Richard Selden • May 25, 2016

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.
[gallery ids="102233,129440,129434" nav="thumbs"]

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.

Richard Selden •

On Friday, Paul Wiedefeld, general manager of Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, announced “SafeTrack,” a plan to carry out three years of repairs to D.C.’s Metrorail system in a single year.

The planned work is to include repairs to rails, insulators, fasteners, ventilation systems, tunnel lighting and third-rail cables, boots and cover boards, as well as radio-system installation, debris cleaning and tunnel leak-mitigation and washing.

Starting Friday, June 3, according to the plan, extended weekend service will be eliminated, with the system closing at midnight every night. Over the course of the year, there will be 15 SafeTrack Surges, “long-duration outages on selected line segments,” the first to be on the Blue Line between Franconia and Van Dorn, from June 4 to 19.

The stated goal is to continue to provide a minimum level of service, with single tracking or “bus bridges” — shuttles of 40 to 50 buses — connecting stations, such as between Braddock Road and National Airport from July 5 to 12 and between Pentagon City and National Airport from July 12 to 19.

The draft plan awaits approval by the WMATA board, chaired by Ward 2 Council member Jack Evans. Wiedefeld, who started as GM last November, did not provide an estimate for the work’s total cost, saying that the funds will come from Metro’s capital-improvement budget, with some taken from future years.

Among those commenting on the “tough medicine,” in Wiedefeld’s phrase, was President Obama. “It is just one more example of the underinvestments that have been made,” he said. “We’ve known for years now that we are $1 trillion or $2 trillion short in terms of necessary infrastructure repair.” The president placed the blame on “an ideology that says government spending is necessarily bad.”

Richard Selden • May 9, 2016

ZGF Architects, a firm based in Portland, Oregon, with offices in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., has been chosen from a pool of eight to carry out a feasibility study for an aerial gondola between Georgetown and Rosslyn, Virginia. The firm worked on the preliminary concept for the Portland Aerial Tram.

The selection was announced today by the Georgetown-Rosslyn Gondola Executive Committee, a coalition of the Rosslyn and Georgetown Business Improvement Districts; the D.C. and Arlington County governments; Georgetown University; and developers JBG, Penzance and Gould Properties.

Georgetown BID CEO and President Joe Sternlieb said in the announcement that ZGF “brought together the most experienced team of subject matter experts in engineering, transportation, and economics from across the country to serve as subcontractors and contribute to the study.”

The study has a five-month project schedule and a budget of approximately $190,000.

Richard Selden • May 5, 2016

“Historical literacy,” according to public historian and R Street resident Brent D. Glass, “is more than simply knowing the names of leaders or when famous battles were fought. It involves understanding the context of historical events and how events are connected.”

Having devoted his career to the cause of historical literacy, the director emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History decided to take action in a direct and personal way: He wrote a book.

Published this spring, Glass’s “50 Great American Places: Essential Historic Sites Across the U.S.” doesn’t read like a lecture from your American history teacher, unless you had an unusually inspiring one. In an inviting, conversational style, Glass captures some of the atmosphere of the places his entries describe.

Better yet, many of his Great American Places are well-chosen surprises.

Yes, Great American Place No. 1 is the National Mall, here in D.C. But No. 50 is “Malls of America.” Glass uses the plural because that entry covers the history of the enclosed shopping mall, from the 1956 debut of modernist architect Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, to the gargantuan Mall of America, which opened in 1992 in nearby Bloomington.

Along the way, the reader gets a capsule history of suburbanization, with a cross-reference to the phenomenon’s 19th-century roots, nurtured in books like “The American Woman’s Home,” written in 1869 by Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe (Stowe’s Hartford, Connecticut, home, along with that of her neighbor, Mark Twain, is Great American Place No. 25).

By grouping sites both geographically and thematically, Glass has written an enjoyable volume for the hammock (or the bathroom) as well as a guidebook. You may want to get one copy for the car and one to keep handy at home.

The entries between the Mall and the Malls are roughly chronological. Glass checks in at the Liberty Bell (No. 9), the Alamo (No. 18) and Pearl Harbor (No. 41, get it?), but also touches down at key spots in the history of American art, science and social change.

Famed biographer David McCullough, who met Glass — then head of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission — in 1989 at the centennial of the Johnstown Flood, calls attention in the book’s forward to the choice of a farmhouse in Red Cloud, Nebraska, as Great American Place No. 26 (“Willa Cather’s Great Prairie”):

“[Pioneer woman] Annie Pavelka and her story were the inspiration for Willa Cather’s famous masterpiece ?My Ántonia,’ and to stand there beside the storm cellar into which she rushed her children when tornadoes struck is to feel the ?power of place’ in no uncertain terms.”

As much as anyone, McCullough has shown that history doesn’t have to go down like medicine. Well-written narratives can motivate us both to want to learn more and to experience in person the places that shaped our nation. Glass’s book contains many such motivating moments, neatly packaged for 21st-century lives.

Richard Selden • April 27, 2016

The 13th annual French Market, along the boutique-and-gallery-filled Book Hill section of Wisconsin Avenue, will run for three days instead of two, Friday, April 29, through Sunday, May 1.

Organized by the Georgetown Business Improvement District and sponsored by TD Bank, the French Market isn’t strictly French, but as you sample a croissant, sip Sancerre and sidewalk-shop, you may feel that you’re spending the afternoon in Paris (or, at least, Europe).

The blocks between P Street and Reservoir Road, where Book Hill Park begins, will be enlivened with music, street performers and activities for kids on Saturday and Sunday. The Saturday music line-up includes Swing Guitars DC with Daisy Castro, Bitter Dose Combo and Mary Alouette and the Crew. On Sunday, Laissez Foure (how clever can you get?) will perform.

The French Market is not only kid-friendly, but dog-friendly. On Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., visitors can have their picture taken with their dog(s) at the Parisian Pup Photo Booth, courtesy of A-list Photo Booths. Unleashed by Petco is providing treats.

Also on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Revolution Cycles and DC Bike Ride are offering free bicycle spot checks in the parking lot at Wisconsin and P Street. The first 100 bicyclists who stop by Patisserie Poupon’s booth in the same lot will receive a free gift bag.

Speaking of bags, on Sunday between noon and 3 p.m. in the TD Bank parking lot at Wisconsin and Q Street, a limited-edition Georgetown French Market tote bag will be screen-printed by Soul & Ink before your very eyes for $10 (while they last).

Friday and Saturday hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday hours are noon to 5 p.m. About three dozen shops and cafes are offering French Market discounts of up to 75 percent. Here is the list (or, as they say in French, la liste), adapted from the Georgetown BID website:

A MANO, 1677 Wisconsin: Clearance, up to 75 percent off.
Appalachian Spring, 1455 Wisconsin: Broken Hearts Sale, up to 50 percent off.
Artist’s Proof, 1533 Wisconsin: Spring art collection, prints by Carol Rowan, John Stango and others, 20 percent off coffee-table art books by Phaidon and Taschen.
Bacchus Wine Cellar, 1635 Wisconsin: Six-pack of wines in a canvas tote for $50, samples offered for tasting prior to purchase, 15 percent off all French wines.
Cafe Bonaparte, 1522 Wisconsin: Sweet and savory crepe stand, $5 per crepe.
Cross MacKenzie Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin: Discounts on all artwork in the gallery and affordable functional ceramic pieces outside.
Egg by Susan Lazar, 1661 Wisconsin: Sample sale items, 20 percent off everything full price.
Ella Rue, 3231 P: In-store basement sale and sidewalk sale, $30- and $20-and-under racks, 50 percent off jewelry on Wisconsin in front of Carine’s, Steals & Deals 50 to 75 percent off.
Georgetown Lutheran Church, 1556 Wisconsin: Church and garden open to visitors, free treats.
Georgetown Olive Oil Co., 1524 Wisconsin: Free small bottle of Champagne wine vinegar with purchase, 15 to 30 percent off select items, French-inspired variety packs and gifts.
Illusions Salon of Georgetown, 1629 Wisconsin: Parisian-inspired hair show, Kerasilk launch party hosted by Goldwell, giveaways, beauty tips from the Illusions Team, complimentary makeup applications by a Jane Iredale artist, discounts on selected items.
Jaco Juice & Taco Bar, 1614 Wisconsin: 15 percent off regular-menu items, special limited tasting menu, fresh juices and smoothies.
Jaryam, 1531 Wisconsin: 70 percent off select clothing.
LiLi The First, 1419 Wisconsin: 15 percent off regular-price items and 50 percent off sale items.
Little Birdies Boutique, 1526 Wisconsin: 50 percent off past-season styles and headbands and bows, newborn to size 10 designer clothing on sale including French children’s clothing lines Baby Dior, Petite Plume, Petite Annette and Petite Bateau, French-inspired baby plates, sippy cups, bowls, utensils.
Lynn Louisa, 1631 Wisconsin: Up to 70 percent off, including Parisian designer brands Margaux Lonnberg and Gat Rimon apparel, Adeline Affre jewelry.
Manny and Olga’s Pizza, 1641 Wisconsin: $3 fresh pizza slices, $1 drinks.
Marston Luce, 1651 Wisconsin: Selection of 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century French and Swedish furniture and accessories, carefully chosen jewelry.
Matt Camron Rugs, 1651 Wisconsin: Rugs and textiles.
Maurine Littleton Gallery, 1667 Wisconsin: 20 percent off SwitchWood interchangeable wooden bow ties, 10 percent off monogrammed cuff links.
Moss & Co., 1657 Wisconsin: Up to 75 percent off, assortment of home accessories, antiques (including French antiques), furniture, garden items, jewelry.
Patisserie Poupon, 1645 Wisconsin: Illy coffee station, French pastries including croissants, kouign amman, eclairs, tarts and macarons, grilled specialties including merguez, flank steak, chicken and toulouse sausage, French tablecloths, linens and handmade baskets.
Pho Viet & Grille, 1639 Wisconsin: 30 to 40 percent off Vietnamese sandwiches, Viet salad and Viet coffee drink.
Pretty Chic, 1671 Wisconsin: 60 percent off throughout the entire store excluding consignment items, Secret Garden Special with $5, $10 and $20 racks.
Reddz Trading, 1413 Wisconsin: 20 percent off everything in the store excluding Chanel and Hermès.
Sherman Pickey, 1647 Wisconsin: 20 percent off everything in the store excluding Chanel and Hermès.
Susan Calloway Fine Arts, 1643 Wisconsin: Classic modern designs inspired by Chinese ceramics by Georgetown-based Middle Kingdom Ceramics at street level, 40 percent off antique and vintage French paintings inside.
TD Bank, 1611Wisconsin: Portraits by caricature artist on Saturday.
The Bean Counter, 1665 Wisconsin: 10 percent off sandwiches.
The Phoenix, 1514 Wisconsin: 20 percent off jewelry by French designer Selen, 20 to 50 percent off spring and fall clothing from Eileen Fisher, Oska, White + Warren.
Via Umbria, 1525 Wisconsin: Discounted Italian olive oils, foods and ceramics, French cooking class and dinner with chef-sommelier Vickie Reh on Friday at 7:30 p.m.
Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1641 Wisconsin: Friday from 1 to 3 p.m., “Make and Take” prints for children 3-12.
Zannchi, 1529 Wisconsin: Special Kimbap (rolls) and tea.

Richard Selden • April 20, 2016

Urban Pace, a D.C.-based firm that provides real estate developers with sales, marketing and advisory services on new residential projects, will become part of the Long & Foster group.

The partnership, representing an investment in Urban Pace by the Long & Foster Companies — the parent of Long & Foster Real Estate, the nation’s largest privately owned real estate firm — was announced today.

“In regions like Washington, D.C., urban developments — whether they’re high-rise or townhouse-style condos — are thriving, and our team at Long & Foster recognized the opportunities for our company’s and our agents’ growth by partnering with a firm like Urban Pace,” said Jeffrey S. Detwiler, president and COO of the Long & Foster Companies.

“In addition to our base office in Washington, D.C., we now operate in New York City and Philadelphia as well,” said newly appointed CEO of Urban Pace Lynn Hackney, previously the firm’s president. “We’ve noticed that several successful firms using our business model — working directly with real estate developers — have been strengthened substantially by their affiliations with large residential real estate brokerage firms.”

Urban Pace will continue to operate under its same brand and team at the current office location at 1919 14th St. NW.

Richard Selden • April 18, 2016

Billing itself as a “full-service, boutique fitness studio,” the first BLAST outside Georgia — just west of Georgetown, at 2311 M St. NW — held its grand opening March 19.

The brand’s backstory will sound familiar to many.

In the course of carrying her second child, founder Missi Wolf put on weight — a lot of weight. Five feet tall, after giving birth she weighed 206 pounds and had 34 percent body fat. Her doctor categorized her as morbidly obese and borderline diabetic.

That was motivating. Wolf immediately began researching, studying and experimenting in order to create her own personal fitness program, which enabled her to lose 100 pounds in two years and get her body fat out of the danger zone (in the ‘after’ photograph on the website, Wolf has also become a blonde).

That crash program evolved into BLAST, an acronym for Balanced Level of Aerobic and Strength Training. The three parts of the program are classes, metabolic testing and nutritional coaching. Wolf opened her first studio in Atlanta in 2008.

Among the five instructors at the D.C. location are Christa A., a cheerleader for the football team with the objectionable name, whose power song is “Anything” by Calvin Harris. To read more instructor profiles, schedule a class and connect with the BLAST community, visit theblastlife.com.

Richard Selden • April 8, 2016

A National Historic Landmark, the Seventh Regiment Armory on Manhattan’s Upper East Side made an about-face in 2007.
The one-time drill hall for New York’s aristocracy — with interiors by Tiffany, Stanford White and the Herter Brothers, among others — had become best known as a cavernous venue for high-end antiques shows.

That year, the massive brick castle became the home of Park Avenue Armory, a nonprofit that undertook the building’s restoration and began to program performances and contemporary art installations. The Royal Shakespeare Company came for six weeks one summer and the Merce Cunningham Company danced its last there. Visitors listened in the dark to “The Murder of Crows,” a sound piece by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller; swung on giant swings amid dangling sheets at Ann Hamilton’s “The Event of a Thread”; and marveled at Paul McCarthy’s pornographic take on Snow White, “WS.”

Almost singlehandedly, the Armory has made the Upper East Side hip. (The next major installation, “Martin Creed: The Back Door,” opens June 8.) Its avant-garde events have been so successful that last year the New York Art, Antique & Jewelry Show, an annual rental of $300,000 or so, was evicted; the 2016 show will be at Pier 94 in November.

But two of the most prestigious shows of their kind in the world are still Armory tenants. The Winter Antiques Show will return in January 2017. This weekend, April 7 to 10, more than 200 of the top U.S. and international vendors of rare books, maps, manuscripts and ephemera will be at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair.

A short walk up Park Avenue from the Armory is the Asia Society Museum, between 70th and 71st streets, where “Kamakura: Realism and Spirituality in the Sculpture of Japan” is on view through May 8. The exhibition focuses on sculpture from the politically turbulent Kamakura period (1185 to 1333), when artists and their workshops were commissioned by the warrior class to create Buddhist icons of exceptional realism, power and technical excellence.

Meanwhile, the big news on the Upper East Side is the opening, last month, of the Met Breuer. With the Whitney Museum of Art in a new Renzo Piano building in the Meatpacking District (at the southern terminus of the High Line), the Metropolitan Museum of Art has taken over the old Whitney, at Madison Avenue and 75th Street, a Brutalist icon designed by Marcel Breuer.

The inaugural exhibition at what this writer calls the Metney (until I hear from both museums’ lawyers) is “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,” running through Sept. 4. Under the direction of Sheena Wagstaff, named the Met’s chair of modern and contemporary art, a new department, in 2012, the show’s curators selected nearly 200 works — by contemporary artists and by big names from Rembrandt to Rauschenberg — that were never completed or “partake of a non finito … aesthetic that embraces the unresolved and open-ended.”

About eight blocks away, at what is now identified as the Met Fifth Avenue, the top-billed special exhibition is “Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France.” Closing May 15, the display of 80 paintings and pastels is said to be the painter’s first retrospective “in modern times.”

Finally, across Fifth Avenue from the “Big Met,” the exquisite Neue Galerie on the corner of 86th Street is the sole U.S. venue for “Munch and Expressionism,” through June 13. Organized with the Munch Museum in Oslo, the exhibition will explore the mutual influences among Edvard Munch and his German and Austrian contemporaries, including Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.
[gallery ids="102397,122717" nav="thumbs"]