Richard Selden • June 23, 2016

A household name nearly 70 years after his death, the Bambino is the first sports star in the “One Life” series.

Richard Selden • June 16, 2016

The Juilliard grad led the Cathedral Choral Society and Washington Bach Consort, which he founded, until his death.

Richard Selden • June 8, 2016

Weekend Metrorail service first pushed past midnight, to 1 a.m., in 1999 (the better to party like it’s 1999). Currently operating until 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, the trains will have a midnight curfew seven days a week after the last reveler exits the turnstiles early Sunday morning, May 29.

The earlier closing times are part of a year of service cutbacks as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority attempts to complete three years’ worth of maintenance in less than a year.

WMATA’s revised SafeTrack plan, detailing the work it intends to carry out, was released May 19. The scheduled completion date is March 19, 2017.

Along with plenty of weekday single-tracking — which riders are already experiencing — there will be several periods of service shutdowns on particular lines. Shuttle buses will replace trains to the extent feasible.

• Service on the Orange, Blue and Silver Lines between Eastern Market and Minnesota Avenue (Orange) and Benning Road (Blue and Silver) will shut down for 16 days beginning June 18.

• Service on the Yellow and Blue Lines between Reagan National Airport and Pentagon City will shut down on the evening of July 5 for a week, with a second week of no service between the airport and Braddock Road.

• Service on the Red Line between NoMa-Gallaudet and Fort Totten will shut down from Oct. 10 to Nov. 1.

• Service on the Blue Line between Rosslyn and Pentagon will shut down from Dec. 7 to 24 (except for Dec. 17).

Clearly, the reduction in late hours has been the most alarming part of the plan for night owls. On an average weekend night, there are about 7,500 riders between midnight and 3 a.m. This number has declined in recent years, in part due to the rise of car services such as Uber and Lyft.

In response to the reduced Metrorail hours, Uber announced that it would expand its ride-sharing service, UberPOOL, to Montgomery County and Prince George’s County in Maryland and to Virginia towns beyond Arlington and Alexandria. However, surge pricing would be in effect, without a cap on the multiplier for the time being.

Richard Selden • May 25, 2016

At a May 17 public meeting at the Carnegie Library, District Department of Transportation staffers shared their plans to extend DC Streetcar — the spanking new system operating since February on a 2.4-mile stretch of H Street — to Georgetown. One of the options presented has dedicated streetcar lanes for nearly the entire route; the other has dedicated lanes only from Mount Vernon Square to Washington Circle (Foggy Bottom). Without dedicated lanes, the cars mix in with automobile, bicycle and pedestrian traffic.

The proposed route, about three and a half miles, takes New Jersey Avenue to a reconfigured K Street, cutting down under the Whitehurst Freeway. Overhead-wire, wireless (underground or battery) and combination power systems are being considered.

Once the planning process is complete, construction might start in 2022, with the line opening a few years later.

The current H Street line had an average weekday ridership in April of about 2,300, with about 3,200 riders on Saturdays. The absence of dedicated lanes reduces the speed of the short trip, making it less attractive to would-be passengers.

A May 19 meeting will cover the line’s eastward extension to the Benning Road Metro station. Another meeting is expected to take place this fall.

Streetcars last ran in Georgetown in 1962.

Richard Selden •

“Don’t give in to cynicism. It is a toxic spiritual state,” said U.S. Sen. Cory A. Booker (D.-N.J.), speaking on the National Mall on Sunday, May 15, at the commencement ceremonies for George Washington University.

Booker was among the prominent individuals invited to address the graduates of Washington’s higher-education institutions this month, starting with Howard University’s commencement speaker, President Barack Obama, on May 7.

Explorer Alexandra Cousteau, Georgetown Class of 1998 and granddaughter of Jacques Cousteau, will speak at commencement for Georgetown College of Georgetown University on Saturday, May 21, at 9 a.m. The choice of Georgetown resident Jeh Johnson, Homeland Security secretary, as the speaker at the ceremony, also on May 21, for the university’s School of Foreign Service was protested by students who object to the department’s policy of separating undocumented immigrants from their families.

Like Georgetown, Trinity Washington University will hold its commencement on May 21, with Dr. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, former president of Bryn Mawr College, addressing the graduates.

The speaker at American University’s Washington College of Law will be U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch on May 22. Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter spoke on May 8 at the commencement for AU’s College of Arts and Sciences.

The University of the District of Columbia’s Commencement was May 14, with speaker Broderick Johnson, cabinet secretary and chair of the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force. The Catholic University of America also held its commencement May 14, with comedian Jim Gaffigan and his wife and creative partner Jeannie Gaffigan speaking. The day before, Dr. Vinton Cerf, Google’s chief internet evangelist, spoke at Gallaudet University’s ceremony.

Richard Selden •

The first batch of Sagamore Spirit, Under Armour founder and CEO Kevin Plank’s new straight rye whiskey, was released May 13, just in time to be the official rye of the Preakness Stakes.

At Plank’s Sagamore Farm — about 15 miles northwest of Baltimore’s Pimlico race track, home of the Preakness — Sagamore Spirit co-founder (with Plank) Bill McDermond hosted a launch party for the rye May 19. Restaurateurs and bartenders from D.C. and Baltimore drank rye and rye cocktails, tossed down bites from area eateries, smoked cigars, listened to a Nashville band and rode a mechanical bull. Plank’s remarks were on video; he was giving the commencement address at his alma mater, the University of Maryland.

The hugely successful athletic-wear entrepreneur bought Sagamore, former horse-breeding farm of Pimlico owner and president Albert G. Vanderbilt II, in 2007. About 100,000 attendees are expected at this year’s Preakness, on Saturday, May 21. The favorite, Nyquist, won the Kentucky Derby May 7.

A distillery for Sagamore Spirit, under construction in the Port Covington section of Baltimore, is expected to open to the public by early 2017, complete with tasting rooms. The rye, currently aged out of state, is cut to 83 proof with springwater that bubbles up through the limestone on Plank’s farm.

Two Georgetown liquor stores sell Plank’s Sagamore Spirit for $44.99 per 750-ml bottle.

“The guys like it,” said Steve Feldman of Potomac Wine & Spirits at 33rd and M Streets. “It’s kind of a sweet rye.”

Hop, Cask & Barrell — on Wisconsin Avenue near R Street — also had about six bottles left, pre-Preakness.

Richard Selden • May 19, 2016

The weather cleared up and the crowds turned out for the annual Spring Art Walk in Georgetown’s Book Hill section last Friday. One of the half-dozen exhibitions that welcomed visitors that night, in a pop-up space at 1666 33rd St. NW, is called “High Art | Low Art: Works by David Richardson and Ari Post.”

(There will be another open-house reception at the gallery with Richardson and Post on Friday May 20, from 5 – 9p.m.)

The two artists, who met in a Dupont Circle art gallery in 2009, are unlikely colleagues: a Marine Corps Lieutenant who was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and a manager of curatorial programs for the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries (Post, art critic for The Georgetowner, is the latter).

The first two rooms contain eight large paintings and one small one from Richardson’s “Trojan War Series”: abstract oils that suggest Richard Diebenkorn in their varied combinations of lines and planes and Mark Rothko in their strong, layered colors. A distorted tic-tac-toe motif that at times seems to transform into landscape is rooted in the Japanese stone markers that inspired an earlier series by Richardson.

Other than the series title and the names of the paintings — for example, “Achilles Seeking Kleos” — the signs that these works are about the experience of combat are, literally, signs (they could be considered sculptures but are not identified as such). Three quotes are painted on groupings of boards on the walls. And powerful Diomedes/froze him with a Glance/”Not a word of retreat./You’ll Never Persuade me…” reads one, one phrase per board. In the center of the second room stands a stanchion — a charred board, with text painted on one side and the locations of battles on the other, set vertically in cement with a military knife for a pinnacle.

The remaining room on the first floor displays Post’s work in several media. Two painted portraits are simultaneously decorative and aggressive, with hints of both Henri Matisse and Alice Neel. In between them is the hard-to-look-away-from “Plisa,” a dense clustering of more than 200 small heads, somber white faces bordered by shadows in charcoal and India ink. It brings to mind the Holocaust and, in fact, is named for the Lithuanian village of Post’s ancestors.

On the opposite wall are pairs of animal illustrations. In each case, the ink drawing and the linoblock print are so dissimilar — not only in medium but in style — that one would never guess they were by the same artist (never mind by the creator of the portraits and “Plisa”). In several of the linoblocks, the strokes within the animal’s outline are not meant to represent its hide, instead resembling the patterns of paper-cut art.

The ink drawings — storybook animals — are preparation for what you’ll find upstairs. Post, who calls newspaper comics and political cartoons “his first true loves,” has drawn caricatures, mounted in gilt frames, of would-be presidential nominees Clinton, Cruz, Kasich, Sanders and Trump. Surrounding them is a series of 34 small drawings titled “The Four Humors, and Other Temperaments,” which could have come from the pen of Richard Thompson, creator of “Cul de Sac” in the Washington Post.

These illustrations, however, are from the Ari Post, a virtual newspaper intended, yes, to entertain us, but also to help us face our true and often neurotic natures. Post has taken the ancient theory of the four humors, believed for centuries to determine the moods and character types of individuals, to a new level of subtlety (with a good dash of irony).

Among the titles of his cartoon snapshots: “Confronting one’s inherent banality,” “Hungry, but not really hungry” and (under what is perhaps a portrait of the artist as a young man) “Misplaced guilt which, like a phantom limb, is but the tingling reminder of having renounced your Jewish faith.”

In the other room on the second floor are earlier works by Richardson that incorporate symbols such as skulls, Statues of Liberty and Uncle Sams. There are also three reproductions of a signboard for, presumably, a gym in Ramadi, showing an Iraqi barbell-lifter. To recreate its destruction by street gunfire, which he witnessed in 2006, Richardson took a shotgun to the three paintings, blowing away half of the third.

One of Post’s most impressive works is in that room, a tall, narrow painting with five heads stacked vertically. Perhaps referencing a strip of movie frames or photo-booth pictures, it is a portrait of painter Philip Guston, an Abstract Expressionist who later adopted a cartoonish representational style. Each head, bordered by the four letters of the subject’s name, “Phil,” is colored differently, two only in yellow on the white canvas.

Note: There will be another reception with Richardson and Post this Friday, May 20, from 5 to 9 p.m.
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Richard Selden • May 16, 2016

John Dukes Schroeder, the hardcore punk rocker known as John Stabb, died Saturday of stomach cancer, age 54. ‘Boycott Cancer,’ Sunday’s John Stabb benefit show at the Black Cat, became a memorial.

Lead singer for ’80s band Government Issue, Schroeder was called the “Clown Prince of Punk.”

“We wanted to mix the anger with humor,” he told the Vinyl District. He was featured in the documentary “Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington D.C.”

The name Stabb came from the earlier incarnation of Government Issue, a band called the Stab. Schroeder performed solo and with others since G.I.’s 1989 breakup. His most recent band was History Repeated.

Bobby Polsky, who owned Smash Records when it was on M Street in Georgetown (it moved to Adams Morgan in 2007) told WTOP that when the singer came to the store with records and T-shirts, “he would ask about new bands. He was always interested in local bands.”

Schroeder had been diagnosed in February. He is survived by his wife, Mina Devadas.