Erin McCann – We Love DC http://www.welovedc.com Your Life Beyond The Capitol Mon, 28 Oct 2019 04:41:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.9.9 We Love Music: Middle Brother @ 9:30 Club, 3/2/11 http://www.welovedc.com/2011/03/04/we-love-music-middle-brother-at-930-club-3211/ http://www.welovedc.com/2011/03/04/we-love-music-middle-brother-at-930-club-3211/#comments Fri, 04 Mar 2011 20:00:36 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=65002 Middle Brother-21

All photos by Erin McCann

Wednesday night̵…

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Middle Brother-21

All photos by Erin McCann

Wednesday night’s show at the 9:30 Club was the start of a high-profile tour for Middle Brother. It’s a side-project for its members, all of whom have highly respected bands on the cusp of greatness of their own to tend to. For less-talented musicians, gambling time away from their primary projects might kill the hard-won momentum they’d built up. For the members of Middle Brother—Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith, Deer Tick’s John McCaulay and Delta Spirit’s Matt Vasquez, all of them darlings of the indie music culture—the side project turned out to be a shot of adrenaline for a bunch of guys already riding pretty high on their own. Wednesday’s show took some seriously high-energy bands, tumbled their members together in a free-for-all of booze, musicianship and friendship, and spit out a rocket fuel concoction that propelled its members even higher. It ranked among the best I’ve seen on the 9:30 Club stage. So, first things first: Thank you, guys. That was a hell of a night.

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On this leg of the tour, Middle Brother’s opening acts are a natural fit: seeing as how half their members are the headliners, it made perfect sense to bring Dawes and Deer Tick out as the openers. And seeing as how the people at a Middle Brother show are logically fans of its members’ other projects, it was an especially great touch to allow both openers to play a full set of songs before getting to the main act. It required a huge commitment from the fans, and an even bigger one from the performers who would be asked to run an endurance test throughout the night.

In a normal show, Band A would go play, then chill out while Band B and Band C perform. With Middle Brother, the members of all three bands wandered freely into each others’ sets throughout the night, so we got Deer Tick’s John McCaulay playing the harmonica during the end of Dawes’ set, and Matt Vasquez playing guitar and singing on a few Deer Tick songs. Even the bands’ supporting members couldn’t catch a break–Dawes bassist Wylie Gelber came out to back up Middle Brother on a few songs. By the end of the night, even Deer Tick drummer Dennis Ryan was out on stage singing lead vocals while the rest of the gang was too busy hitting drums and shaking things and playing off each other on guitar to be bothered to sing. Actually, let’s clarify that: by the end of the night, EVERYONE was out on stage, even a random guy from the crowd who guzzled some Jack Daniels before diving from the stage into a pile of very confused, plaid-clad hipsters who weren’t packed nearly tight enough to catch him. (I think he was probably too drunk to have cared. Or noticed.)

And all night long, like a lost country cousin who just happened to get on the tour bus, performer Johnny Corndawg popped into the sets for a song or two. Corndawg, clad all in denim, is a performer who commands your attention. After Middle Brother winds its way to SXSW this month, Dawes and Deer Tick drop off the bill, and Corndawg will be filling the opening-act role all by himself for the West Coast dates. It will be a dramatic change to the show, and while I don’t doubt the West Coasters will be treated to a great show, I feel sorry for them that they’ll never get to see the particular mix we did on Wednesday night. Because wow.

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All night long, the stage was full of personalities and old friends. Their chemistry—musically and personally—was palpable and incredible, reminiscent of those great evenings you sometimes get to spend just hanging out with some of your favorite friends. Like a lot of groups, there’s the impish screwup (hi there, John McCaulay), and there’s the down-to-business guy who keeps the show rolling (looking at you, Taylor Goldsmith). And, finally, there’s the anchor, Matt Vasquez, who bursts out on stage with an energy that forces everyone to like him and a willingness to pick up any instrument and just create something great. Watching him cover Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street” was like watching peanut butter discover jelly, and there was no turning back.

The party got out of hand a time or two. These guys have been playing together for ages, running the same circuit for years, opening for each other, but this was their first night out as a full-fledged show. The night suffered from the sort of timing issues that arise when everyone’s so busy being friends that they forget to attend to the show for a little while. I don’t agree with the decision to alternate Dawes’ and Deer Tick’s spots on the bill: Dawes sets build to a climax that would have served as a magnificent lead in to Middle Brother, but instead all their built-up energy was deflated a bit when Deer Tick came out and John McCaulay seemed more interested in hosting a kegger than performing a show. My friend Nicole mentioned a little after 10:00 that she thought Deer Tick might have been too drunk to know that their set was supposed to have ended 20 minutes earlier. McCaulay is a ham, and I got annoyed with him from time to time, and then he would start singing again and all would be forgiven. But seriously, that’s the worst I can say about that show, that someone on stage appeared to be having too much fun. And that’s hardly a complaint at all, especially when McCaulay rallied, played some Dead Kennedys for the hell of it, and stormed the stage an hour later to almost single-handedly provide the burst of energy Middle Brother needed to kick off the final leg of the night. Drink all you want, McCaulay, as long as you keep singing the way you do, especially on your cover of The Replacements’ “Portland.”

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This was my last 9:30 Club show for a while. I’m picking up and moving to New York in a week, and I’ll be working a schedule that will seriously cut into my concert-going time. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to say goodbye to a venue that has become not only one of my favorite places in the District, but one of my favorite places, period. You hear a lot of artists and music fans talk about how great the 9:30 Club is—Middle Brother did it on stage on Wednesday night—and if I have any last words of advice to the music fans in this city, it’s this: Go. Go see a show. Go experience the bands live. Spend as much time as you possibly can in the 9:30 Club. There is no other experience on earth like seeing a really great sold-out show in that place, and I know how lucky I am to have seen so many of them over the last 6 years. So thanks, Middle Brother, for being on top of your game Wednesday night, and thanks, 9:30 Club, for just being there.

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We Love Music: The Avett Brothers @ DAR Constitution Hall, 2/18/11 http://www.welovedc.com/2011/02/21/we-love-music-the-avett-brothers-dar/ http://www.welovedc.com/2011/02/21/we-love-music-the-avett-brothers-dar/#comments Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:00:14 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=63611 Avett Brothers @ DAR
All photos by Erin McCann

I didn’t much li…

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Avett Brothers @ DAR
All photos by Erin McCann

I didn’t much like the Avett Brothers when I first heard them. The banjo was too much, the vocal harmonies sometimes too off-key, the melodies sometimes just on the other side of pleasant. That changed a little bit for me one day when “Ballad of Love and Hate” from 2007’s “Emotionalism” came on, where the banjo was replaced by an acoustic guitar, and the melody was a simple tale of woe delivered in a clear, mournful voice by Seth Avett. And finally, when “I and Love and You” came out in 2009, and I first heard the chorus to the title track, I was hooked. I got it. I was a convert. I was in love.

Avett Brothers @ DAR

Avett Brothers @ DAR

In part, it was that as the band matured over the last few years, they’ve smoothed out the rough edges that first turned me off. And I also grew to appreciate the rough edges that remained. The Avetts and I, we met in the middle, and judging by the crowd on Friday night, I’ve got plenty of company.

The Avetts are a genre unto themselves. Yeah, there’s a banjo, but the sounds Scott Avett makes come out of it are light years away from the “Deliverance” stereotype. The opener, Jessica Lea Mayfield, was as country as you can get — woman with an acoustic guitar and a twang, backup guitarist in a cowboy hat, songs about a broken heart — but the last song we heard on the sound system before the Avetts took the stage was from the Beastie Boys. When the lights came up two hours later, Nirvana came out. They just put the pieces together, the best pieces they can find buried deep in any musical culture you want to name, and you’re free to call it whatever you want. Watch the first 45 seconds of “Talk on Indolence” here and try to come up with your own adjective that describes what’s going on:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Awesome, in the truest sense of the word. That’s the best one I’ve got.

Avett Brothers @ DAR

Avett Brothers @ DAR

A sibling is a curious creature. My own brother doesn’t quite remember my exact birthday, but our default modes are the same. The Avetts know this strange chemistry, and they use it to their advantage in creating art. Friday opened with the two brothers standing alone before the crowd, Scott with a guitar and Seth with his hands in his back pockets, crooning “Murder in the City”: “I wonder which brother is better, which one our parents love the most,” they harmonized together. “Always remember there is nothing worth sharing like the love that let us share our name.” Scott and Seth have been creating music together for a long time under various configurations and a few different band names, but it’s not for nothing that they have found their footing and their fame under the Avett Brothers name. Each brother is probably better in different ways, but together they are so much greater than the sum of their parts.

And on stage, that sum is multiplied again with the addition of Bob Crawford on bass, Joe Kwon on cello and Jacob Edwards on the drums. Songs like “Will You Come Again” became harder, faster, more boisterous when the full band is partying onstage. And then they followed it with the most country, twangy version of “I Killed Poor Sally’s Lover” imaginable. The Avett Brothers know the genre game, and they’re actively thwarting it, giving the audience almost an overdose of country, taking it just far enough to Opryland before switching that energy into something closer to punk and then flipping around 180 degrees to what can best be described as arena rock. If the phrase “punk banjo” exists, its definition is Scott Avett.

Avett Brothers @ DAR

Avett Brothers @ DAR

Avett Brothers @ DAR

The party was punctuated four or five times through the night when the Avetts stood by themselves before the crowd, these two brothers and their guitars, simply singing and singing simply, stripped of the energy — but not the passion — of their earlier songs. That’s when they brought out songs like “Sanguine” and “Bella Donna.” Listen to this beautiful performance. Or try to, anyway, because I give you about 20  seconds before you want to punch Squealing Harpy Chick in the throat for repeatedly ruining it:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Which brings me to a plea to the ladies (and a few men) of the greater DC area. Yes, the Avetts are pretty. The songs are, too. It’s harder to appreciate both when you are squealing at the most inappropriate moments imaginable. Did you notice the lights dim and everyone else get quiet? Calm down and LISTEN to the beautiful things happening on stage.  That the Avetts continued to be so gracious as the show went on was a testament to their class and not an encouragement to you to keep shouting out marriage proposals. I’m embarrassed for you and for whatever friends you came with, if they even wanted to call themselves that by the end of the night. To put it another way: shut the fuck up. One more time for the slow ones in the back: shut. the. fuck. up. And if you’re incapable of controlling yourself, use one of those acoustic interludes to go visit the beer line again, because it’s clear from your inability to handle yourself in public that that’s where you’re most comfortable.

No, I don’t expect or want silence.  I don’t mind talking during a show, and I absolutely love the shared experience of singing along with a hall full of people, but what happened Friday night was an embarrassment to music fans everywhere. There is a time and a place for shouting, and the moment when two brothers are pouring their hearts out on stage is not it. One friend said over Twitter that the crowd reminded him of a Dave Matthews Band show and wondered if that was the sort of place the Avetts are heading with their fame (ugh). Another said it’s just what happens at DAR, that the place attracts the kind of people who wouldn’t go to smaller, more intimate venues like the 9:30 Club or Black Cat. What do you think, readers? Is it the Avetts’ fans, or DAR, or just the full moon on Friday night that turned normal people into vibe-killing assholes?

Avett Brothers @ DAR

Avett Brothers @ DAR

But here’s the incredible thing about that show: I hated the crowd. Hated it hated it hated it. And it was still one of the best shows I’ve seen in a year. I have been to a lot of shows in the last 12 months, some good, some bad, and this was one of the truly great musical experiences I’ve had in my life. That’s how good the Avetts are. That’s how much they bring to the stage. That’s how much you should be listening to them.

The Avetts are masters at crafting not just a good song, but a good time. Their setlist is a work of art. It has a mood and flow that takes you on a journey: it lifts your heat, fills your body with the urge to smile and move, lifts you again, and pauses at the top for a poignant acoustic interlude before starting the whole process over again with a bang from a kick drum. (Another note to the ladies in the back: that kick drum is your cue to start screaming again. Not, I repeat, when everyone around you is standing in rapturous silence.)

The progression is mirrored on stage. Cellist Joe Kwon started the night standing politely to the left, just chilling, doing his thing. By the end of the night, his bowstrings were shredded and the cello itself was alternately being held under his arm like a guitar and beaten like a drum. Check him out on the far left in the opening moments of this video, doing a jig with bassist Bob Crawford during “I Killed Sally’s Lover” — these guys have built up so much energy during the show that tapping a toe just isn’t enough. Seth and Scott Avett traded off on the keyboards and vocals, like a relay, racing each other from song to song, building up the energy until finally Scott had to bound across the stage and bounce up on a stack of tower speakers just for the release. No one on stage spent much time standing still, bouncing instead and and encouraging the audience to join in the fun. And we did.

Avett Brothers @ DAR

Avett Brothers @ DAR

Avett Brothers @ DAR

Avett Brothers @ DAR

Avett Brothers @ DAR

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Hot Ticket: Avett Brothers @ DAR, 2/18/11 http://www.welovedc.com/2011/02/17/hot-ticket-avett-brothers-dar/ http://www.welovedc.com/2011/02/17/hot-ticket-avett-brothers-dar/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:00:33 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=63178 Straight from last Sunday’s Grammy awar…

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Photo courtesy of the Avett Brothers

Straight from last Sunday’s Grammy awards broadcast, where they performed with Mumford & Sons and Bob Dylan, the Avett Brothers are bringing their show to DAR Constitution Hall on Friday night.

Linguistically speaking, folk rock is a genre that shouldn’t exist. Rock is too powerful, and folk is too sweet, to logically co-exist, right? And yet it does, and it is wonderful, and the result is pretty well captured in that photo at the top of this post: hard-rocking banjo, bluegrass with an edge, energy that rivals the Ramones and melodies and lyrics that wrap themselves around your head and won’t leave until you feel just a bit better about life. Listening to the Avetts, you learn what a kick drum can do to jump-start your heart.

The last time I saw an event at DAR was when Eddie Izzard returned to standup in 2008. The sound was so bad — no, seriously, I missed half the show because I just couldn’t hear anything — I haven’t been back since, missing Vampire Weekend and the Pixies and probably a dozen other great shows since then. The Avetts are that important — and that good — that I am willing to give DAR another chance. Some bands are just worth seeing, no matter what crappy venue they happen to book.

Tickets are through Ticketmaster. Sold out as of this writing, keep checking back for that final batch to be released. Craigslist has a few, too. 8:00. $35 and up, if you can find them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Photos: Old Washington in the Winter http://www.welovedc.com/2011/02/02/photos-old-washington-in-the-winter/ http://www.welovedc.com/2011/02/02/photos-old-washington-in-the-winter/#comments Wed, 02 Feb 2011 20:00:56 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=61729 Taft Inauguration

Photo courtesy of the DC Public Library

I love Fl

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Taft Inauguration

Photo courtesy of the DC Public Library

I love Flickr. Here at We Love DC, we all love Flickr. Without your contributions to our pool, the site would be a lot less colorful. But one of my favorite things about Flickr is The Commons, where museums of the world post selections of their historic photography collections. It can be fun sometimes to spend an hour or two lost in a long-ago world, made all the more enlightening because so many of those photos show scenes of our very city: Washington. As we recover from last week’s snowstorm and as we’re currently dealing with another mess of a weather pattern, it seems like the right time to take a look back at how Washingtonians of the past dealt with winter.

Above photo: The Taft inauguration on March 4, 1909. According to the DC Public Library, 6,000 men worked half the night to clear more than 500 loads of snow from the parade route.

White House Shovelers

Shovelers clear a path to the White House. Date unknown. Photo courtesy of the DC Public Library.

Many of the best photos come from the collection of E.B. Thompson, whose 1904-era lanternslides and glass plate negatives were added to the DC Public Library collection in 1944, as Thompson prepared to retire. In 1904, Thompson operated a store and studio out of 1342 F Street NW, not far from where I currently work at the National Press Building.

1899 Storm

Another E.B. Thompson photo, this one from a snowstorm in 1899. Photo courtesy of the DC Public Library.

How many times did we see that last photo in in February 2010? Wikipedia says blizzard conditions from the 1889 storm reached from Tampa to New England. It dumped 20.5 inches of snow on Washington.

These next two are among my favorites. The colors and tones are all the more stunning when consider that these images were made 100 years ago.

Lafayette Park

Lafayette Park across from the White House, date unknown, also from the E.B. Thompson collection. Photo courtesy of the DC Public Library.

Belasco Theatre

The Belasco Theatre, also from the E.B. Thompson collection, circa 1910. Photo courtesy of the DC Public Library.

The library says the theatre building, shown here from Lafayette Park, was built in 1895. It was razed in 1965 for the U.S. Court of Claims building. This site will tell you more about the history of the spot.

Visitors on the National Mall

A snowrabbit on the Mall in 1978. Photo by Chip Clark, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

Knickerbocker Snowstorm Hits Washington, D.C

A man walks behind the Smithsonian Castle — the area now home to the Haupt Garden — during the Knickerbocker Storm on 1922. Photo courtesy of Smithsonian.

Washington hikers (LOC)

Suffrage activists arriving in Washington in  February 1913. The bundled women were among 12 who had marched from New York City to the Capital in the dead of winter. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

SIB in the Winter

The Smithsonian Castle in 1967. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian.

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Dismemberment Plan: a weekend in tweets http://www.welovedc.com/2011/01/24/dismemberment-plan-a-weekend-in-tweets/ http://www.welovedc.com/2011/01/24/dismemberment-plan-a-weekend-in-tweets/#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 17:00:08 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=60825 Photo

When Dismemberment Plan’s “Emer…

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When Dismemberment Plan’s “Emergency & I” was first released in 1999, “tweet” was the sound a bird made. This weekend, as they played three reunion shows in our city’s finest venues (check back at 3 for Brittany’s review!), it became an often hilarious and sometimes poignant way for some fans to experience the event. Many of you might complain that in the age of smartphones, we’ve forgotten how to kick back and just enjoy the music. But as someone who spent Friday and Saturday night’s shows following along from home, and Sunday night’s show sending photos out to friends who couldn’t make it, I’d argue that there’s some communal value in the concert tweet. There’s room for poignancy, humor and nostalgia in those 140 characters, all of which were on display by some of DC’s tweeters this weekend. Below the jump, a collection of our favorites.

@ctklimek: Travis: I should get my Fugazi pants! Jason: Ian’s gonna punch us all in the balls. #DPlan

@brfreed: Attention dude holding the plaid hat: We can see that your hat is very plaid. Is there anything else you wish to discuss? #dplan

@abeaujon: Funny how time collapses as you get older. Doesn’t feel like so long since I last saw this band but it musta been 2002? Bowery. #Dplan

@travismorrison: @thedplan that was one of the best shows we’ve ever played. I want this weekend to not end. And yeah I sang far east movement.

@abeaujon: Is #dplan show over? Everybody went quiet allofasudden. Valiantly DMing around, searching for clarity. #tbdnight

@Chris__Richards: The main difference between last night’s @thedplan show @BlackCatDC and tonight’s show @930Club is that this room smells like food.

@sommermathis: Travis Morrison’s decision wear a blazer/shirt combo buttoned all the way up a minor tragedy, lady #dplan fans agree. #tbdnight

@sommermathis: Oh he unbuttoned the top button! Much better. #dplan #tbdnight

@sarahgodfrey: “the city” just elicited primal scream from girl on the balcony #dplan @930Club#tbdnight

@heathermg: Emergency & I is on the Wonderland stereo. This whole town is happily sinking into a @dplan shaped hole. Even the bar baby likes it.

@amorrissey: black cat, where the line for @thedplan is no longer blocking access to the red room bar.

@fritzhahn: Man, what are all the blogs in DC going to do for content once the @thedplan shows are over and photos/reviews have been posted? #walewho?

@ahess: I really need to finish watching LOST. Because @travismorrison looks a lot like Daniel Faraday. #dplan

@davestroup: Life is sometimes complicated, sometimes messy, sometimes awkward, sometimes wonderful. #dplan do a great job of expressing that.

@travismorrison: You know who else gets mentioned on twiter by @ariannahuff and @questlovewithin a 12-hour space? BARACK OBAMA. #justsayin

@thedplan: Game time.

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Photos: MAGfest 9 http://www.welovedc.com/2011/01/19/photos-magfest-9/ http://www.welovedc.com/2011/01/19/photos-magfest-9/#comments Wed, 19 Jan 2011 20:00:43 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=60350 Magfest 2011

Chances are, you’ve played a video game o…

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Magfest 2011

Chances are, you’ve played a video game or two in your day. Maybe you haven’t picked up a controller since Mario made his first (of many, because man she was helpless) attempts to rescue Princess Toadstool. Or maybe you’re a little tired this afternoon because you stayed up too late last night obsessively launching birds at pigs. Me, I picked up an Intellivision controller as soon as I was old enough to grip things, and I’ve been at it ever since.

Which is why I jumped at the opportunity to spend last weekend with 3,000 other people at the Hilton Mark Center in Alexandria for MAGfest 9, an annual four-day celebration of music and gaming.

Between Thursday and Sunday, we strolled through a 24-hour-a-day, 10,000-square-foot game room equipped with every console, PC and arcade game you can imagine. We took quiet breaks in the tabletop gaming room, where most groups seemed content to play Magic: The Gathering, but classic board games such as “Scrabble” shared table space with copies of “Settlers of Cataan,” standing at the ready ready for anyone who wanted to wander in and start a game. And we rocked out to nightly concerts featuring game-music bands including The Minibosses, Protomen and Metroid Metal (think metal-tinged covers of game theme songs).

Magfest 2011

Ordinarily, I am not what you would call a hard-core gamer. At cons like MAGfest — and the much larger-scale PAX — I tend to embrace the culture more than the actual games. When I do stop to put down the camera and play for an hour or two, it is usually in the service of some game I played a decade or more ago, just wondering if my muscles still have the memory to know when to twitch and jump and punch and hit and kick. (Apparently, they do: I beat the arcade version of “Killer Instinct 2” twice on Saturday, and I am still as bad at “Mario Kart“ as I was in 1998.)

The stereotype is that gamers are solitary, anti-social creatures, but the best part about a con like MAGfest is how easily it disproves those labels. Everyone is having fun, and when you walk into a ballroom at 3 a.m. you can walk up to any stranger and ask to join whatever game he happens to be playing. The entire event is about camaraderie; people play games at home alone all the time, but they come to places like MAGfest to share the experience with others. And that is about as social as you can get.

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Featured Photo http://www.welovedc.com/2010/12/07/featured-photo-81/ Tue, 07 Dec 2010 14:00:43 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=57446 Photo courtesy of
‘projection-4’
courtesy of R

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Photo courtesy of
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courtesy of ‘dr_kim_veis [”o ]’

December’s increasingly short days and this week’s biting wind have forced many of us into hibernation mode. With the outside world so inhospitable these days, it’s time to look for inside activities to keep from going stir-crazy, and dr_kim_veis has shared his cure for the winter blues with us for today’s featured photo.

The image on the wall is a camera obscura projection, and it’s made using a technique that pre-dates photography. All you need to do it yourself is a window to mount a lens on and a spot for the image to show up. The end result lets you see the scenes and lights and colors of the outside world without ever leaving the comfort of that blanket you’re hiding under. The Internet is full of people who have experimented with techniques, and there’s a Flickr group devoted to sharing images from users’ work.

The projection itself can be a work of art, or, like our photographer, you can turn the camera lens on the scene and create an image like this one. When Samer featured a similar shot back in August, he talked a little bit about the technique needed to capture these images. But, like the camera obscura itself, half the fun is in the experience and experimentation. So take one of these cold dark evenings to see what you can put together. When you’re done, share your images with us in the We Love DC Flickr pool.

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Getaways: Centralia, Pa., is one smokin’ hot town http://www.welovedc.com/2010/11/30/getaways-centralia-pa-is-one-smokin-hot-town/ http://www.welovedc.com/2010/11/30/getaways-centralia-pa-is-one-smokin-hot-town/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 20:00:20 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=56491

Photos by Erin McCann

What was it Joni Mitchell s…

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Photos by Erin McCann

What was it Joni Mitchell sang? “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”? Let’s just say that it took growing up and moving away from Central Pennsylvania for me to realize the true greatness of the place. Amish quilts and baked goods? Rolling hillsides? Whatever. What I’m talking about is the sort of tourist spot that only my homeland can create: an abandoned mining town that’s been on fire for nearly 50 years.

In 1962, Centralia was a small town just like any other, populated by miners and the descendants of miners. There were streets and houses and bars and churches and people. Today? Today there are streets. The houses and bars and churches and people are gone. In their place you’ll find the oppressive smell of sulfur, and steam spews from the ground constantly. It’s a post-apocalyptic wasteland that serves as a symbol of stubbornness, conspiracy and the decay of the American dream.

And it’s three and a half hours from D.C.

(And when you’re done, there’s beer.)

Centralia

Coal runs through the hills of Central Pennsylvania, and mining runs through the blood of most of the people who call it home. It’s inescapable; everyone’s family has the stories. In my own, a great-grandfather named Aloysius McNamara (good Irish stock that we are) was missing more than a few fingers by the time he ended his career in the coal mines. My paternal grandfather worked less than one day underground before hightailing it out of there and joining the Marines.

A century ago, the mines gave immigrant families the means and opportunity to put down roots in a new country (in exchange for backbreaking, soul-crushing work); these days, many of the towns they built are smaller and shabbier, poster cities for the Land That Prosperity And Time Forgot. Mount Carmel, just down the road from Centralia, had a population of just around 20,000 residents for most of the first half of the last century. Right now, it hovers around 6,000. Multiply that by hundreds of cities and towns around the region, and that’s what you’ll see as you wind through the hills on the way to Centralia.

(What Mount Carmel does have, however, is what certain members of my family have called “the best pizza on the East Coast.” Matucci’s Willow Cafe is about a 10-minute drive from the burning wasteland of Centralia. Call ahead to get a head start on the 30-minute cooking time for what are admittedly some truly delicious pies.)

Centralia
Centralia
Photo by Lynn McCann

No one knows with 100 percent certainty how the fire started. The very busy editors of the town’s Wikipedia entry are careful to call the prevailing story a “theory,” though it’s the one generally accepted by eyewitnesses, historians and the U.S. government. In May 1962, an old strip-mining pit served double-duty as a landfill. And back then, it was common practice for the town to burn off some of its extra trash. You see where this is going? Open flame, right on top of a giant pile of flammable, flammable coal? The earth underneath Centralia is a honeycomb of coal veins, so once that fire started, it branched out immediately and had plenty of room to burn.

A 2005 Smithsonian magazine article describes the fire and its aftermath like this:

An underground inferno has been spreading ever since, burning at depths of up to 300 feet, baking surface layers, venting poisonous gases and opening holes large enough to swallow people or cars. The conflagration may burn for another 250 years, along an eight-mile stretch encompassing 3,700 acres, before it runs out of the coal that fuels it.

But, well, 300 feet is awfully deep, and there were more than 1,000 people living in the town. Despite the hellfires burning underneath, life went on pretty much as normal for the people of Centralia for the next 20 years. Except for the occasional steaming pit opening up beneath their feet.

Centralia

It wasn’t until Feb. 14, 1981, that things got serious. Twelve-year-old Todd Domboski was swallowed into the weakened ground by a sinkhole, and though residents had dealt with occasional incidents of carbon monoxide poisoning over the previous 20 years, it was the peril faced by a child that finally pushed residents and the government to act.

But Centralia — like the other towns around coal region — was a community built by hard (and hard-working) people. They trudged deep into the ground every day for decades, and doing things the easy way was not in their nature. The Geological Society of America describes the next few steps like this:

Residents of Centralia were unable to develop a strategic plan with the U.S. Office of Surface Mining, the U.S. Bureau of Mines, and state agencies for controlling or extinguishing the Centralia mine fire. Several factors including the fire’s elusive nature, fractures that circulate air to burning anthracite in the subsurface, the inexperience of town officials in dealing with state and federal officials, and the expense involved led to this impasse.

The fire was impossible to put out, no one really knew how to put it out anyway, and many of the people living on top of it just wanted to ignore the whole thing.

By 1983, Congress had authorized up to $42 million to buy out the town and give its residents an opportunity to relocate. Most took it, and by the 1990s, fewer than 100 residents remained. As people fled, homes were razed, one at a time. Driving through the area back then, you could see what was once a duplex home, one half surgically removed, the other half left with brick and wood pylons propped up to support the still-standing side.

Centralia

Those who remained were convinced the government hadn’t been telling the whole truth. “The problem in Centralia … is not the mine fire. The problem in Centralia is the government and [the state Department of Community and Economic Development]. Not the mine fire. It never was,” fire chief  Tom Hynoski told The Associated Press. As the government stepped in and took the rest of the land under eminent domain, the remaining residents claimed the fire’s dangers had been exaggerated, that the government had no right to push them out, that the whole, sad situation was about nothing more than mineral rights and that they were being cheated out of them. The coal under the town was profitable, they said, and the government just wanted to take it from them. Others hoped for a rebirth: “I’d always hoped the town would come back and be rebuilt,” former holdout John Lokitis told AP, “but I guess that’s never going to happen.” His home was razed last Christmas.

And that’s where things have stood for the last 20 years. Elderly residents have been dying or moving away to assisted-living facilities, and one by one the final homes have been razed. In 2002, the postal service took away their ZIP code. According to an AP report, as of last February, there were fewer than a dozen holdouts left living in the final five homes. Those residents, squatters, essentially, who have lived rent- and tax-free in their homes for decades, have banded together to make one last stand against the government they swore has been lying to them for half a century. In October, they filed suit in federal court alleging that their civil rights had been violated.

Knowing all that history, visiting the town now can feel depressing. Nearby residents sometimes use what amounts to an abandoned field (albeit one with a street grid) as a dump, a crushing reminder of how the fire first started nearly half a century ago. Local high school kids have turned a now-closed section of Route 61 into Graffiti Highway, possibly setting a world record for the number of spraypainted penises per square foot. (Follow the penises for about half a mile past where the main road now detours and you’ll get to the spot where the road has buckled and fractured as the heat destroyed it.) You’ll get a headache from the sulfur after about an hour.

Centralia

But there’s something incredible about the place. Despite the dried-out trees that fell decades ago, the ground can be mossy and covered with wildflowers in the spring. As the fire’s heat shifts from one spot to another, signs of life sprout as places cool again. The next ridge over from this cautionary tale about the dangers of fossil fuels is lined with windmills, turning 24/7 and generating energy out of the same air that fuels the coal fire beneath Centralia. I stood up there once and watched an actual double rainbow (!) appear and disappear as a summer thunderstorm moved across the sky.

Life in Centralia

The people who live there are weary of their story, but they’re also used to the many people who stop to explore. Often, they’ll drive over to chat, curious about where you’re from and where you heard about their home. There are two cemeteries left in the town, one of which is still actively used as elderly former residents pass on. It’s not unusual to see other explorers wandering about, or geologists stopping by to update readings on long-term studies. For a dead town, it can be surprisingly active some days.

There’s the fractured highway (park by the cemetery and walk straight when Route 61 veers to the left), and there’s the street grid that is slowly being reclaimed by nature. There are decaying picket fences that once divided one home from another. It’s a bonanza for photographers, especially in the winter when the steam from the ground is more visible swirling against the cold air. There isn’t really a lot to see in Centralia, unless you’re looking carefully, and then suddenly there’s everything to see, and it’s beautiful.

Rainbows over Centralia

When you’ve had your fill of the sulfur, though, Pennsylvania coal region has one more gem to serve up to its visitors: Yuengling. Pottsville, home to America’s oldest brewery, is less than 20 miles away from Centralia. I grew up largely ignorant of Centralia and its history, but there was no way I could escape Pennsylvania without a healthy respect for one of its most famous exports. Your throat will probably be dry from all that walking, and what better way to quench the thirst than with a lager? Yes, they offer tours, Monday-Friday yearlong, and on Saturdays in April through December.

Centralia

Centralia

Centralia

Centralia

Getting there:

Google Maps is your friend here, because there are several ways to get from D.C. to Centralia. All are about three and a half hours long. There are signs that point the way on Route 61.

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We Love Music: Reel Big Fish (and Aquabats!) at 9:30 Club http://www.welovedc.com/2010/11/24/we-love-music-reel-big-fish-and-aquabats-at-930-club/ http://www.welovedc.com/2010/11/24/we-love-music-reel-big-fish-and-aquabats-at-930-club/#comments Wed, 24 Nov 2010 16:00:53 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=56397 Reel Big Fish

You can tell a lot about a show by the way people le…

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Reel Big Fish

You can tell a lot about a show by the way people leave after it’s over. The lights come up, the house music kicks in, and people filter through the door, clinging a little bit to the last two hours. Or, in the case of Reel Big Fish at the 9:30 Club on Monday night, they hum along a little to that house music before breaking into a spontaneous group singalong of “Sweet Caroline.”

Which, really, tells you everything you need to know about that show: a little corny, a whole lot catchy, and, deep down, something you probably enjoy despite yourself.

Reel Big Fish

Reel Big Fish

I was a teenager in the late 1990s, a very peculiar time in pop music. Third-wave ska bubbled to the surface, and so did its second cousin, pop-punk. Metal rap was inexplicably popular, and Marilyn Manson had just hit. Believe me, there are elements of those years that we all wish we could forget. Reel Big Fish fell a little bit higher than that for me: catchy and fun, but particularly representative of a period in pop culture whose star I long assumed had faded.

There were bands that did ska harder (Op Ivy), and bands that did ska better (the Bosstones), but nothing marked the moment when the genre crossed over into the mainstream quite so perfectly as the days in 1997 that Reel Big Fish’s “Sell Out” played in near constant rotation on MTV. And nothing quite marked its death quite so perfectly as July 14, 1998: the release date for the soundtrack for “BASEketball,” which featured Reel Big Fish covering A-Ha’s “Take On Me.” (Speaking of late-90s stereotypes, take a gander at that soundtrack listing: Deep Blue Something? Smash Mouth? NERF HERDER?!)

Reel Big Fish

To me, Reel Big Fish represent that self-aware place we all probably visited from time to time in high school: you want to fit in but you want to rebel, and here comes this band singing catchy tunes with a great big wink toward that angst you’ve worked so very hard to calculate. “It’s not so bad bein’ trendy, everyone who looks like me is my friend,” they sang on (what else?) “Trendy.” “Please don’t hate me because I’m trendy.” Like many an angst-filled 16-year-old in 1997, I both hated and loved Reel Big Fish for that very reason.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is where this nostalgic rumination takes a strange turn: that 16-year-old Reel Big Fish fan is apparently not an extinct creature. I got older. Reel Big Fish got older. The audience at one of their shows, however, has stayed exactly the same age. The 9:30 Club on Monday night was a sell-out crowd full of teenagers screaming along to “Sell Out.”

This shocked me.

And I wasn’t alone.

Reel Big Fish

Walking around before the show, I talked to teenagers and I talked to 30-somethings. For the former, the night was about watching any other popular band; at 16, they love the band for the same reasons I did back then. Rebecca Macleod drove 2 and a half hours to bring her 15-year-old daughter to the show from their home in West Virginia. “She’s really big about getting right up front,” Macleod said. “So we have to get here hours early.” For Macleod, who also performed the same service for her 20-year-old son, it was her fourth Reel Big Fish show.

And sure, the presence of the Aquabats as one of the openers had a lot to do with the crowd skewing younger — the lead singer of the Aquabats moonlights as the creator and director of Yo Gabba Gabba, so, uh, yeah, that’s all I know and let’s move right along now. Eight-year-old Cooper and 11-year-old Mack were sitting on the balcony before the show. Dad Chris, identified by Mack as the biggest fan in the family, had recycled his Aquabat Halloween costume for the night. “I thought there would be more people in costume,” he said, looking out over the floor from behind his blue Spandex top and mask.

Aquabats

But amid all the kids (and their parents), there were people like me: old enough to remember 1997 and maybe feeling a little nostalgic. Lloyd, 30, and Terrell, 30, remembered the late-90s fondly, “back when music was great,” Terrell said.

“We grew up listening to them,” Lloyd said. “That’s all we did was ride around and listen to them, and I never got to see them.”

Bill Shondelmyer, 27 and wearing a Mighty Mighty Bosstones T-Shirt, was there making up for lost shows. “Ska to me has always just been about having a good time,” he said. “I was too young for punk rock, so I got ska. I wish I could have gone to shows back then and appreciated it like I do now that it is past its prime.”

The thing is, it doesn’t matter how old you are: ska apparently finds itself a new audience every couple of years because it’s damn fun to listen to, to dance to, to sweat to. Up on stage on Monday, Reel Big Fish presided over a great big party, with members of the Aquabats and the other openers, Suburban Legends and Koo Koo Kanga Roo, wandering back on stage throughout the set to join in. They covered both “Brown-Eyed Girl” AND “Enter Sandman,” just because, hey, why not, half the point of ska is proving the point that you can skank to anything. They were the ringleaders of a three-ring circus that knows no fads, only fun and musical family.

Reel Big Fish

Reel Big Fish

Reel Big Fish

Reel Big Fish

Reel Big Fish

And the Aquabats:

Aquabats

Aquabats

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Why I love DC: Erin McCann http://www.welovedc.com/2010/11/12/why-i-love-dc-erin-mccann/ http://www.welovedc.com/2010/11/12/why-i-love-dc-erin-mccann/#comments Fri, 12 Nov 2010 14:00:35 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=55453 photo.jpg

In 2004,  staring at acceptance letters from gr…

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photo.jpg

In 2004,  staring at acceptance letters from graduate programs, I had a choice to make: fulfill a lifelong dream and move to England, or come to D.C. Finances and a weird sort of tugging in my heart led me here. Six years later — longer than I ever intended — I’m still here. It’s a story I hear from a lot of people: “I came for X, and then I just sort of stuck around.”

I won’t be here forever — came close to leaving this summer — but for the time that I’m here, and likely for the rest of my life, I will fight to the death with anyone who dares say this city is anything but an amazing place to live. Those people are legion, inside D.C. and around the world, and if I could, I would take each of them on a personal tour of MY D.C. and dare them to be so cynical.

 

No, we are not a perfect city, and certain things — this summer’s streetcar funding fight; the quiet acceptance that blue blazers and khakis are an appropriate sartorial choice for grown men; Metro’s desperate attempt to solve overcrowding by forcing as many people as possible back to their cars — seem maddeningly backward. But if you are able to stand on the National Mall at dusk and face the U.S. Capitol as the sky gets dark and not think to yourself, “GodDAMN this is a great place to be,” you are simply dead inside.

I’m sitting in Peregrine Espresso on the Hill right now, listening to some vague indie pop play in the background as I think about my favorite things about this city. Peregrine is one of them, that’s for sure. And so is the feeling of leaving the 9:30 Club at midnight in the middle of summer, where everyone is hot and sticky and the music’s still ringing in your ears but it’s too early to go home so everyone just stands around in the street, willing the night to last a little bit longer. Or descending into the bowels of the E Street movie theater on a weekday afternoon, when your cell phone dies and it’s just you and the screen for the next two hours.

But other cities have coffee shops, and music clubs, and movie theaters. Probably perfectly fine ones, too. (Though hey, New York? Our theaters are still bedbug free.)

One spring afternoon a couple of years ago, I stopped in at the old Chapters bookstore, down near 11th and E streets NW. (It’s gone now, too, just like Olsson’s Books and Music. Sigh.) I picked up a copy of “American Brutus,” about John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln assassination, because, well, those are the types of things I pick up for fun. It was April 14, a coincidence the clerk pointed out when she handed me my receipt. “Are you buying it because today is…?” “What? No I just…ohhhh,” I said as it dawned on me that I was buying the book on the anniversary of the assassination. (Where else would a bookstore clerk have that date at her fingertips?) Two blocks later, after walking up 10th street, past Ford’s Theatre and the scene of the crime, I looked down an alley and saw a re-enactor dressed as Booth, dragging on a cigarette and involved in a heated conversation on his cell phone.

That is why love this city.

In no other place on earth can a girl like me mouth off to a security guard in a fit of righteous indignation and four months later find herself testifying before a congressional panel about the funny way Union Station’s management had decided to circumvent the concepts of free speech and public property to its gorgeous building.

That is why love this city.

I love this city because of the people who live here. The people I have met in the last six years are, almost without exception, driven, creative, fun, wicked smart, explorers, entrepreneurial in spirit, and never at rest unless they are building things — websites, photo exhibits, music, governments, buildings, anything. Many of them have become the best sort of friends I could have ever hoped to find in any city the world over. And so I thank them for reminding me daily why I love this city.

Right. Enough of the sappy stuff. Why don’t I just shut up and stop talking about why I love this city, and just show you?

Cherry Blossoms

pink and in love

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The Winning Ticket: A Q&A With Dawes http://www.welovedc.com/2010/11/01/the-winning-ticket-meet-dawes/ http://www.welovedc.com/2010/11/01/the-winning-ticket-meet-dawes/#comments Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:00:32 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=54292

The “next big thing” is thrown around a lot in mus…

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The “next big thing” is thrown around a lot in music culture. What you hear about less often is the next great thing, the next band that’ll knock your socks off not just because all the cool kids love them but because they are just that good. If there is a musical god out there doling out success to those most deserving, Dawes, a rock and roll quartet from Los Angeles who will be appearing at the Rock & Roll Hotel on Wednesday, will be just one such band. Their 2009 debut, “North Hills,” was praised by critics as wide-ranging as Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal (!); Daytrotter’s Sean Moeller calls lyricist Taylor Goldsmith “as magnificent of a songwriter as there is currently creating.” Goldsmith has a knack for crafting beautiful lyrics that make order out of the chaos of our lives, and the men sharing the stage with him — his brother, drummer Griffin Goldsmith; Wylie Gelber on bass; and Alex Casnoff on keyboards — excel at setting those lyrics to music. On stage, the result is an improbable blend of melodic folk and high-energy rock and roll.

And they need that energy to get through a tour schedule that seems endless. In the last year and a half, the band has appeared at such festivals as South By Southwest, Newport Folk Festival, Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza, and opened for artists including (deep breath here): Josh Ritter, Corey Chisel and the Wandering Sons, Edward Sharpe, Langhorne Slim, She and Him, Jason Boesel, Deer Tick and Delta Spirit. Dawes has hit the road hard in support of “North Hills,” and the legwork has paid off. The tour that brings them back to D.C. for their fourth show in the area in a year is their first as headliners.

As a special thanks to We Love DC readers, we’re giving away a pair of tickets to Wednesday’s show. See the bottom of this post for rules of the giveaway.

I talked with Taylor Goldsmith about the band’s rising star, musical influences and future plans:

Photo courtesy of
‘Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes’
courtesy of ‘weeklydig’

I’ve seen you described as a throwback band, natural descendants of artists like Crosby Stills and Nash or CCR. And you’re also part of a vibrant contemporary scene, sharing the stage with artists like Cory Chisel, Delta Spirit, Deer Tick and Josh Ritter. How would you describe your sound?

No band would want to be just some throwback. We definitely want to be regarded as a contemporary thing and that we do bring something new to the table. We do understand that there are qualities of our band that are associative to time past — like a guitar solo or certain things that people think, ‘Oh, this is what rock and roll used to be like and it’s not like that much anymore.’ It’s hard, because it’s not like we’re trying to sound like an older band. We just want to try to do what’s fun for us. And so that sometimes makes someone think, ‘Oh this is an older sound.’ … There are a lot of incredible songwriters throughout time that definitely carved out their own place. Like a guy like Tom Petty — I don’t think that when he started, he came into it and really changed the game in terms of bringing in a new sound. I think he wanted to play rock and roll, and he developed a catalog and wrote good songs, and eventually become one of the greats. We do what comes natural to us. As cool as it would be to be the kind of band like Radiohead or The Walkmen, a band that no one ever heard anyone sound like that until they came along, that would be cool, but at the same time, that’s what comes natural to them. For us, that’s just not the case. We don’t want to fight it or redirect what comes naturally.

You’re on your way to Nashville for a show right now, so I’m wondering if that might affect the way you answer this next question. Who are the artists that you’re listening to while you’re driving around the country or just looking for inspiration?

It’s always changing. Every artist is a sponge, sort of. It’s like a wet towel that you ring out, and some towels are bigger than others and you can get a bit more out of it, but then eventually you get to the point where you don’t really listen to anymore because then you know it back and forth. Like any musician who plays rock and roll, I feel very much indebted to The Beatles and that sort of thing, but I grew up listening to them so much, so while I still appreciate it and love it, I don’t really go to it much anymore because I feel like I know it inside and out. Every artist, I go through that process with them, and it dries up. Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Dire Straits and Leon Redbone and Warren Zevon and Allman Brothers and Jackson Browne, and stuff like that. Last week it was Lucinda Williams and a whole different kind of thing. Its always changing and some stuff comes back into the rotation, and sometimes some stuff doesn’t.

The blog I write for is called We Love DC, so I have to ask: Any plans to play tourist while you’re here? It is the nation’s capital, so is there anything you’d like to see while you’re here?

There was one tour where we made time to go down ot the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial and the World War II memorial, walking around that whole area that day. Now, with the load-in and getting a decent soundcheck and making sure we eat dinner and all that, by the time we have any free time, it’s always not enough free time or it’s too late. I don’t know what city we’re driving in from the next day, but hopefully it’s close enough that we can check some stuff out.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You’re playing at the Rock and Roll Hotel, for the second time in just over a year, and your fourth show in the area in that time. How do you feel you’ve grown or changed as a band since then as your star has taken off a bit?

It’s cool that we are gonna headline this time, because last time we were in support of Langhorne Slim. D.C. has been really cool for us. Its been a really great year because w have started to learn how to play to different audiences. When we first started playing at festivals, shows, we didn’t know how to maintain a crowd that big, or captivate a crowd that big in certain cases. So the set that you’d play there is very different from that set that you’d play at a fairly decent-sized bar. So we’ve definitely learned a lot about how to put together the right kind of show for the right kind of environment. So it’s been a really cool year because were starting to find our audience. It’s definitely in the very beginning steps, but we’ve noticed, especially with this tour that we’re on now, the people that are coming listen to the things that we enjoy.We’ve  been on tours before with certain kinds of bands that might have a more pop sensibility or a more soft sensibility, but for us, we like to jam and we like to play. I think jam’s a funny word, but we like to play a guitar solo, we like to feature the musicianship. People seem responsive to that. It’s not just that we feature that song that they heard on the radio. That they are accepting of us on own terms … is really, really rewarding, even if we’re just playing to 10 people.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I saw you at Iota in Clarendon earlier this year, and that was the first time that I had heard you. That night, you got a really strong response to “When My Time Comes,” and in seeing clips on YouTube I’ve seen that’s not an isolated reaction. Why do you think the song resonates so strongly with audiences, and how are you playing that into the setlist as you go out in front of the crowd?

When we were we coming up — I mean, we still very much are — when we were doing opening sets for audiences that didn’t know us at all, like when we were first going out with Deer Tick and Delta Spirit, we would play that song fourth of fifth because I feel like for the first three or four songs, people would be, like, ‘OK, I’m willing to give this band a little bit of my attention. I haven’t made up my mind yet but I’m listening.’ With that song, not that everyone would just immediately like it, but it is the song that I feel like confirmed anyone on the fence, and I feel like after that song, it would either be, ‘OK, I like it,’ or ‘I don’t like it.’ So we played it early because once we used that song to win anyone over that hadn’t really decided yet, then people would be willing to listen to the rest of the set. And now, appealing to audiences that for the most part are familiar with us, we like to play that song last, because it ends the show on a high note and it gets people excited. Even thinking forward, when we release our second album, we’re thinking of doing that song in an earlier slot again, not continuing to keep that song as our main focus, because we want to direct attention to our new material.

I see some bands that will put out their second record, but they’ll still play their single of their first album last, and I feel like that’s letting the audience come to that show for that one song, and we want to make sure that this song, as grateful as we are for all the good it’s done for the band, we also don’t want to be all about that one song. I think it’s cool when you see a band like Fleet Foxes or My Morning Jacket or Wilco, they have careers where you aren’t depending on them to write their second big hit or something becaue their albums are so good.

Following on that, from my own recollections of hearing you sing that song: A lot of nights it seems like you are on the verge of shredding your voice. You leave it all out there there. How are you able to sustain that every single night? Has it affected your songwriting at all—are you writing quieter songs that don’t require you to do that, or give you a break in the show?

No, I knock on wood. I don’t have any voice trouble. The one thing that will happen to me pretty regularly is when I’ll sing for a month or two every night and we’ll go on tour and I’ll be fine, better at the end than at the beginning. Then once the next tour starts, after a month of not singing, I’ll go out there and sing like I did after those two months of touring, like my voice has built up to being able to handle that, but then the second night you’ll really hear my voice being kinda thrashed. It’s like a muscle: I tear it up, and then it comes together stronger. When I look at videos or live footage of Otis Redding or Bruce Springsteen, guys that are not singing ‘correctly’ and are shredding their voices, I think if you just go with it and not freak out as much, I think you’ll be fine. In fact, with the new material,I’m  asking even more of myself vocally.

You’ve had months—over a year now—of touring behind the songs from “North Hills.” What are some of the best experiences you’ve had on the road?


There’s definitely key shows and moments that really mean a lot. And people will come up and say,  ‘I know you hear this all the time, but that album, it really helped me through a rough patch.’ And it means a lot every time that I hear that. Sometimes it’s hard to know how to respond other than, ‘Thank you that means a lot.’ I don’t know how genuine people realize I’m trying to be, but it does mean a lot. People saying, ‘Yeah, we had that one song of yours as the first dance at our wedding.’ Crazy stuff like that, it means so much. It’s really fun to get up on stage and rock out, but for these songs to mean something to someone and help heal, not necessarily through my words, but through what they take from it, which is maybe something wise beyond what I had intended in it or could see in it, just that it could help them learn a little more patience or love or just inherent goodness or something — that’s what matters more than anything. So when we hear moments of people having something like that, it’s really great.

And then also, certain shows in certain cities that were much bigger for us than we could have thought they were going to be. And certain festivals—you know, being part of a timeline, like playing Newport Folk Festival and getting asked by the promoter to come up and sing ‘I Shall Be Released’ with Levon Helm, there are moments like that that we’ll never forget.

Speaking of festivals, at South by Southwest this year, you sat in with John McCauley and Matt Vasquez to create a sort of folk supergroup called MG&V. Those videos are up online, and they’re excellent. Was it a one-time thing, or do you see something more coming of that?

We made a record in the January before that SXSW, and the album is going to be coming out this March. The band’s called Middle Brother. It’ll be the songs that are on those videos, and I’m really excited about it.

Your last Rock and Roll Hotel show was professionally recorded and that’s up on YouTube, along with a lot of fan videos. I know a lot of music fans who think fan recordings distract from the experience of a live show, and some artists have complained of what amounts to free versions of their songs online. How do you feel about people experiencing your live shows that way?

It’ll break my heart if I ever hear someone say, Well, I don’t need to see that band play, because I can just watch all their stuff on YouTube.’ That would suck, because it’s getting ridiculous how a band can’t make money now. Everywhere that they’ve turned, then something goes wrong. Like everyone’s resigned to the fact that records aren’t being sold, we just aren’t going to sell records, that you’re not going to make money in that way anymore, and that’s just part of the deal. And then it’s like, ‘OK, we’re just going to focus on live touring. We’re going to tour all the time and try to make a go for it there,’ and that’ll be the way that a band makes money. And then you hear that the markets being flooded and every band is saying the same thing, and people can’t afford to go to shows six nights a week, so then bands start not selling enough tickets. There are less and less directions to turn for this to be sustainable.

Live shows, regardless of what I just said, are still one of the only sure things for a band right now, and I don’t care about people having access to new material and I don’t care about people having access to live footage—I think that’s awesome. I just feel that when that becomes a substitute for actually buying a ticket or going to a show, if that became commonplace, I don’t know what we’d be able to do. We wouldn’t have any way of making money, and we’d have to go home–no one’s coming to shows and theres no one to play to, and those YouTube videos would be null and void.

Speaking of making money, it seems like you are close to having a new album. There are new songs popping up in shows. Do you have a followup planned?

Yeah, yeah, we just finished recording it in September. Because of the Middle Brother stuff coming out in March, the next Dawes album will come out around May.

Do you have a title for it yet?

Nope, unfortunately no title. We’re definitely wracking our brains, but we don’t know what it is yet.

How do you see the new material that you’re working on comparing to ‘North Hills’?

It’s definitely a little more aggressive, a little more alive, a little more energetic. Aggressive is a weird word, I guess, but a little more of a higher energy.

Dawes appears Wednesday at the Rock and Roll Hotel. Doors are at 7; music starts at 8.

Like what you’ve heard? Then enter to win a pair of tickets to Wednesday’s show at the Rock & Roll Hotel:

The rules:

For your chance to win these tickets simply leave a comment on this post using a valid e-mail address between 1 p.m today and noon Tuesday. One entry per email address, please.

Comments will be closed at noon on Tuesday, and a winner will be randomly selected. The winner will be notified by e-mail. The winner must respond to our e-mail by 5:00 Tuesday afternoon or they will forfeit their tickets and we will pick another winner.

Tickets will be available to the winner at will call at the R&R Hotel. The tickets must be claimed with a valid ID. The winner must be old enough to attend the specific concert or must have a parent’s permission to enter if he/she is under 18 years old.

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Weekend Flashback: Sanity Edition http://www.welovedc.com/2010/11/01/weekend-flashback-sanity-edition/ http://www.welovedc.com/2010/11/01/weekend-flashback-sanity-edition/#comments Mon, 01 Nov 2010 13:00:27 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=54272 you call this "sanity?"
courtesy of ‘philliefan99’

Hey, …

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you call this "sanity?"
courtesy of ‘philliefan99’

Hey, did you hear we had some guests this weekend? Roughly a quarter of a million of them, in fact. A lot of you took photos of them. Good lord, did you take a lot of photos of them. Click on through for an extra special super-duper-sized edition of your Weekend Flashback: Rally For Sanity edition.

Photo courtesy of
‘IMG_0813’
courtesy of ‘Atomic Overmind’

Photo courtesy of
‘the question’
courtesy of ‘mofo’


Photo courtesy of
‘Bear Breath’
courtesy of ‘ep_jhu’

Photo courtesy of
‘Rally for Sanity After-Party?’
courtesy of ‘jacquesofalltrades’

Photo courtesy of
‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’
courtesy of ‘sintixerr’

Photo courtesy of
‘Rally to Restore Sanity’
courtesy of ‘Ryan vs Hell Track’

Photo courtesy of
‘Sanity/Fear Rally: Best Sign Ever’
courtesy of ‘pnzr242’

Photo courtesy of
‘Sanity/Fear Rally: Horde or Alliance?’
courtesy of ‘pnzr242’

Photo courtesy of
’30 Oct 2010 – No 105: First Wave’
courtesy of ‘B Jones Jr’

Photo courtesy of

courtesy of ‘Rolenz’


Photo courtesy of
‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’
courtesy of ‘sintixerr’

Photo courtesy of
‘Apparently this is a sign’
courtesy of ‘caroline.angelo’

Photo courtesy of
‘Indoor Voice’
courtesy of ‘caroline.angelo’

Photo courtesy of
‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’
courtesy of ‘a digital cure’

Photo courtesy of
‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’
courtesy of ‘a digital cure’

Photo courtesy of
‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’
courtesy of ‘a digital cure’

Photo courtesy of
‘(303/365)’
courtesy of ‘kimberlyfaye’


Photo courtesy of
‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’
courtesy of ‘a digital cure’

Photo courtesy of
‘Strange Women’
courtesy of ‘caroline.angelo’

Photo courtesy of
‘Ban Comic Sans Now’
courtesy of ‘Kevin H.’

Photo courtesy of
‘Arrgh! This Sign is So Angry!’
courtesy of ‘kimberlyfaye’

Photo courtesy of
‘Signs’
courtesy of ‘ep_jhu’

Photo courtesy of
‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear and/or Justin Bieber’
courtesy of ‘sintixerr’

Photo courtesy of
‘Yes We Can’
courtesy of ‘Max Cook’

Photo courtesy of
‘Ha!’
courtesy of ‘kimberlyfaye’

Photo courtesy of
‘Rickrolled at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’
courtesy of ‘tzk333’


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Weekend Flashback 10/22-10/24/10 http://www.welovedc.com/2010/10/25/weekend-flashback-1022-102410/ http://www.welovedc.com/2010/10/25/weekend-flashback-1022-102410/#comments Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:00:25 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=53504 Photo courtesy of
‘Silver Spring Zombie Walk 2010’

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Photo courtesy of
‘Silver Spring Zombie Walk 2010’
courtesy of ‘mediaslave’

Hi, Monday. You’ve got a lot to live up to, given how gorgeous the weekend was. I’m willing to give you a chance, being a fresh week and all, but really, check out all the great stuff the photographers got up to the last two days: rock concerts, fall foliage, zombies and SCIENCE!

Photo courtesy of
‘DC Streets: In Shocking Color!’
courtesy of ‘pnzr242’

Photo courtesy of
‘Matt & Kim Playing At The 9:30 Club, #1’
courtesy of ‘[F]oxymoron’

Photo courtesy of
‘Jack O’Lanterns’
courtesy of ‘Columbia Heights Climber’

Photo courtesy of
‘Silver Spring Zombie Walk 2010’
courtesy of ‘mediaslave’

Photo courtesy of
‘….when every leaf is a flower.’
courtesy of ‘christaki’

Photo courtesy of

courtesy of ‘patrickjoust’

Photo courtesy of
‘Science!’
courtesy of ‘Amber Wilkie Photography’

Photo courtesy of
‘Alas, poor Yorick!’
courtesy of ‘LaTur’


Photo courtesy of
‘ç��æ ½’
courtesy of ‘Rukasu1’

Photo courtesy of
‘InstaVintage DC Subway’
courtesy of ‘andrew.cohen’

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Photographers get a win http://www.welovedc.com/2010/10/19/53070/ http://www.welovedc.com/2010/10/19/53070/#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 16:00:30 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=53070

Via our neighbors up in New York City, some good n…

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Via our neighbors up in New York City, some good news for all you DC photographers: The Department of Homeland Security is, once again, being forced to admit that you have the right to take pictures of federal buildings. As part of a settlement brokered by the New York Civil Liberties Union, DHS –and specifically the Federal Protective Service, those guys who run the security for almost every federal office building around the country, including those in DC–has “agreed to provide federal officers written instructions emphasizing the public’s right to photograph and record outside federal courthouses,” the NYCLU says.

The settlement came after photographer Antonio Musumeci was arrested in November 2009 for the “crime” of using a camera outside a federal courthouse in Manhattan. That the law was on his side was never in question, and in the settlement, the NYCLU got the feds to admit “that there are no federal laws or regulations that prohibit photography outside federal courthouses.”

You can’t get far in DC with a camera before running into a security guard who questions your right to take a picture. Over at the DC Photo Rights group on Flickr, we document and track these incidents with some regularity. It’s a good idea to carry a copy of Bert Krages’ Photographer’s Right in your camera bag, and if you’re ever stopped, take note of who is stopping you and what agency they work for.

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Photos: DC Henge, such as it was, the moon and special bonus storm http://www.welovedc.com/2010/09/23/photos-dc-henge-such-as-it-was-the-moon-and-special-bonus-storm/ http://www.welovedc.com/2010/09/23/photos-dc-henge-such-as-it-was-the-moon-and-special-bonus-storm/#comments Thu, 23 Sep 2010 18:43:21 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=50459 Photo courtesy of
‘Washington Monument – Old Glory

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Photo courtesy of
‘Washington Monument – Old Glory Aflame – 09-22-10’
courtesy of ‘mosley.brian’

Yesterday had the potential to be a squee-worthy afternoon for DC photographers. The first day of autumn meant the possibility of spectacular light as the sun set directly along the east-west axis of the city’s streets during an event we have come to know as DC Henge, and shortly after that, the harvest moon was set to rise in alignment with the major monuments along the mall. Both are twice-yearly events that drive the photographers wild, but to have both happen on the same day is pretty unusual.

So of course, something had to go wrong. In this case, storm clouds conspired to obscure the moon until it had risen well past the Capitol Dome, and haze kept the sun’s brightest rays a bit dimmer than we’ve seen in recent days. But, because there is always a silver lining in every cloud, that storm gave up some spectacular lightning bolts for the photographers conveniently already in place along the mall. Below the jump, a collection shots featuring the moon, the sun, the storm and other signs of the apocalypse:

Photo courtesy of
‘Washington Skyline – Quadruple Strike – 09-22-10’
courtesy of ‘mosley.brian’

Photo courtesy of
‘Here Comes the Storm’
courtesy of ‘Karon’

Photo courtesy of
‘Harvest Moon Thunderstorm’
courtesy of ‘MudflapDC’

Photo courtesy of
‘Harvest Moon Thunderstorm’
courtesy of ‘MudflapDC’

Photo courtesy of

courtesy of ‘erin m’

Photo courtesy of

courtesy of ‘kimberlyfaye’

Photo courtesy of
‘M St DC-Henge’
courtesy of ‘Tony DeFilippo’

Photo courtesy of
‘Good evening’
courtesy of ‘erin m’

Photo courtesy of
‘last dc henge moments’
courtesy of ‘amarino17’

Photo courtesy of
‘pre dc henge sunset’
courtesy of ‘amarino17’

Photo courtesy of
‘harvest moon shroud’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99’

Photo courtesy of
‘harvest moon light trails’
courtesy of ‘amarino17’

Photo courtesy of
‘quiet reflection’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99’


Photo courtesy of
‘lunar peek-a-boo’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99’

Photo courtesy of
‘the moon finally shows up’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99’

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Featured Photo http://www.welovedc.com/2010/09/21/featured-photo-70/ http://www.welovedc.com/2010/09/21/featured-photo-70/#comments Tue, 21 Sep 2010 13:00:39 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=50087 Photo courtesy of
‘DC Streets’
courtesy of

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Photo courtesy of
‘DC Streets’
courtesy of ‘pnzr242’

The few elements of this photo that shine out from the darkness tell us everything we need to know: a man,  a train station, a grim expression, head bowed. We’ve all been there, isolated as we trudge from the Metro to the office or back again.

Photography is a game of precision timing and people and light. The people who wander the city’s streets with cameras in hand thrive on the rare moments when all three come together at the exact same instant the shutter clicks. You can get high on the feeling of success in those moments; in them you fall in love with your city, your commute, your camera, everything, all over again. Sure, absolute success is a little about luck, but it’s also about having an eye for the small moments that add up to great pictures. It’s about seeing great light and a great scene and lying in wait for the right subject to come along. Flickr user PNZR242 relied on skill and a little bit of luck to catch such a moment at a Metro station last week.

The man and the moment may seem stern, but in timing them just so perfectly, the photographer managed to raise the bar a little bit for everyone who lifts a camera to their eye and hopes to capture some magic.

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TSA warns you to report photographers http://www.welovedc.com/2010/09/09/tsa-warns-public-against-photographing-planes-yegad-no/ http://www.welovedc.com/2010/09/09/tsa-warns-public-against-photographing-planes-yegad-no/#comments Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:00:54 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=48620

I like to take pictures. A lot of my friends like t…

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I like to take pictures. A lot of my friends like to take pictures. Sometimes, we even like to take pictures of things like airplanes. You might call us hobbyists, photo enthusiasts, or just photographers. But now, thanks to a new campaign from the Transportation Security Administration, there’s something else you can call us: terrorists. Yep, that’s right, gang, it’s time for another round of Security Theater Will Not Actually Make You Safer, starring the TSA and a bunch of scary, scary people armed with cameras.

Via Carlos Miller’s Photography Is Not A Crime site and Reason Magazine comes word of a TSA poster apparently designed to encourage passers-by to report suspicious photographers–helpfully shown wearing dark pants and hooded sweatshirts–to the police. Sigh. Really, TSA?

The poster is actually part of a larger campaign encouraging airport employees “to be vigilant about general aviation security and report any unusual activities to TSA.” In the video accompanying the campaign (scroll down on the link above), its clear the scary photographer person is actually meant to be lurking outside a gate, and the message to airport employees is to make sure the gate is secure. In context, directed at small-airport employees, it makes sense. And the TSA, pioneers of behavioral detection analysis, certainly seems to a grasp of the fact that that in some instances, context is everything.

So what’s with this poster? Why would they strip it of all its context and send it around the country apparently ignorant of the message its sending? The TSA is playing into the irrational fears photographers deal with every day, especially here in DC, home to every kind of federal structure you can imagine and an army of private and federal officers guarding them. A security guard who has seen that poster is going to feel justified in pushing a photographer away from a federal building or a national landmark or National Airport or Gravelly Point, because his own government–his BOSS–is telling him to fear the photography threat.

After the poster made the rounds yesterday, drawing complaints from photographers, TSA quickly crafted a response in which they acknowledged the critics, saying, “Some felt this poster didn’t go far enough in distinguishing between general photography and suspicious surveillance activity.” No, TSA, it didn’t. Photographers especially know the power of an image, and the image in that poster made no distinction at all between general photography and suspicious surveillance activity. Maybe if he’d been wearing a pink hoodie instead?

There was a small ray of hope in the TSA blog post, though, when Blogger Bob made the point–argued by photographers all around this city and beyond–that “many photographers would be prime candidates to use such vigilance programs to report suspicious activity since they’re extremely observant of their surroundings.” That’s actually a really great point and one I’d like to see on a poster and hung in the break rooms of every federal building in this city.

From the TSA security video

I cannot believe that we have to continually point this out to the people who are in charge of our national security, but here it goes again: there has not been a single documented instance in which a terrorist or someone accused of involvement in a terrorist plot surveilled a location with a camera before carrying out that plot. NONE. ZERO. You are making up this threat. To quote from Bruce Schneier, a security expert who wrote on the topic in 2008:

The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.

Below is a collection of photos taken at or near Gravelly Point, a favorite spot of athletes, picnickers and, yes, photographers, with a great view of the planes landing and taking off at National Airport. Next time you’re over there, make sure you’ve got the police on speed dial. Wouldn’t want anyone suspicious to get away, now would we?

Photo courtesy of
‘Flyover’
courtesy of ‘Kevin H.’

Photo courtesy of
‘US Airways 737 Taking Off’
courtesy of ‘Mr. T in DC’

Photo courtesy of

courtesy of ‘KentonNgo’

Photo courtesy of
‘De Plane, Daddy!’
courtesy of ‘flipperman75’

Photo courtesy of
‘Here for a moment’
courtesy of ‘karthikkito’

Photo courtesy of
‘DSC_0375’
courtesy of ‘bhrome’

Photo courtesy of
‘Gravelly Point – To Fly – 12-29-08’
courtesy of ‘mosley.brian’

Photo courtesy of
‘planes and sun flare’
courtesy of ‘needlessspaces’

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Featured photo http://www.welovedc.com/2010/09/08/featured-photo-68/ Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:00:23 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=48415 Photo courtesy of
‘Katy in the surf’
courtesy of 

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Photo courtesy of
‘Katy in the surf’
courtesy of ‘MudflapDC’

Labor Day weekend is traditionally recognized as the End Of Summertime. School starts again, the weather (reportedly) begins to cool, and collectively we put away the swimsuits and get down to the business of life. In their quest to document summer’s last grasp, our pool of photographers did not disappoint: Many went to the beach and found some great ways to capture the atmosphere.

But it’s this shot at Rehoboth Beach by MudflapDC that I kept coming back to. Katy stands defiant in the surf, a wave from Hurricane Earl tumbling toward her, seconds away from contact. Katy doesn’t seem to mind, and she seems to be facing the looming wave like more of us should face everything life throws at us: “Show me what you’ve got, Mother Nature. I’ll just stand here unphased.”

I like to think the wave hit, maybe Katy lost her balance a little, and as the water faded back out to sea, Katy stood there smiling, waiting for the sun to dry her off.

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Get your science on http://www.welovedc.com/2010/09/08/get-your-science-on/ Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:00:10 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=48420 Photo courtesy of

courtesy of ‘Chris Rief aka Spod

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Photo courtesy of

courtesy of ‘Chris Rief aka Spodie Odie’

So hey, did you know there’s going to be a big old science fair in DC next month? No? Neither did I until I caught sight of the USA Science and Engineering Festival Twitter feed last week, and it took about 10 seconds to hook me on the whole idea. It’s two weeks of science, SCIENCE, SCIENCE!, from Oct. 10-24, capped off with a weekend of events on the National Mall on Oct. 23-24. And here’s where you come in, dear readers: they need volunteers.

Maybe you were the science nerd in high school, or maybe you never quite got that homemade rocket off the ground, but I bet a festival that covers such wide-ranging topics as kitchen chemistry experiments AND an “exciting cryogenics show” could probably use your help in some capacity, no matter what your background.

Once you sign up to help, there’s a 90-minute training session on Sunday, Oct. 17, and then you’ll take a four-hour block over the weekend. DC has plenty of fine volunteer opportunities, and this is but one of them. But I dare you to come up with a better way to spend a few hours on a fine October afternoon than helping kids get excited about science.

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Kermit gets some new friends at the Smithsonian http://www.welovedc.com/2010/08/25/kermit-gets-some-new-friends-at-the-smithsonian/ http://www.welovedc.com/2010/08/25/kermit-gets-some-new-friends-at-the-smithsonian/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:00:51 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=47266 Photo courtesy of
‘Jane Henson, Brent D. Glass, NMAH direc

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Photo courtesy of
‘Jane Henson, Brent D. Glass, NMAH director, and Dwight Blocker Bowers, NMAH curator’
courtesy of ‘erin m’

Kermit the Frog and Oscar the Grouch have long been popular attractions at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. On Wednesday morning, courtesy of a donation by Jane Henson and the rest of the Jim Henson family, they gained a few new fuzzy friends: the original puppets used in “Sam and Friends,” one of Jim Henson’s earliest TV projects.


Photo courtesy of
‘Kermit and friends’
courtesy of ‘erin m’

Washington has its fair share of natives who go off into the world to do good things, but few have the longevity and appeal of the characters created by Jim Henson. In the 1950s, as a teenager living in Hyattsville and later as a student at the University of Maryland, Henson found work at local TV stations creating puppets for children’s shows, learning from an incredibly early age how to earn laughter and smiles from an audience. DC audiences were his test tube for the kinds of characters, humor and storytelling that would come to define the Henson Company for millions of fans; one of the most notable and successful such creative projects was “Sam and Friends,” which ran from 1955-1961 on WRC-TV.

The main character of the show was Sam, a bald papier mache lip-syncing singer in a suit who bore an uncanny resemblance to Henson friend and fellow WRC employee Willard Scott. But the one who would become Henson’s star was a fuzzy, green not-quite-a-frog-yet character named Kermit, made from the fabric of Henson’s mother’s discarded winter coat. The Kermit on “Sam and Friends” looks familiar enough, with his ping pong ball eyes and lanky build, but he’s missing a couple of the later version’s key attributes: webbed feet, and the spiked collar. Kermit and Sam are joined by  other characters in whom we can see other hints of the characters who would eventually populate Henson’s later projects: Pierre the French Rat, who looks an awful lot like Rizzo the Rat; Mushmellon, in whose grouchy face you can see the kernel that would eventually become Oscar; Yorick, a Shakespearean-themed purple skull with a happy enough expression that you can trace his evolution to Cookie Monster. In all, there are 10 puppets from the show who will be going on display in the museum’s pop culture gallery in November.

It is a bit of a homecoming for the characters. Jane Henson, museum Director Brent D. Glass and Curator Dwight Blocker Bowers all noted the local beginnings of the characters who would eventually take the world by storm. “I am sure these guys are really pleased to be home,” Henson said.

Photo courtesy of
‘Jane Henson and Willard Scott’
courtesy of ‘erin m’

The Muppets and other characters are most identified with Jim Henson personally, and indeed 9 of these original puppets were made by Jim himself as a teenager (the 10th, Mushmellon, was made by Jane). Like so many great projects, though, the work was the result of a fruitful, lifelong collaboration between Henson, his wife, Jane, friends like Willard Scott, and the many, many other puppeteers and builders who worked with him from his teen years until his death in 1990. Jane Henson and Willard Scott were on hand for Wednesday’s donation ceremony, and watching them together was a charming glimpse into the creative energy that must have existed around these friends when they were getting their start with shows like “Sam and Friends.”

Looking back on the Henson legacy, Scott, himself no stranger to longevity, reflected on the enduring popularity of the “Sam and Friends” characters and the ones they would later inspire: “People come and go in TV, but not the Muppets,” Scott said. “They just went on and got better and better and better.”

Photo courtesy of
‘Sam and Willard Scott’
courtesy of ‘erin m’

Photo courtesy of
‘Sam and Friends’
courtesy of ‘erin m’

Photo courtesy of
‘Sam and friends’
courtesy of ‘erin m’

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