe,  (designer of the U.S. Capitol among other significant American buildings) who ended his life here, a victim of yellow fever in 1820
How to resist a city where a  funky restaurant with the odd name of Jacques-Imo advertises itself in neon as having "Warm Beer Lousy Food Poor Service." Not yet on the wholly Discovered list except to locals and friends. Paintings on the ceiling, Watermelon mojitos. duck breast with - what else? - pecans and mushrooms. Louisiana has plenty of all these.
The high point for visitors is being identified as  locals. Our party of four sat in Mr. B's bistro on Royal St. drinking our wine and Sazerac (rye whiskey, absinthe, bitters and an orange peel, no ice) when two women interrupted to comment  with words to the effect "oh you all must be natives." Because we were, if nothing else, wholly engaged in the ambiance and they were a pair of visiting physicists from the state of Washington, coming to town for a convention.
In NOLA, it's easy to pass for legitimate, since the mix of insiders and outsiders is  throughly blended. And make note too: the streetcars work - oldest continually operating trolleys in the world, going back to the early 1900s.

'Anything Goes': Cole Porter's World

Another Washington, D.C., November note:

For a farm boy, Cole Porter has to be considered one of the most 'urbanized' of men.
As the New York Times noted at the time of his death, age 72, in 1964, he and his wife were unstinting in their embrace of a grand lifestyle that took advantage of what every major city could offer, Paris, Venice, etc:

Their home on the Left Bank in Paris had platinum wallpaper and chairs upholstered in zebra skin,  and Mr. Porter once hired the entire Monte Carlo Ballet to entertain his  guests. For a party in Venice, where he rented the Palazzo Rezzonico for $4,000 a month, he hired 50 gondoliers to act as footmen and had a troupe of high-rope walkers perform in a blaze of lights.

 Unusual taste for  a man born on an Indiana farm. His talent showed early and later garnered him  enormous success and admiration across the board for a sophisticate who knew how to entertain the masses with such jazzy tunes as those in 'Kiss Me Kate' now playing at Shakespeare Theatre Company's Harman Hall. The production is loud and brassy -  starting with the opening sequence (the familiar "Another Op'Nin, Another Show") on a Baltimore backstage. (More city references follow: Padua, Mantua, Verona, etc., introduced in the show-within-a-show.)  What the revival lacks in subtlety, it makes up in a joyful display of acting and dancing talent. This is a show for a new generation hooked on instant feedback and sound bites, aiming for the solar plexus rather than the brain. Musical numbers come and go with crackerjack timing and breathtaking gymnastics. the www.shakespearetheatre.com

Cartoonists Without Their Pens

It wasn't surprising that a public symposium at the National Archives called "Drawn from the Headlines: Communication & Political Cartoons" would draw (!) an overflow crowd. Four top 'drawer' names in the field spoke off the cuff with moderator David Sipress, the longtime New Yorker magazine artist: Keith Knight, Jen Sorensen, Tom Toles and Signe Wilkinson. This took place only days after ISIS' carnage in Paris, less than a year since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, so it was a bit of a surprise that only later in the evening a question was asked about what limits the panelists impose on themselves, given first amendment rights to 'speak truth to power.'
But whose truth and what kind of power?
"As a functioning cartoonist I'm extremely conflicted. it's a real quagmire. In the history of political cartooning there have been shameful chapters - viciously anti-Semitic and extremely racist  work- that have had serious consequences," said Toles (a Pulitzer Prize winner  with the Washington Post ). It's not that he would refuse to consider mockery but in what context, he seemed to say. To what end?
The balance, always the balance, was the answer to another question about the best way to get a point across: not to be too obscure'; not to be 'too clever.'
"You want [the point or message] to be like the viewer thought it up himself," said Sipress, whose introductory remarks included guidelines the New Yorker follows. (You can't advocate for a cause, or support any one party. Caricatures are forbidden, so he sticks to archetypes. I.e a politician who rants like a king can be portrayed in royal robes. Witness a recent drawing of his showing two kings in the midst of opposing armies saying, one to the other"On the other hand, we could join forces and attack the media." Which of the presidential candidates haven't hinted or proclaimed this outright?
Signe Wilkinson, best known for her work with the Philadelphia Daily News, one of two women panelists ('today there is woman who is a full-time paid cartoonist"), batted off any suggestion about a 'woman's point of view' as did Jen Sorensen, who called herself a 'generalist,'  open to the world. "The first goal is to make a point," in any piece. "The second is to be funny." Comedy chops are required above all or who would bother. " Knight, creator of (th)ink and other columns, keeps in mind "the guy in the bar." He told of the rise of 'niche' cartoonists, even one who deals solely in sex toys - a symbol of the  ever-divisible media world where the cartoonist has maybe have a thousand followers, receiving maybe $75 from each. An audience but not much of a living...

Urban Lady's Allure

November 2015
The French-American artist Louise Bourgeois was certainly an urban lady. She had all the family dysfunction  you could imagine but instead of taking out her hurts on others, she turned to art and the art world followed -  slowly. But it finally found and embraced her sculptures and later prints and drawings, although the latter  may not be as familiar to contemporary fans as her provocative and commanding sculptures. She is the spider woman, known best for the graceful but intimidating immense form she composed in many guises. (See it in the National Gallery of Art's Sculpture Garden, among other places.)
NGA currently offers a fine new exhibit of some of these lesser-known works in the West Wing, nearly all real and promised acquisitions for their Bourgeois collection. Curiously, one of the most arresting pieces on show is a small white sculpture (kept well protected so not to tempt prying fingers) illustrating the thrust of several fingers through a round base angled on its side.There is a suggestion of lusciousness in the shape, as NGA curator Judith Brodie  pointed out in a press preview, saying, coincidentally, how "Chocolate (for itself and as a subject) is very popular with artists." There's much to see in these two small rooms about variety of LB's creative impulses and their relation to the times. She grew up in the 'age of anxiety' so-called, a time when a existentialism was in flower thanks partly to Jean Paul Sartre. "No Exit," however , wasn't entirely a negative in her mind. It had also to do with free will  - the ability to choose one's life. Bourgeois did that to the end of her life, making freedom and positivity her hallmark, staying active and engaged until her death at 98 in 2010. 

Boom Boom Town

Praises be, the District of Columbia and a few - very few - of its suburban 'hoods, are being hailed as hot. With hot goes hype and high prices. And the hordes coming through.
While earnest informed voices offer free insights into relationships between art and literature at the National Gallery of Art these days (thanks in part to integration of Corcoran collection of American painting), a few blocks away the redoubtable Harrington Hotel and Harriet's restaurant soldiers on to accommodate the 'foreign hordes.' (Yes, increasing numbers of tourists coming all seasons to DC).   Notably, according to our chef source, a stutterers' convention came to dine,  as often do  FBI  employees having celebrations since the restaurant can guarantee no direct shot into its dining room from any outside protagonist. And recently, the entire body of a Caribbean island high school, plus  sons and daughters of some of Mexico's richest families who matriculate and travel with bodyguards in tow. Improbably enough, they were seated next to a group of solidly right white offspring from the  South, and never the twain did meet - or even talk together.
Such variety is the stuff of life. The Mexican kids - no surprise - opted for spice and more spice; the offspring of alleged KKK boasted of a rib eating contest - up to 12 and then 24, as though this were an initiation into manhood. Eat and compete; grow bigger, die sooner.