Category: Local News and Views

Once around the block

Napier Shelton walks an eight-mile nature loop around Northwest D.C. for the current issue of Audubon Naturalist News. (Alas, Audubon Naturalist Society has moved its web site into a new URL- and page title-mangling content management system.)

Since the days of my childhood, some tropical migrant birds have been lost, but barred owls and red-shouldered hawks still live in Glover-Archbold; black-crowned night herons still roost by day along Rock Creek; and deer, beavers, and coyotes have moved in. A big difference from the past, however, is the lack of kids (and adults) exploring the woods by themselves like I did.

I am not making this up

It just gets weirder and weirder. The former CFO of my homeowners association’s previous management company, Jeffrey Koger, who is generally believed to be responsible for embezzlement of funds between 2004 and ’06, has been charged in connection with a shootout involving police this past weekend.

In October, a lawsuit alleged that a large portion of the missing homeowners association money might have been invested in a sushi and steak restaurant that opened on Capitol Hill last summer.

Another friend gone

This always happens when I check back with a morning news source later in the day: bad news. Sommer Mathis of DCist links to a column by Hank Stuever about the closing of the last of D.C.’s crackerbox art movie houses, the AMC Dupont Circle 5. The Dupont 5 never had the scope of the Biograph or the two-story interlock of the lovable Key, but attending a movie there always brought with it the challenge of getting there early enough to secure the one seat in each auditorium with decent sightlines. Apparently the cinemas’ closing has been quietly scheduled for some time. The doors close forever this weekend.

The Dupont 5 was a few dozen extremely familiar steps away from the south escalators of the Dupont Circle Metro station, between a Cosi and a Ben & Jerry’s, and not far from Olsson’s Books & Records. Here you had a perfect world of second and third dates. You could always see someone standing in front of the Dupont 5, wondering if his or her date was going to show up. (This was before everyone owned a cellphone.) A few hearts were broken in front of the Dupont 5.

A shining

Via ArtsJournal: Philip Kennicott produces an excellent piece about the art, science, theater, and politics of illuminating the monuments and other public buildings of the National Mall at night.

A recent revamp of the lighting of the Washington Monument, employing focusing technology used to light sports events, reduced the amount of wattage thrown on the structure as well as light pollution (what a lighting designer would call “spill”). Nevertheless, 24 kW goes into keeping the obelisk bright at night.

The structures on the Mall have a hierarchy that is replicated in the lighting scheme:

… as lighting designers who have worked on the Mall discover, that hierarchy is an informally acknowledged rule, not a written one.

Claude Engle, a lighting designer who has lit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the [East Building] of the National Gallery, remembers a significant change over the years that he has been working in Washington. In the 1970s, when he lit the new [East Building] of the gallery, he just did it by feel, by instinct.

“We decided—and that was just us—that it should be less bright, maybe 80 percent as bright, as the Capitol dome,” he says.

And silly restrictions on information “for security reasons” extend to lighting the Capitol dome:

Eva Malecki, a spokeswoman for the architect of the Capitol, says that since 9/11, officials can’t even reveal what kind of light bulbs are used to light the structure.

“Any information regarding the current process for lighting the Dome,” she says by e-mail, “is security sensitive.”

Not even trying

It’s a little of a dog-bites-man story, but the kerfluffle over the bad D.C. geography in the new Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake is entertaining in a wince-inducing way. Just one among the apparently many gaffes, spotted by Reliable Source:

To get from Georgetown to Cleveland Park, [Nicole Kidman as Carol Bennell] drives through a tunnel. Seems like the long route. Oh, it’s also rush hour and there’s no traffic. In our dreams.

Buchanan in bronze

Candidates for a revised edition of Mondo DC, especially since the Squished Penny Museum has closed: Clay Risen visits ten of D.C.’s more obscure monuments.

Needless to say, the Cuban American Friendship Urn is not of recent vintage. Originally located in Havana in commemoration of the 266 U.S. sailors killed in the 1898 USS Maine explosion, a precipitating factor in the Spanish-American War, the marble urn (contents unknown) was moved to Washington after it was knocked over in a 1926 hurricane. At first it was placed in front of the Cuban embassy, but after Castro came to power—and the embassy was shut down—it was moved to its present location, an obscure corner of East Potomac Park, itself a relatively obscure spit of land running south from the Mall.

Granite kissed

in progress WhitmanStone masons are scribing a quotation from Walt Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser” into the Q Street N.W. entrance of the Dupont Circle Metro station. The complete stanza reads:

Thus in silence, in dream’s projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hos-
   pitals;
The hurt and the wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night—some are so
   young;
Some suffer so much—I recall the experience sweet
   and sad;
(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have
   cross’d and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

Update: Via a DCist comment thread, WMATA’s press release on the project.

Now I feel safe

Commonwealth officials are cracking down on restaurants serving sangria prepared according to old-fashioned recipes, reports Jessica Gould.

La Tasca [a Spanish-themed restaurant in Clarendon] manager Daniela Schenone says the restaurant’s two Virginia outposts stopped serving brandy with their sangría about six months ago. Why? Because swilling traditional sangría is against the law in Virginia—and has been for decades.

Beth Straeten, spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, writes in an e-mail that sangría has been illegal since the state’s alcohol agency was created in 1934. According to Virginia code, any restaurant with a mixed-beverage license is prohibited from “selling wine to which spirits or alcohol, or both, have been added.” Restaurants are also barred from selling beer to which wine or spirits have been added. So no go on the boilermakers, either.

Changes- Changes- Changes: 1

Great hopping copy editors, the hard copy edition of Washington City Paper has acquired a pair of staples! And color inside! The staples will make it easier to hold the paper together when it’s balanced off the end of the dining room table while I’m chowing down, and I’ll have to modify my one-handed pinch-at-the-spine technique that I once used for flipping through the tabloid on the subway looking for Ernie Pook’s Comeek, but now it’ll be more trouble to pull out the one sheet FilmFest DC schedule for future reference. The new layout hasn’t quite stabilized (I hope): right now it’s somewhat of a typographic pileup.

And the personals have been reduced to two pages of tease, laced with “Many more listings online!” O the humanity! Artist in Hiking Boots, please come back, all is forgiven!