And someone asked me for directions to the Inner Circle, which was all of a block and a half away. Mind you, Loews Cineplex Odeon can't make up its mind to keep the venue open, so the signage is inconspicuous, to say the least.

posted: 9:24:16 PM  

Magnolias are blooming in the park that separates eastbound and westbound E Street N.W., between GSA and Interior. Light mid-day showers have given way to warm sun and clouds.

The fountain is not yet filled this season. Tourists from Annandale and Rockville park along the four sides of the street. There are several spaces still available.

I never cared much for magnolias. The cheap-smelling scent, the blowsy flowers—much too pushy for me. That's okay, the magnolias don't mind. They're attended by three or four bumblebees.

I see the my first grackle of the season performing a courtship display: his tail fanned into a rudder, he flies to and fro. This is the bird equivalent of cruising the strip in your low-rider.

There are three guys sleeping on benches. A couple couples. A brunette in a taupe tank and black cropped pants becomes the fourth to recline on a bench. She lies supine and reads her textbook, wielding a yellow highlighter. She kicks her feet up and crosses them.

posted: 9:19:46 PM  

A postscript to the Mills show: I dropped by [the] BFA exhibit upstairs. The only thing worth nothing noting is by Kim Ho, who laid out an army of plaster rabbits in three sizes. The rabbits make a pattern on the floor like a stylized outline map of the Americas. Every one of the bunnies is streaming for Tierra del Fuego.

posted: 9:07:46 PM  

Sibley's Birding Basics, by David Allen Sibley

There is good information to be found in this slim book (154 pages), no doubt about it. It fills a gap between the dozen pages to be found in a modern field guide and full-length books: ornithology texts, identification guides for particular families, and books like Jack Connor's The Complete Birder. In particular, chapters do a good job of 3-5 telling the reader what to look for and what to ignore.

But I hesitate to recommend this book to the beginning birder, who will be snowed under by the wealth of detail on plumage to be found in chapters 9-11 and 13-15. Again, this is good stuff, but it's something to come back to after you've spent some hours in the field.

posted: 9:03:24 PM  

Joseph Mills: Inner City, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington

If the Bourke-White show offered too little humanity, this show is afflicted by too much, and that's a good thing. Joseph Mills photographed in the streets of downtown Washington throughout the 1980s, casting an unflinching eye on the scars and scabs of his fellows. He returned to his negatives in the late nineties to print them. The results, using photographic paper past its use-by date and layers of varnish, have an air, a distancing, like that of the nineteenth century. Mills confers a kind of old-world dignity on an image of a man swaddled in trash bags against the cold.

There is a human image, or the trace of one, in nearly every one of the 50-odd images in the exhibition. It may be a tiny solitary figure in full sun at the end of a block-long dark canyon of an alley; it may be a closeup from sidewalk level of a man's foot in an ankle-brace; it may be only a weathered footprint in cement.

Even the well-off are wounded in Mills's world. A be-suited couple looking to hail a taxi grimace in the sunlight.

Sometimes there is dark humor, like the don't-try-this-at-home photo of two women standing before shop window, an mannequin "growing" out of one's head.

Many of his pictures include reflections through bus windows, through store windows, sometimes reflections of the sky. I find a little bit of hope in that.

posted: 8:52:34 PM  

David Cronenberg shows us in Spider that less is more: less verbiage from Ralph Fiennes (he barely speaks an intelligible, audible syllable in anyone's hearing), less light, and definitely less blood. John Neville shows broken patrician gravitas in a small supporting role.

posted: 8:32:15 PM