Today is the last day of the Greek Festival, and I am afraid I just don’t have any mad money to spend this weekend. I pass by the Greek Orthodox church every day on my way back and forth to work. It seems like every time some fun comes along, I’ve just blown my budget on something else. I guess the secret is that there are always opportunities to spend too much money and wake up the next day with renewed vigor to stick to a budget. The same thing happens every year with Adams Morgan Day, and in a week or two there is the Takoma Park festival - that’s not such a budget-buster since I know a guy who will let me hang out on his balcony overlooking the street, and he’s always got plenty of beer.
I might stop by the Greek Festival this afternoon anyhow, and take a spin through the market, but it’s going to be annoying not being able to afford a big lunch under the tents - I’ve got food at home, but it’s just not the same. Perhaps I’ll scrape together enough for an assortment of bakalava.
I did stop by, if only for a minute. I absorbed the atmosphere of the dining tent, then went to the bazaar. Men with beards nearly knocked me over when I tried to enter - they were lunging at each other to give one of those kiss-on-both-cheeks greetings and I nearly got caught in the middle. I didn’t get my baklava - it was so crowded, and I didn’t have the money to feel confident throwing my weight around. Everything was down on the table, so my height was no advantage - and I didn’t want to clobber anyone with my swinging computer bag.
I went out the door and up the steps back to 16th Street. Regarding the street, deciding between bus stops, I noticed some people emerging from the front of the church. I’ve never seen the inside of the Greek Orthodox church, so why not?… A sign said “please use the center doors”, and when I got to the top of the stairs to pull the door handle, it wouldn’t budge.
Someone called out from sidewalk level… “You can get in through the side!”.
“Yes”, I stifled my anger, “I just came from there. But now, I’m here.”
I took a moment to let the irony subside. And, tried to let go of my anger… “Screw this.”
It was one of the best decisions I made all day… I walked to the stop, caught the next bus, got on and found an old friend: Lo and behold it was Richard Goines. He used to work with me at the record store years ago, and he still lives just up the way from me, so it’s not too strange to see him. He had a little entourage along for the ride - his niece and her little daughter. The daughter seemed very well dressed - in a dark Chinese silk dress - and there was a good reason: They were all just returning from Walter Reed Hospital where the little one had been singing to entertain wounded soldiers. I was impressed. I can probably see the Greek Orthodox church any time I want, but running into friends on a bus is a rare treat.
Posted in DC-roaming, gourmand | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:34:00 GMT
This actually illustrates a part of Zoo & Cathedral.
It didn’t look like there used to be a bridge at this corner. Maybe I’m in the wrong place. But it’s typical overgrown Northwest DC.
Posted in DC-roaming, photos | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:36:00 GMT
These are pictures of a Montgomery College theatre arts building under construction along Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring. I don’t walk past it all that often - don’t really have a good reason - but, I have noticed the progress on the building and wondered what it was supposed to be.
Posted in DC-roaming, photos | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 01 Aug 2008 02:28:00 GMT
Yesterday I the heat wasn’t so bad, and I took a stroll through the zoo, headed uptown then crossed back over to the Cathedral.
Oh let’s see… Thursday night I had a message from Troy, suggesting that we get a beer in my neighborhood, so that was a nice distraction. I spoke to Marina about her recent Hurricane experience, and that was when Troy called me back and we were able to do more than leave messages. I was planning to stay in for the evening, get some reading done and catch up on my rest. Things didn’t work out like that, though. Troy met me on the first floor of Reef, we drank one round, then I suggested we survey the roof deck, which is usually too crowded and hot. It was neither of those things, but we still couldn’t sit - so we hovered at the roof edge examining the street life from above. I think my bartender friends were startled to see me bring a friend along - I suppose that means I haven’t been very social lately. After all, one of my favorite activities is to wander around town by myself taking photographs and writing in my journal. If I can read a book at a bar, I’m happy. Once Troy left, I found an unoccupied stool and stayed a little longer while they overserved me with and undercharged me for some Wasmund’s, a local Single Malt Whisky from Virginia.
All of that gave me a slow start Friday morning, but I picked myself up, dusted myself off and went for a trek anyway. I had a vague notion of going as far as the zoo, which is just down in the park a few blocks away. I drank an iced coffee and enjoyed the sights. Walking through the zoo is not easy - even a sparse crowd presents navigation problems: Nobody is in much of a hurry, but they do dart this way and that at the last minute, closing the gaps I planned to pass through. Kids have a tendency to scream about which animals they do or do not want to see, often because the adults are leading them in an inauspicious direction. There was a crowd around the elephant pen, but I found peace and quiet in an exhibit on pollinators with a roofed in area of benches. There was a mock backyard filled with garden plants and birdhouses. I was going to sit still and see how close the birds would come, but immediately a big group of little kids from a summer camp showed up. I stayed long enough to cool off, then I set out again. At the entrance to the zoo, a small boy was up on a lion statue, and his father was coaxing him to jump. I dawdled for a minute to check their progress - It looked like they might be there for a long time. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I detected the slightest memory of me at that age, too scared to come down.
On Connecticut Avenue, I went north toward Cleveland Park. I scribbled notes in my notebook as I went. The bridge over abandoned Klingle Road was nearly finished - they’ve been rebuilding it for years, and most of the work was down by the creek bed. A string of school buses waiting for their charges to tour the zoo was parked on both edges of the bridge, and the bus drivers were gathered on the stout new railings along the curb. I looked over the barely protected side of the bridge at the workmen below and daydreamed of a hike I took once up the little valley along Klingle after a snowstorm years ago… The road was closed but still drivable, except for the occasional outer curve edge falling away into th creek. A rivulet of runoff had formed within the packed snow, and the only people I encountered had their dogs off the leash. The road has further decayed since then, and I haven’t figured out what they plan to do with it.
Further along the avenue, I examined the main drag of Cleveland Park. Many of the shops have changed in just the last ten or so years. CVS had historical photos of the neighborhood hanging in the front windows - just as they do at the Dupont Circle store. One of the pictures was an enlargement of the developer’s brochure for several newly built neighborhoods - we don’t call them by those names anymore. A young woman in knock-off art nouveau rendering beckons me to buy a house in ‘the heights’. One of my favorite coffeeshops by the subway escalator is boarded up, and the Yenching Palace restaurant similarly abandoned - it’s marble facade partially dismantled, no longer suggesting 20’s Shanghai.
There were supposedly bad mudslides in the park, so instead of navigating that, I turned up Porter, where I considered catching an H bus back to Mt Pleasant. I admired the refinished craftsman bungalows glowering over the street. The air may have been cool, but the sunlight compelled me to find the shady side of every street. I encountered stands of bamboo along 34th, trying my best to find the same vantage of a photo in the CVS showing a bridge at the crossing of Reno and Newark, but the lay of the land didn’t register. Part of Reno road followed the course that eventually became 34th, so I must have passed through the spot - Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough to see it. The bamboo was certainly planted to provide a measure of privacy, but it always feels like it escaped from the zoo, where in its invasive spirit, it grows in abundance as food for pandas.
I climbed the last bit of hill to the Cathedral, getting tired enough to look out for a bus home. Sensing a gap in the schedule, and not trusting my little clock that needs a new battery, I took the last hundred meters to the greenhouse, only to find it deserted for the season. It was only a year ago that I bought a rosemary plant there, and they seemed ready for anything. I wonder what was different this year… or if last year was an anomaly and I just lucked out.
Posted in DC-roaming, bar-scene | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:31:00 GMT
I was sitting very close to this seat. I was riding home from Dupont on Monday night and caught one of the ‘Airport Bus’ style 42s, with a little group of four seats facing together like a booth at a fast food place. To capture it in one photograph would have been very difficult - I needed the flash to illuminate the graffiti, but as you can see, it caused a lot of glare on the vinyl. I have here a composite image. It took some fussing.
How is that for poetry?
Posted in urban-studies, DC-roaming | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:54:00 GMT
This is St. Matthew’s Cathedral on Rhode Island Avenue. Every time I walk past this spot on Connecticut Avenue, I see the dome peek over the rooftops. There’s something very wonderful about that dome - it doesn’t quite belong here, with the traffic lights and the scaffolding. From some angles, it improbably looks like it belongs to one of the other, more prosaic buildings.
Posted in DC-roaming, photos | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:35:00 GMT
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
Actually it was not that great of a time. I wasn’t even sure pay phones still existed anymore until I saw a guy talking on the one on the right in May. I got one photo of the guy with his back to me, and then I saw police nearby so I tried to act natural. When I was sure they weren’t interested in me, I took this shot of the phone by itself. I remembered a photo I took last year in Clarendon - the one on the left. The phone seemed so forlorn that day - the receiver off the hook, the abandoned storefronts all along the block, and the chilly wind ripping at my bare hands… Oh, sorry - I almost forgot that it was the middle of July. I better wrap this up before my laptop catches fire or something.
Posted in telecom, DC-roaming, photos | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:41:00 GMT
These photos make me wish for a tilt-shift. Of course with a Nikon Coolpix 5600, this is completely absurd. All the distortion tricks I know in Photoshop are annoying to work with: I used to know how to do all the ‘free transform’ options, but the last time I tried, I couldn’t get it right: I was going to take some up-pointing photos of gridded windows on a building and pull them back into plumb - but it wasn’t as easy as I remembered it. I might have to go back to the manual for this. And the pinch settings are very hit-or miss: I have to widen the canvas and move the image into place for the pinch to land in the right spot - but finding that place is a matter of trial and error. Maybe I’d be better off abandoning the wide setting on the zoom (if only I could have it start up in a medium zoom position).
These are my attempts to pinch filter and free transform the distorted original. As you can see, there are some tradeoffs. I was able to straighten the vertical lines at the cost of stretching the white car. I stopped because the laptop was getting sluggish from all the disk trashing.
It should go without saying that I liked the look of the back windows on this building. Too bad about the plywood patch, but this is exactly the kind of organic character that isn’t built into new buildings. The brick is probably original, while the big block of windows and door on the left is a later adaptation.
As I was gazing into the alley with my camera, some old woman waiting for a bus came over to look too. When she couldn’t see what she imagined I saw, she was distinctly puzzled. I didn’t exactly confront her, but we had a moment… She had some preconception about what would be worth taking photographs of, and I didn’t match it. I have a variety of sentimentality for the built environment that other people have for relatives or pets. That’s just the way it is.
Posted in DC-roaming, photos, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:10:00 GMT
Is there a theme here?
No, not that I can tell - it’s just a bunch of stuff I saw walking in DC…
When customers heard about one of our bookstores closing, some of them made suggestions about where we could open our next store. Some of the suggestions were a block away, and some of them were “Takoma Park” or “National Harbor”. My first reaction was to go look at how much the neighborhood has changed, and explore outward from there.
I did wonder why things are this way. And, by “this way”, I mean: Olsson’s wouldn’t put a store just anywhere. It would seem that every new store has been in brand new buildings for as long as I can remember. Is there an advantage to new buildings? Some of the infrastructure of these buildings left a lot to be desired. The Lansburgh building is some sort of luxury residential hotel; For people with million dollar salaries who don’t know how long they’re going to stay in town. I’ll never know how the magic trick is done: The cheapest possible multistory construction job is finished with the thinnest possible veneer of luxury appointments. And people see “Quality”. In the meantime, laundry suds would occasionally drip from the acoustic tile ceilings onto our CD bins. Not the “attention to detail” that I keep hearing about.
The inevitable redevelopment of every block with the same crap architecture is a clear disincentive to doing anything positive with the land in the interim.
This in turn got me thinking about one of my favorite reasons to take photographs: To document the things that will be lost. With some things, we’re probably better off with just the photograph. An entire block of 5th Street could argue for that.
So I present a handful of views from my Friday afternoon walk: Some memories I cherish, some memories I won’t cherish, the forces threatening to destroy them, and a startling juxtaposition or two.
Posted in urban-studies, DC-roaming, photos, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:35:00 GMT
When I heard there was a disgruntled bartender giving away free drinks, I came right down…
I love the sound of this, but it’s not entirely accurate.
It was a really nice day yesterday (today, too), and when I left work, I went on a walkabout. I worked my way into DC on Georgia Avenue by walking and riding buses. I read my book as I went, and I observed the architecture very carefully. I’m reading “The Design of Future Things”, and I’m receptive to how the urban environment is arranged. I’m having a lot of interesting cinematic images in my head, more ideas at once than I could possibly write down.
When I reached Park Road, I got off and walked over to Wonderland Ballroom. I read at the bar and had a whiskey-and-coke. One of the control analogies in the Norman book is Horse+Rider. It illustrates the concept of loose reigns vs. tight reigns, and he goes on to meditate about how that might be designed into hi-tech devices. Since he’s done a lot of work on cars and airplane cockpits, a lot of his examples tend to devolve into driving. I have one more moment where I think “Oh no! We’re not going to have to drive in the future are we?”. My hopes for the future are to let the machines figure out how to accomplish a lot of the things we want to do. He does allow for this possibility: At one point he suspects that cars will drive us everywhere, and that there will be special parks where people can drive the cars for leisure - just like horseback riding is more relegated now.
A little more ominous is the remark about your horse sometimes having a mind of its own, and someday maybe your car too - deciding it should pull over because you need to eat. And, maybe in the service of a RF billboard or something. We would love to delegate some of the decisions, but delegate them to the marketing flaks who claim to have our best interest in mind? Sorry, no thanks. And then, next I was daydreaming about the nature of animal intelligence as opposed to machines. The dolphin-riders and horse-whisperers. When animals are ready to take a place in our society, what will that be like? We might consider them ‘less than human’, but do you really need to be all human to contribute to the mix, or derive benefits, tangible or intangible? What new levels of working together for mutual benefit are possible?
With all this going on in my mind, I realize that I’m not making any social connections with the people around me. Once I took an online quiz where you answer a series of questions, and it suggests the book you ‘most resemble’. I had some trouble with the binary choices, but I did the best I could, and the result was “Invisible Man”.
An older guy had sat down on the end of the bar, close to where I was. He ordered a beer and a couple of their famed chili cheese hot dogs. He noticed the announcement for “Guitar Hero” that was scheduled for later in the evening. He asked the cute young hipster bartending what that referred to. She left it at “It’s a video game”. But I took it as a conversational opening, and described the Simon-says procedure and the ersatz guitar controller to him. I didn’t belabor the point, but I hinted and the slavery-to-machines angle that’s been bothering me, and mentioned the full band version that some people play. If you ask me, it’s a little like the difference between watching TV alone and watching TV in a group. Many people have argued the merits of group viewing with me. I say it’s neither here nor there: I’ve watched TV with a group, but my commentary on what we were viewing seldom seemed welcome. It’s essentially going to a crowded theater alone. I paid my bill and moved along.
This wasn’t even close to being finished. Who is going to re-read it now?
Posted in urban-studies, DC-roaming, bar-scene, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:32:00 GMT
