Whimsy and Worship: the Eccentric Piero di Cosimo at the National Gallery
• February 23, 2015

Piero di Cosimo’s paintings never reached the canon of High Renaissance art inhabited by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and even Giorgione works. Yet his pieces, a myriad of which are on exhibit now at the National Gallery, show a fun-loving, eccentric artist bounding from style to style all while demonstrating the aristocratic tastes of that period in which both whimsical mythology and devout adoration were sought after for personal consumption.

Piero’s birth, in 1462, proceeded Michelangelo’s and preceded Leonardo’s by about a decade each, respectively. Like other artists of the era, the Florentine Piero was given biographical treatment by the one and only Giorgio Vasari in his “Lives of the Artists” writings, which chronicled with debatable veracity of exactly that. Vasari, Piero’s only biographer, painted a picture of bizarre, even outlandish man in his writings.

He wrote that Piero suffered from such bad pyrophobia that he subsisted solely on eggs that he boiled (fifty at a time) with the glue he worked with. According to Vasari, Piero lived “more like a beast than a man” with regard to cleanliness, preferred animals to humans and had a propensity for seeing beauty in the lowliest street scene.

Vasari’s passages on Piero ring truest and with most relevance for today when he writes that Piero “changed his style almost from one work to the next.” That much is apparent in the National Gallery’s six-gallery-spanning retrospective “Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence.”

Upon entering the exhibit, visitors are greeted by Piero’s “Madonna and Child Enthroned with Sts. Peter, John the Baptist, Dominic, and Nicholas of Bari,” a painting clearly influenced by colleague Fillipino Lippi (and the International Gothic Style) but with the High Renaissance in mind. Piero uses Lippi’s bright palette and fanciful adornments in dressing the figures, whose sharp contours flatten the painting. There is balance though, which carries through in three paintings in the predella where scenes involving St. John the Baptist, St. Dominic and St. Nicholas of Bari are neatly arranged with figures, slopes and vegetation that create a sense of balance.

“The Finding of Vulcan on Lemnos” continues the Lippi-esque style in the next gallery, but with pagan subjects, flirtatiousness, nudity and highly detailed deptictions of flowers, birds and plants. In “Vulcan and Aeolus,” Piero shows a naturalist tendency again, including, most notably, a giraffe but also a number of birds and smaller mammals in a pagan scene. (The giraffe was given to Florence’s leader Lorenzo de’ Medici as a gift from the Sultan of Egypt but met an untimely death after hitting its head on a low palace entrance.)

Nature runs wild in a subsequent piece, “The Hunt,” depicting lions, tigers and bears (oh my!), not to mention satyrs, deer, beavers and the men who have ignited a fire in the woods in order to slay all of these animals. The organized chaos of Piero’s “Hunt” comes to a serene end in “The Return from the Hunt,” where women take stock of animal carcasses and even nurse a bear cub that’s been separated from its mother. Oddly enough, the set was a wedding gift for

In the epic “Perseus Freeing Andromeda” Piero is near-Boschian in constructing the peculiar sea monster sent by Poseidon to capture Andromeda, the daughter of Ethiopian king Cepheus. Piero doesn’t quite nail human skin tone in th work, as Andromeda and other figures meant to be black appear sickly more than anything else. But Flemish inspiration leads to incredibly detailed illustrations of water, landscape and architecture in the background. (Details in the background of “The Visitation of Saint Nicholas and Saint Anthony Abbot,” too.)

Piero’s devotional tondi come as a surprise then when juxtaposed with his fanciful, mythological works. Traditionally, a tondo is a circular piece of art given to a bride upon marriage. Piero’s works in the medium vary in style with Piero giving some a Flemish attention to detail and others the forms of a Leonardo painting. Nonetheless, all of the works are rife with devotion and matronly emotion showing, perhaps, a more devout artist than his mythology suggests. “Mary Adoring the Child” and “Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels” stand out the most in this regard.

The National Gallery’s retrospective makes clear that Piero di Cosimo, despite and maybe even because of his eccentricities, was a masterful painter. Had he stuck with and built one style or streamlined his subjects more effectively, maybe he would be considered a master today. But then the National Gallery’s exhibit wouldn’t be so much fun.

City Deficit Grows with Firefighters’ Overtime Settlement
• February 5, 2015

A 14-year quarrel about overtime pay for the District’s firefighters is about to come to a head – at the expense of the new mayor’s and the city’s spending priorities. The District government has run out of legal options in the long-running dispute, and is expected to pay up to $50 million to settle a dispute with the union, IAFF Local 36. That settlement comes on the heels of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s election and an already enormous budget shortfall of $83 million.

The head of the local, Edward C. Smith, says he has not spoken to Bowser or D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine to talk sums with regard to the settlement. Bowser has not commented on the dispute publicly, but is expected to address the issue on Tuesday morning at a monthly public meeting – her first – with the D.C. Council.

Like many of the District’s budgetary problems, the overtime conflict with firefighters arose when Congress appointed a financial control board to balance D.C.’s budget. The board did this, in part, by weakening the collective bargaining agreements between the city and its employees. The union had previously negotiated for time-and-a-half wages for working more than 42 hours per week. The financial control board adjusted that threshold to 53 hours.

When the District government reassumed control of its finances in 2001, the firefighters union argued that the 42-hour limit was reinstated. The fire department disagreed, and has not paid for overtime between 42 and 53 hours since then.

Now the D.C. Court of Appeals, the highest court in the District, has decided that the city owes back pay for those hours. Local officials estimate that the government will owe $47 million.

The settlement could not come at a worse time for D.C. officials, who have seen the city’s budget deficit skyrocket to $83 million due to malfunctioning traffic cameras. The growing bills spell trouble for both Mayor Bowser and the Council.

Freeze Hits Local Pinkberrys as Franchisee Files for Chapter 7
• January 29, 2015

According to court records uncovered by the Washington Business Journal, the local franchisee for local Pinkberry frozen yogurt shops has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

The future of Pinkberry Mid-Atlantic LLC’s frozen yogurt outlets in the area, including shops in Georgetown, Dupont, Arlington, Fairfax, Tysons Corner and National Harbor, is in question and a Pinkberry store in Leesburg closed in 2014.

In court documents, the company lists debts at over $1.2 million and assets at around $820,000. Mid-atlantic banking behemoth BB&T is the largest creditor, with claims upwards of $500,000. Pinkberry also owes tens of thousands of dollars to Sysco Food Services and area utilities. The company also owes close to $100,000 to Arlington County and Virginia state each in back taxes.

The Chapter 7 filing could mark the end of D.C.’s expanding frozen yogurt trend, which began with a bang including an onslaught of openings 2009 and 2010 but has since petered out. Pinkberry arrived in D.C. in 2010.

Update: P Street 7-Eleven Robbed Twice in 48 Hours
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The 7-Eleven convenient store at 2617 P St. NW was robbed 5:13 a.m., Jan. 7. and again at 2:20 a.m. on Jan. 9, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.

The robber on Jan. 7 wielded a handgun and was seen on surveillance tape wearing a dark jacket with white stripes around the waist and sleeves, light blue jeans, white gloves and black shoes with white details. His face was mostly covered by a hood and a face mask. Police say the suspect was a black male weighing between one hundred and one hundred twenty pounds and between 5’2″ and 5’5″ in height.

A 7-Eleven employee said that the robber got away with about $40 and some packs of cigarettes.

Then, according to police, four black males robbed the store in the wee hours of Jan. 9. A surveillance photo from the convenient store shows one wearing a dark bomber hat lined with a light fur lining, a leather jacket and white gloves. Another man is wearing an orange and blue jacket with face covered with a bandana and sunglasses and the third wears a dark jacket and covers his face with a black hat and a red bandana. Police say the robbery occurred at 2:23 a.m.

The store’s owner, Girma Hailu posted to a neighborhood safety message board that he is “very stressed out” by the incidents and that the second robbery was worse than the first, though nobody was harmed in either incident. He also said that on both occasions the robbers used “27th st as cover,” taking advantage of the dark street and the store’s window on that street, which is largely covered.

The MPD is urging anyone with information about either robberies to contact the department with details.

D.C. police also advise area residents to take the following precautions in day-to-day activity: always be aware of your surrounding; do not be distracted by your cell phone, music, reading, etc.; avoid traveling alone, especially at night; do not openly display electronics; use ATMs during the day in well-populated areas.

Anyone with information on the Jan. 7 or Jan. 9 robbery should inform the 2nd District headquarters — 202-715-7300.
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Urban Turf: Real Estate in Real Time
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“A conversation that I thought would last 15 minutes became two hours,” says Urban Turf cofounder Will Smith of his initial brainstorming – with cofounder-to-be Mark Wellborn – about a D.C-focused real estate blog.

Smith grew up in Alexandria, attended St. Stephen’s & St. Agnes School and graduated from Brown University. When he met Wellborn, Smith was working on a number of other online publications he founded in the area. A D.C.-native from Capitol Hill, Wellborn had gotten his master’s from Columbia University’s journalism school and was working at the New York Observer.

The meeting, in 2008, took place at a mutual friend’s party in Brooklyn, where – in quintessential late-twenty-something fashion – “people were kicking around business ideas,” says Smith. The partners clicked when they started talking about D.C.’s lack of an authoritative real estate blog and the success of such blogs in New York City.

Founded later that year, Urban Turf’s rapid growth coincided with a development tidal wave that has washed over Washington. The blog has served up valuable scoops as the real estate market has boomed, bringing new life – and prestige – to a city best known for its political-industrial complex.

As that happened, Wellborn says, “We’ve evolved much more into a news publication rather than a real estate blog.”
The statement holds up. Urban Turf has strengthened its foothold, attracting a healthy mix of real estate consumers and professionals (70 percent and 30 percent of readership, respectively) and boasting more Facebook “likes” than Washington City Paper in the process. (City Paper’s footprint on Twitter still dwarfs Urban Turf’s, though.)

District residents increasingly rely on Urban Turf not only to inform them about real estate trends but also to fill in the details, to paint a picture of what is happening on both the macro and micro levels.

After starting out with what Wellborn describes as an “archaic idea of the web,” the site now publishes five or more posts a day, with some sponsored articles that help pay the bills. (The ads are clearly labeled, Smith is eager to interject, and they are written by someone outside editorial, Wellborn adds.)

The timing and targeting could not be more on point given the rapid influx of millennials to American cities. Lark Turner, Urban Turf’s lead journalist and a newcomer to D.C., puts it most succinctly: “Millennials are returning to cities in America, and there is probably no better example in the country [than D.C.] of all of these trends.”

San Fermin: A Symphony Out of a Solo Act
• January 28, 2015

With Ellis Ludwig-Leone at the helm, San Fermin melds classical music with rock ’n’ roll to create lush, manic and irresistible chamber pop soundscapes. The Brooklyn-based band came together around Ludwig-Leone’s vision, constructed during a nine-week retreat in Banff, Canada, where the Yale graduate developed the concept and aesthetic of the band’s music.

“I hadn’t really written songs before. I had done composition stuff, but I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be,” Ludwig-Leone reflects. “I had this idea that you needed to be totally secluded and in your own mindspace to do what you wanted to do.”

When he came back to New York with a composition for a debut album in hand, Ludwig-Leone got to work pulling together a band to record the effort. Childhood friend Allen Tate was the obvious choice for the album’s male voice, but the female voice, just as essential in Ludwig-Leone’s composition, was more difficult to nail down.

Ludwig-Leone’s recruited guitarist Tyler McDiarmid knew Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe of budding indie pop band Lucius, so Ludwig-Leone approached them. “I actually cold-called them,” Ludwig-Leone says, and the duo agreed to be a part of the project. (Their contribution shines brightest on the soaring, ecstatic “Sonsick.”)

Ultimately, 22 musicians – from trombonists to drummers to upright bassists – lent their talents to San Fermin’s debut, which arrived in September 2013 on Downtown Records.

Touring required that the band be whittled down to eight members, and the Lucius girls were out of the equation due to their band’s schedule. Rae Cassidy stepped in on female vocals, but ended up quitting the band to pursue a solo career in April 2014. Ludwig-Leone says there is bound to be “changeover” in a band with so many members. But he also notes, “We think of it now as a real band in the sense that everyone is invested and involved.”

The band’s onstage chemistry, honed over two years of nonstop touring, is proof. Ludwig-Leone talks of the band’s eight members finding “their moment” during their rowdy live shows, which direct the audience toward what’s happening onstage.

As for behind-the-scenes, Ludwig-Leone says he’s “really happy” with how the group interacts. He paints a clearer picture, saying, “I run the rehearsal and talk with people about the parts if I have comments. John [Brandon] and Tyler tour-manage, so they’re in charge of that stuff. Everyone finds a place where they’re in charge. On the music part, it’s super cool because now that all the musicians know the aesthetic of the band, they can add things that are almost always great.”

Ludwig-Leone returned to seclusion to write San Fermin’s sophomore record, “Jackrabbit.” This time, he stayed in New Hampshire, and only for three weeks. But when he got back to New York, he realized – with the help of the band, his manager and his mentor, composer Nico Muhly – his new work was missing something, “an upbeat heart of the record.”

Around the time of his return, Charlene Kaye joined San Fermin’s roster on female vocals. Ludwig-Leone went to work on the last three or four songs on the record (which he says are his favorites) with her in mind, saying that it’s important for a song to “fit” the person singing it.

The album’s title track “is totally high energy,” Ludwig-Leone says, which is no surprise given that the song was recorded with the eight-member live band. With Kaye’s ethereal vocals at the forefront, the song is a proper sequel to the band’s biggest hit to date, “Sonsick.” The rest of the second album, though, continues the dialogue and questioning that Ludwig-Leone started in the first, but with “three-dimensional characters.” He explains, “There aren’t any answers, it just keeps spinning out of control.”

San Fermin plays the Barns at Wolf Trap on Jan. 30. “Jackrabbit” arrives in stores April 21.

D.C. ‘American Sniper’ Screening Attracts Bradley Cooper, Political Stars
• January 20, 2015

Oscar-nominated actor Bradley Cooper was in town Jan. 13 for a screening of his new film, “American Sniper,” which was directed by Clint Eastwood. The movie is based on the autobiography of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, one of the most lethal snipers in U.S. history, and details his tours in Iraq and his battle with posttraumatic stress disorder upon arriving home. A Marine Corps veteran whom Kyle had brought to a shooting range to help calm his PTSD killed Kyle in 2013.

Kyle’s widow, Taya Kyle, attended the screening held in the Burke Theater at the U.S. Navy Memorial. Vice President Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) were also in attendance. Biden was “moved to tears during the final sequence,” at the screening according to the Daily Beast.

The movie has received largely positive reviews and was nominated Jan. 15 for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and a number of more minor Academy Awards. Cooper was nominated as Best Actor in a Leading Role for his portrayal of Kyle. “American Sniper” was snubbed at the Golden Globes, with no nominations in any category.

A Georgetown University alum, Cooper was spotted dining at Café Milano on Prospect Street after the screening. The restaurant is somewhat of a haunt for Cooper, who was last seen there in 2010 with then-girlfriend Renée Zellweger. [gallery ids="101970,135654,135643,135656,135648" nav="thumbs"]

Capella Hotel Hires Frank Ruta of Palena As Head Chef
• January 16, 2015

After being forced out of Cleveland Park last spring, Frank Ruta has been hired as the executive chef at the Capella Hotel on 31st Street, NW, in Georgetown.

Ruta and his concept, Palena, became a neighborhood and city institution, but both were given the boot by the landlord over back rent payments that reportedly reached more than $100,000. Ruta called the incident “sad, embarrassing and somewhat painful” in an email to the Washington Post when the restaurant closed.

Since Palena’s closing, Ruta has taken charge over Bread Feast, a multi-course dinner series held at Mark Furstenberg’s Bread Furst bakery on Connecticut Avenue in Van Ness. He will cook his last dinner there on Dec. 19 before moving to the Capella. He has expressed hope, though, that the Bread Feast tradition continues in some shape or form.

The Capella opened its Grill Room and Rye Bar with great fanfare last year with Swedish chef Jacob Esko at the helm to provide patrons with a luxurious dining experience to match the hotel’s rooms, which range in cost from $500 to $7,000 a night. Esko left the Capella in June and is now the executive chef at W Barcelona in Spain.

Ruta arrives at the hotel’s restaurant with a mission to bring in more Georgetown locals. In an interview with the Washington Post, Ruta mentioned the possibility of lowering price points by expanding menu options beyond the Grill Room’s staples of seafood and steak in an effort to make the Grill Room a regular destination for Georgetowners. He also said that he expects to bring more Italian and French influence to the menus.

Before taking over the kitchen officially, Ruta is expected to take time to fill out key staff positions and evaluate the hotel’s kitchens. He told the Washington Post that having “final say” over staffing was a key part of his negotiations with the hotel’s management team.

Ruta starts at the Grill Room and Rye Bar on New Years’ Day.

Roadside Development: A Different Kind of Commercial Real Estate
• December 19, 2014

One of the biggest names in Washington, D.C., real estate, Roadside Development was established 17 years ago by Smithy Braedon alums Richard Lake and Armond Spikell, who recruited longtime client Todd Weiss to join them. All three are well acquainted with the D.C. metro area. When he was growing up, Lake worked at the Zebra Room, a Wisconsin Avenue business owned by his family.

The name Roadside Development was inspired by the company’s first projects: CVS locations in the D.C. suburbs. After doing 17 stores in and around D.C., Armond said, “We build things along the road. Why don’t we call ourselves Roadside Development?” Lake says he and his partners have thought about changing it, “because who wants to live in an apartment built by Roadside Development…[but] it has really stuck.”

According to Lake, there are a lot of developers who build housing well, and others who build retail well, but Roadside’s mission is to “marry the two.” He offers Roadside’s City Market at O in Shaw and its Cityline in Tenleytown as examples and calls them his favorites, saying that the projects “captured what was necessary for those neighborhoods.”

He talks glowingly about City Market. “It was an early form of grocery store in the 1800s when it was built. It made sense to incorporate the market and make it the centerpiece of the entire development.” But, Lake says, Roadside wanted to “design something that sets that building off and apart from more modern construction.” The company looked at different shapes, materials, colors and windows and came up with a design that pays homage to the original market while maintaining modernity.

Lake also talks passionately about the need for affordable housing in the District, calling such housing “imperative.” He adds, “We all fail if we don’t provide safe and quality housing for everyone.” In that vein, during the City Market construction process, Roadside promised area seniors 78 affordable units, eventually constructing 90 that rent at below-market rates.

Lake is looking forward to future Roadside projects, such as renovating Frager’s Hardware, a Capitol Hill institution that burned down in 2013. He calls the project a “smaller version of [City Market at] O Street” and says that Roadside is seeking to add vitality to the block and bring people in to live at the site.

In Georgetown, Roadside has the old Neam’s Market site under contract. Lake says: “We don’t own the property. We aren’t talking about plans yet because we haven’t formulated them completely. It’s a really cool corner with a lot of history. The corner is a Washington institution. It’s a small piece of property, but we want to do something neat there if we are able to.”

Lake calls the pipeline the “single most complicated part of the business,” explaining: “We just finished building $400 million worth of stuff, but you have to make sure there’s something else in the pipeline for the future when you are in the final stages of other projects.” He adds, “There are so many variables in the types of development we do, always something that can trip us up, whether it’s zoning, the market or changes in attitudes.”

The company “has been pretty fortunate to find projects to keep us active.” Lake says he worries sometimes about overdevelopment and “too many of the same thing being built,” but says Roadside works as hard as it can to differentiate its product by bringing in retail, office space and, when feasible, housing.

So far, that mix and Roadside’s vision have brought great value to the District while restoring and enhancing its architectural character.

Sam Smith Ushers in Holiday Season With “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”
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Pop music’s biggest rising star Sam Smith just released a soothing, soulful version of the Christmas classic, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” backed only by a piano. This is Smith’s first endeavor into the Christmas canon, but he is no stranger to covers. Last year, Smith released renditions of songs by Whitney Houston, the Arctic Monkeys, Tracy Chapman and Bruno Mars. There’s no word on whether Smith plans on releasing any other Christmas tunes this season, but with pop rivals like Ariana Grande deep in the game, it wouldn’t be surprising if the British singer-songwriter released a full Christmas album sometime in the future. For now, we can enjoy this rendition as we get closer and closer to Christmas.