Pedestrian traffic only

The 17.4 inches of snowfall recorded at Reagan National Airport yesterday is was the fourth biggest snowstorm in DC’s history of officially recorded storms, the Washington Post says. That doesn’t count the 36 inches of snow the area received in 1722, recorded in the diaries of both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Of course, the District of Columbia wasn’t a district or the nation’s capital then, nor did the nation itself even exist. But our Founding Fathers were faithfully chronicling the Virginia weather with quill pens and sheepskin.

The worst officially recorded snowstorm was the 1922 Knickerbocker Storm, so named because it caused the collapse of the flat-roofed Knickerbocker Theater in Washington, killing 98 people.

From here in Capitol Hill, where the power lines are fortunately underground so that we still have power and heat, the 2010 Snowmageddon has been fun. Yesterday we ventured out on foot at midday. The streets had been plowed, somewhat, probably for the benefit of the firetrucks down the street. Everyone was walking in the street, even on Pennsylvania Avenue, as the sidewalks were impassable. An SUV would pass by only occasionally. Kids were sledding at the Capitol, and a lot of photographers were out. The Harris Teeter grocery store near Potomac Avenue was open, bless them. We didn’t make it to Dupont, but some 2,000 people celebrated there with a giant snowball fight.

The sunny weather today seems to have brought everyone out, digging out their cars and shoveling their sidewalks. We walked to Eastern Market, which was closed for the second day. It was a gorgeous day, perfect for skiing, if only you could get to a hill. It took Joe more than an hour to dig out our little car from the driveway, while I wisely opted to upload photos.

Tomorrow morning I’m scheduled to fly to Detroit, but BWI has cleared only one of its two runways as of this afternoon, so we shall see. The federal government is closed, so that should slow things down considerably. Besides that, more snow is possible Tuesday and Wednesday. Meanwhile, I hear Detroit is snow-deprived…

More of my photos on Flickr

The DC/MD/VA Snowpocalypse Flickr pool

It’s supposed to snow 16 to 24 inches Friday and Saturday, which would be the first time since 1986 that DC has received two snowstorms of 10 inches or more in a winter. (We got 16 inches on Dec. 19, which seem to have been enjoyed by everyone, as it brought Christmas vacation early. Except perhaps for that cop who pulled a gun in a snowball fight.)

And even though the first snowflake has yet to fall, and even though the 6 inches of snow we were supposed to get Wednesday turned into only 2 inches, yet schools were still canceled outside the district, PANIC is gripping the city. Our local Safeway was more insane than usual tonight, with people buying jugs of water and cases of beer. Tomorrow’s business meetings are being canceled, and federal government workers are on unscheduled leave, meaning, I guess, that they can have the day off if they can’t make it in. Channel 9 is teaching people how to shovel snow (You have to get under the snow with the shovel, apparently.)

The National Weather Service says, “A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW… SLEET…AND ICE ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. STRONG WINDS ARE ALSO POSSIBLE. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY HAZARDOUS OR NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE FRIDAY NIGHT.”

All right, we have our boots and coats, though we left the snow shovel in Michigan. We can walk to the grocery store. We have enough alcohol to last the weekend, or at least 48 hours. Good luck to all of you!

Fountain at the McNamara Terminal at DTW

Chances are you’ve seen Fuller’s work, in fountains where jets of water appear solid and ropelike. The secret is creating zero-turbulence water streams, called laminars. Some of their most popular fountains are at the Bellagio casino (see YouTube videos) in Las Vegas, which dance to music, and the leaping streams at EPCOT (one of Fuller’s early works, as a Disney Imagineer).

In Michigan, you can see work by WET at the McNamara Terminal at Detroit Metro Airport (see Youtube videos), at Campus Martius and the Compuware headquarters in downtown Detroit, and at the Somerset Collection (don’t call it a mall!) in Troy. I can attest that the fountain at DTW is a calming presence conveniently located near a Starbucks stand, a nice place to stop for a few moments and watch the travelers rushing by. In Washington, WET Design created the fountain at the International Monetary Fund Headquarters, installed in 2005.

WET Design has a highly experiential web site, with photos and videos of their creations. Click on Creations, then navigate either through the map or the timeline. Take a look at the huge Dubai fountains, completed in April 2009, and the Revson Fountain at the Lincoln Center, subject of the New Yorker piece.

The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress

By Joseph B. White

Here’s a mind-expanding way to spend a few free hours in Washington. Go to the Library of Congress, pay homage to the Gutenberg Bible on display not far from the main entrance and visit the replica of Thomas Jefferson’s library on the second floor. Then, go see the real Library.

To get there, take the elevator at the back of the first floor entry hall to the C (cellar) level, and enter the underground tunnels that connect the LOC’s main buildings. Follow the signs for reader registration. Essentially, you are getting a library card for the biggest library in the country.

It’s easy. You show a photo ID, enter some personal data in the computer system, and soon you have a freshly minted photo ID, a bar-coded pass to the collections, good for two years. On the way back to the Jefferson building, stop at the underground cafeteria on the way back for a cup of coffee (not great) and a chunk of red velvet cake (ok, not great, either).

After my coffee break, I took my new all-access pass to the American Folklife Center reading room, back in the Jefferson building room LJ G53. This is the home of the amazing collection of blues and folk music collected by Alan Lomax during a 70-year career.

The Folklife Center librarians are friendly, and apparently quite used to dealing with blues geeks who wander in babbling about Lomax. That’s what I did, and before I knew it, I had been presented with a copy of Lomax’s book about his travels recording blues musicians in the Jim Crow era South, “The Land Where the Blues Began.” Also pressed into my hands was a computer printout listing some of Lomax’s recordings from a 1942 trip through the Mississippi Delta during which he recorded, among others, Son House and a young singer listed as “MacKinley Morganfield.” That’s Muddy Waters to you.

I asked to listen to some Son House and recordings of a gospel group called the Friendly Five Harmony Singers. (Muddy Waters seemed too obvious.)

One of the librarians rolled over to my chair an ancient, reel-to-reel tape recorder, roughly the size of a suitcase and mounted to a rolling stand. It had a sticker identifying it as the property of National Public Radio – I assume NPR donated this antique to the Library for the purpose of allowing people like me to listen to these classic Lomax field recording in a vintage way. Because that’s what you get – a scuffed cardboard box that contains a reel-to-reel tape. Not a CD. Not a cassette.

The librarian threaded the tape, handed me the headphones and Presto! My head’s in a hotel room in Mississippi in July 1942 where Son House is explaining to Lomax how he tunes his guitar. (I think he called it, “A down low.” I couldn’t follow it without guitar in hand, but if I had one, I would have had all the notes, played two or three times by Mr. House.)

I listened to two reels worth of Son House – “American Defense Blues,” about the virtues of the World War II military buildup, and more familiar songs like the “Death Letter Blues,” listed in the catalogue as “Walking Blues.” I listened to The Friendly Five Harmony Singers sing old, old school gospel. A final tape had a long monologue identified only as “Talking to colored fellow about Jefferson Davis.” But it was time to go.

This was just one sliver of the Lomax collection, which is in turn just a fraction of all the folk music collected in this section of the library.

The one downside: Even with the fancy library card, you can’t take the tapes out of the building. Of course, even if you did, who’s got a reel-to-reel?

We visited the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden yesterday afternoon. It’s the circular — actually, cylindrical — building on the Mall. Part of the Smithsonian Institution, it features a large collection of modern and abstract paintings and sculptures. It opened to the public in 1969 with the donated collection of financier Joseph H. Hirshhorn. He kept collecting, however, and upon his death in 1981, his bequest nearly doubled the size of the museum’s collection.

The architecture is striking and the art is interesting. Some of it seems kind of ’60s-ish and trite, now. For example, you can find several sculptures made of recycled car parts that would look at home at the Ann Arbor Art Fairs with water spouting out of them. Also, they often have silly titles (”Are Years What? For Marianne Moore” by Mark di Suvero, for a giant red painted steel structure with another piece of steel hanging from a cable), as if the artist disdains the idea of explaining something about his/her work.

So: Today’s activity is match the sculptures in the photos below with their titles, listed below the photos. The first person to answer them all correctly will win a high-priced coffee drink. (Leave your correct email address so I can contact you.) If you can’t see the whole sculpture in the thumbnail below, click on it to see the full image.

The sculptures

The titles
A. King and Queen
B. Monument to Balzac
C. Two-Piece Reclining Figure: Points
D. Last Conversation Piece
E. Song of the Little Frog
F. Untitled
G. Boccioni’s Fist – Lines of Force II
H. Post-Balzac
I. Column Of Peace
J. Monsoon Drift
K. Voltri XV
L. Seated Woman on a Bench

Not a great photo, but you get an idea of the intimate setting

It was a one-time only show (at least it was the only show this year), so excuse me for raving about a concert you’ve already missed, but Sunday’s performance of selections from The Messiah at St. Peter’s Catholic Church on Capitol Hill by its choir and orchestra was really, really wonderful.

St. Peter’s has a small but powerful choir directed by Kevin O’Brien that entirely filled the medium-sized church with sound. I’ve listened to The Messiah many times, most often on an iPod, but hearing such a high-quality performance live in a perfect space is uniquely thrilling. The 24-member choir featured both professional and non-professional soloists. All of them had fine voices and had mastered their very demanding parts: Soprano Anastasia Robinson, alto Marjorie Bunday tenor James Marsh, and bass-baritone Charles Hyland. While the women were wonderful, it inspires me most to see non-professionals in leading roles: Dr. Marsh is a physician by day, and Mr. Hyland is a vocal performance student at Catholic University.

The choir, accompanied by Mr. O’Brien on harpsichord and a string ensemble, sang all the crowd-pleasing choruses (including For the Glory; All We, Like Sheep; the Hallelujah Chorus) along with many airs by soloists. Shall I just say here that I have giggled uncontrollably over the ““We, like sheep” chorus at a live concert in my youth. I still can’t hear it without thinking of poor lonely shepherds. However, once you get past the unfortunate confusion over the comma, it really is a complex and gorgeous song.

The concert was free, but donations were accepted for the benefit of the Capitol Hill Group Ministry. Go next year if you love The Messiah. Or if you like sheep.

The purse, made in Detroit

I stayed downtown late tonight taking advantage of the late-night sale at Macy’s on G Street. By the time I was done, I had two big shopping bags, plus my backpack and purse. I got on the Blue Line at Metro Center and got off 15 minutes later at Potomac Avenue. I went up the escalator to exit the station. I didn’t have my purse. The train was gone.

Panicked, I knocked on the window and got the Potomac Avenue station manager’s attention. He immediately took the retrieval of my purse as a personal mission. “All right, we’re gonna try and catch it,” he said. He called the Stadium-Armory station manager.

A few minutes later, incredibly, the Stadium-Armory station manager had the purse. A man on the train had turned it in.

To say I was relieved would be a colossal understatement. You know the hassle of having no cash or plastic. Worse, because my spouse is out of town, I would have had to call the landlord to get into the apartment. And what was his number, again? Instead, all I had to do was get on the train again and find the Stadium-Armory station manager. He seemed to think it was pretty miraculous, too, and insisted I check to make sure everything was there. Yes, it was: Smart Card, cash, credit cards, keys.

So let me offer a huge public thank you to the Potomac Avenue station manager, M. Wright, and to the Stadium station manager, whose name I failed to get. Nor do I know the name of the man who turned my purse in, but I thank him greatly and wish him some really excellent karma for Christmas.