Woody Irvin reports that the feds have appropriated $30 million for the Metro extension to Dulles.

posted: 4:46:22 PM  

Gina Trapani spells out How to fix Mom and Dad's computer.

posted: 4:41:34 PM  

David Wilkinson found some more Radio Easter eggs. Click the image of my double: .

posted: 4:15:33 PM  

I just stumbled on an Easter Egg in Radio UserLand. The string "Martin Luther King" was replaced by a hyperlinked image tag that pulled up a thumbnail of MLK, thus: .

posted: 4:01:08 PM  

The surprising thing to me about Sam Gilliam's work, seen in a retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, is how strong his command of color is. The few pieces of his on permanent display around town generally reveal a murky palette, but here the cool abstract expressionist opens up with saturated, pure colors. Even the so-called "black paintings," like Rail (1977), are shot through with reds and acid greens. And when he turns somber, as in the folded and soak-stained April 4 (1969), part of his "Martin Luther King" series, the mauves, grays, and greens are still full of energy and incident. Scraping and scratching at his supports, Gilliam can be heard starting a dialog with the German master colorist, Gerhard Richter. Late pieces show that Gilliam is still developing. Red (1999) suggests figuration: sunset on a marsh with the sun's disk knocked out of its usual place in the sky. While the last paintings (hanging in a cul de sac: this exhibition is very oddly laid out), the poured acrylic "slatt" paintings, are Mondrian-modern, the best of them shimmering like jewels.

posted: 3:57:40 PM  

Bill T. Jones continues to push at the boundaries of what we think of as an evening's dance concert. This evening-length suite of pieces from 1995, 2003, '04, and '05 collages modern dance, live music (Nurit Pacht and DBR on violin), spoken word, video, and ghostly projections on a downstage scrim (by Marc Downie et al.) into an intriguing, if not wholly satisfying, evening. Jones dances the suite straight through without intermission, using only two other dancers. As dancer and choreographer, he has a silken fluidity to his movement. However, his penchant for repetition, especially in 22, in which twenty-two numbered and named phrases are repeated while Jones relates two interlocking stories of tragedy, leads him toward the shoals of monotony. As a result, Jones risks being upstaged by his talented high-tech collaborators.

posted: 3:38:07 PM  

I don't cook for myself very much. Dump a can of soup in the pan, slice some bread and warm it in the oven, crack a beer—I'm done. It's too bad, but I'm out of the house on average five nights a week. Raw materials and freshly made food just don't keep that long in my refrigerator. If I didn't ignore that advice about not keeping bread in the icebox, there'd be hardly anything to eat in the house.

I used to cook more, especially with Susan, back in the 80s. We made a lentil soup from scratch, flavored with carrots and prosciutto, that was very nice. We once went to a cooking demonstation with our friend Gwen, something that turned out to be an expensive informercial (at Wolf Trap of all places!) and brought back a recipe for a chocolate cream pie with a ton of amaretto in it. Bleah. I think the remains are still in the freezer somewhere.

Anyway, as an echo of those days, I still make a cranberry chutney for the holidays. Most years I make it, that is. I'll bring some to Leta's parents' place in Martinsburg next week. We found the recipe in the back pages of the November 1987 Gourmet. It's spicy but not overpowering. Yummy at room temperature on the side of the plate, or chilled on a sandwich of leftovers the next day.

posted: 9:22:58 AM