The Soul of Georgetown

Haggard Hoya logo, partially obscured by kegs, by the entrance to Dixie Liquor in Georgetown.

From Key Bridge

Crossing from Rosslyn into Georgetown across the Key Bridge.

Seattle Central Library

The Seattle Central Library by Rem Koolhaas.

Cedar Creek Treehouse, Part II

The Treehouse Observatory, Rainbow Bridge, and Stairway to Heaven at the Cedar Creek Treehouse near Mount Rainier in Washington State.

Cedar Creek Treehouse, Part I

The Cedar Creek Treehouse near Mount Rainier in Washington State.

Seaplanes

From top to bottom:

A deHavilland Beaver DHC-2 in West Coast Air livery, a deHavilland Otter DHC-3 in Kenmore Air yellow and white livery, and our blue and yellow Kenmore Air Otter docked in Victoria, BC. I rode in the co-pilot's seat, where I was told not to touch anything.

Eastern Market Is Back Open!

Capitol Hill's Eastern Market was closed for two years because of a fire in 2007. There was a temporary structure (pictured below) set up across the street that housed businesses while the central structure was being rebuilt:



Market Lunch in the temporary Eastern Market tent:



Last month, the main building reopened, and it was packed when we visited last weekend. The refurbished building is impressive, but the wait for blue bucks (blueberry buckwheat pancakes) at Market Lunch has gone from about 15-20 minutes to over an hour.

Canadian Embassy

View from the sixth floor.

Indiana Jones: The Adaptation

The Hirschhorn museum in Washington D.C. occasionally screens free movies in its auditorium. When Melody and I were undergrads, it was a reliable source of contemporary avant garde film. We saw Michael Haneke's original Funny Games there and one of the Cremaster series, for example. A couple of weeks ago, while browsing its film series, I saw that they would be screening Indiana Jones: The Adaptation, a more or less shot by shot recreation of the first Indiana Jones movie, made on a BetaMax over seven years (1981-1988). Both Melody and Zed predicted that the screening would be popular, and Melody recommended that we show up several hours in advance. I thought that was absurd, considering that I had never seen the auditorium more than half full. But when we showed up two hours in advance, there were already about 50 people in line ahead of us. Eventually the line grew so long that it coiled twice around the inside of the circular Hirschhorn courtyard. So many people showed up that they had to show the movie twice that night.



The filmmakers were there to introduce the movie and answer questions. They apologized beforehand for the terrible sound, and opened the movie with the invitation to "Let the Beta wash over you". You can get some idea of what the Adaptation is like in these clips.

The opening jungle sequence is recreated remarkably well, including the scene of the porter reaching nervously for his gun and Indiana Jones knocking it out of his hand with the bullwhip. The sound was indeed awful, and it was only because we had watched the original a couple of nights beforehand that we had any idea what anyone was saying. We also debated about whether the grainy, blurry picture helped or hindered the experience of the movie; it was often hard to tell what was going on, but otherwise mundane settings were concealed and made mysterious because you couldn't see much of what was going on. Most importantly, though, the low fidelity made what otherwise would have been glaring continuity problems easier to accept: characters' hair got longer and shorter, depending on the changing styles between 1981 and 1988, voices changed, actors got acne, grew noticeably in height and weight, and so on.

The only scene that was completely left out of the Adaptation was the fight with the strongman around the airplane. During Q&A Melody asked why they left that scene out. The director said that he still has nightmares about not doing that scene. He said that they had prepared to shoot it, with a big fan painted silver for the propellor, the most muscular kid in school ready to play the strongman (complete with a bald wig), and a mock-up of the plane that was to be blown up with a pipe bomb. But some undisclosed problem with the pipe bomb ruled out shooting the scene as planned, and the director said that the idea of blowing up a model with an M-80 was thought to be "too cheesy".

Potomac Ruins

Unexplained structures on the Virginia side of the Potomac River.

National Building Museum

National Building Museum, originally uploaded by Nat Hansen.

For the last three weeks, the National Building Museum has been showing movies that conspicuously feature elements of mid-centurury design and architecture: The Moon is Blue, The Best of Everything, and In Like Flint. The sound was pretty awful, since the interior of the museum is cavernous. But they did allow you to bring food in.

SR-71

The SR-71 Blackbird at the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space extension out by Dulles airport. With Imperial War Museum Duxford, this is the most impressive collection of aircraft I've ever seen. And the planes at the Air and Space extension are in much better condition than the planes at Duxford.

The final flight of this SR-71 was from L.A. to Washington. It took 64 minutes.

Read about the experience of flying the SR-71 here.

Kehoe Field

Kehoe field is an astroturf field at the far southern side of the Georgetown campus. The domed building in the background is Georgetown's old observatory.

The Leavey Center's Rooftop Plaza

This space is located three stories above ground.

Georgetown's Leavey Center, an unremarkable, if not ugly, late-80s combination of student center, hotel, and parking garage, has one redeeming feature: its rooftop plaza. And almost no one uses it, or even knows it's there. You reach it by walking through unmarked fire doors and climbing up two flights of steps that reek of cigarette smoke--workers and students obviously retreat into the stairwell for a quick smoke when they don't want to go outside. When you reach the third floor, you discover a deserted collection of lawns, an arbor, and brick walkways, with views of the main campus to the east and north and the hospital to the west.

The construction site for Georgetown's new business school, viewed from Leavey's rooftop.

Looking north towards the Reiss science building.

Intro Class

Intro to philosophy at GWU, on Plato's Republic.

Aesthetics Class

Two unenlightening but non-circular definitions of "art". Aesthetics class at George Washington University.

Jefferson Memorial on Xmas Eve, 3am

Photo by Melody.

For a long time, I've wanted to visit the Jefferson Memorial late at night when no one is around. Driving home on Xmas Eve at 3am seemed like an ideal time. No one was around, except for a security guard who appeared out of nowhere and started writing me a ticket. That meant I had to abandon the plan for some reflective time in the memorial and sprint back to the car.

Eamonn's Dublin Chipper

The best fish and chips I've had in the U.S. are at Eamonn's Dublin Chipper in Old Town Alexandria. I've eaten there three times in the last month. The regular sized cod isn't enormous (two examples are pictured above), but with a large order of chips it's plenty. The chips are not the familiar stubby yellow British variety, but brownish longish versions I was unfamiliar with. Their mushy peas are as good as anything I've had in England, and Eammon's supplies a nice variety of sauces, including a warm curry sauce that tastes like something that would come from a kebab van (the mushy peas and curry sauce, in plastic cups, are pictured above). The one guy working behind the counter the week before Christmas sang along to the post-punk Christmas songs that were playing on the soundtrack.

Past writing on fish and chips.

Semi Pickup Truck

This absurd pickup truck/semi tractor truck hybrid is sometimes parked at night around 14th and K streets.

UPDATE: An anonymous commenter said that the pickup is an International CXT, the "world's biggest production pickup truck".