Archive for August 2003

Q Street Gnome

I noticed this gnome last Sunday at 17th and Q Street. He looks terrified of the outside world. But, I suppose, every prisoner must rationalize his circumstances.

Trashing the neighborhood

This is from the Post Properties home page

To Post, the tulip is more than a trademark, it is a symbol of what we strive to achieve – a reminder to our residents and ourselves that true beauty always captivates, true elegance always endures, and true quality always shows.

In addition to the trash that Post Properties posts on its website, here’s some trash the Massachusetts Avenue Post House left on my block all last weekend:

Here’s the response of the property manager to my complaint:

Your points are very well-taken, and we apologize that the matter was not handled more quickly. We have reviewed your feedback and incorporated it into our trash procedures. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience that our late trash pickup may have caused you or any of our other neighbors.

Thank you.

Eric Perry

Here’s what showed up on the sidewalk several hours later:

As Judge Judy says: “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me its raining.”

Great American Kitchens

A friend of mine just bought a condo a few blocks from here. It has a disastrous kitchen with ugly countertops the color of overripe avocado, which of course are going to be ripped out. The copy of “Great American Kitchens” taunts the kitchen with its unrealized possibilities. A kind of kitchen pornography, I suppose.

In omnibus caritas

In omnibus caritas. In all things charity.

Dr. Hahnemann, in the park named after him, watches carefully over a homeless man sleeping on his monument last Sunday morning.

The surface of things

I read today a remarkable book, Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa, a stunning extract from the notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne where he describes three weeks in 1851 when he was left alone to care for his son Julian while his wife visited relatives. I’m posting this picture of my niece Corinne, which I took last summer, in response to Paul Auster’s introduction to the book:

As with landscapes, so with people, especially little people in the flush of childhood. All is change with them, all is movement, and you can grasp their essence only ‘at unawares,’ at moments when you are not consciously looking for it. That is the beauty of Hawthorne’s little piece of notebook-writing. Throughout all the drudgery and tedium of his constant companionship with the five-year-old boy, Hawthorne was able to glance at him often enought to capture something of his essence, to bring him to life in words. A century and a half later, we are still trying to discover our children, but these days we do it by taking snapshots and following them around with video cameras. But words are better, I think, if only because they don’t fade with time. It takes more effort to write a truthful sentence than to focus a lens and push a button, of course, but words go deeper than pictures do — which can rarely record anything more than the surfaces of things, whether landscapes or the face of children. In all but the best or luckiest photographs, the soul is missing.

Digital photos no longer fade. But Auster is right that pictures only capture the surface of things.

Can’t Live With Dasani

I “can’t live with” Dasani either.

The rest of the sign, which you can only see from 11th Street, says “out Dasani.” Who knew that Dasani needed to have his private life revealed?

Big! Breakfast

Part of 14th Street resists gentrification. This picture is two years old and yet nothing about this carry-out on 14th and P has changed, as I noticed just this weekend. I don’t think you could get a “Big! Breakfast” for $1.85 two years ago anymore than you could get a “Big! Breakfast” for that price now. And what does “Seafood” have to do with the “Big! Breakfast”? I think I’ll pass on the “bluefish! and eggs.”

Still, I like the exclamation point in “Big! Breakfast,” since it tells you exactly what you’ve bought into. McDonald’s should serve a “Super!-Size Big! Mac” meal, and maybe people will finally realize that a “Small! Salad” or even a “Regular! Salad” might do just fine.

Centurions

Reincarnations, a refurbished furniture store, just moved from 17th Street to 14th and Rhode Island, a block from my house. They have put two tacky identical centurions in front of their entrance to guard the store. This is one of them. What were they thinking? That they would scare away the drug dealers and panhandlers?

Of course, the store takes the centurions back in at night, which makes them pretty useless at scaring away the dealers. . .