Washington City Paper (Mar. 3, 2022)

CITYPAPER WASHINGTON

NEWS: HOW SHOULD D.C. DEVELOP PUBLIC LAND? 3 SPORTS: THE NEW SOUND OF HU MEN’S BASKETBALL 4 FILM: CAPITAL IRISH FILM FESTIVAL RETURNS 16

THE DISTRICT'S FREE WEEKLY SINCE 1981 VOLUME 42, NO. 4 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM MARCH 4-17, 2022

CITY PAPER WASHINGTON

MARCH

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MADNESS.

D.C. AGENCY EDITION

A battle to the bottom of D.C. bureaucracy P.6

TABLE OF CONTENTS COVER STORY 6 The Big Dunce: A battle to the bottom to determine which D.C. government agency performed worst in 2021.

NEWS 3 Loose Lips: What’s the best way to develop public land?

Candidates, elected officials, and activists have differing ideas.

SPORTS 4 Public Service Announcement : Miles Rawls, the longtime organizer of D.C.’s Goodman League, is the new voice of Howard University’s men’s basketball team.

FOOD 14 Old & Full: Reflections and recommendations from outgoing food editor Laura Hayes

ARTS 16 The Film of the Irish: Offerings to look forward to at the 16th annual Capital Irish Film Festival 18 It’s All in the Subtexts: Dan Brady plays with form and content in his new poetry collection.

19 He’s So Popular: A new podcast breaks down tensions in the District’s gay community.

20 Film: Gittell on Fresh 20 Galleries: Rudig on Marcel Duchamp: The Barbara and Aaron Levine Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the online exhibit It’s Art If I Say So

CITY LIGHTS 21 City Lights: A Malian electric guitarist’s concert, and other artsy happenings to check out in the DMV

DIVERSIONS 23 Savage Love

Darrow Montgomery | 1700 block of Lamont Street NW, Feb. 21 Editorial

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NEWS LOOSE LIPS Darrow Montgomery

Uncreative Commons Candidates like Robert White want to change how D.C. develops public land. Could it make a difference to the housing crisis?

By Alex Koma @AlexKomaWCP D.C. could soon replace the distinctly retro Reeves Center in the U Street corridor with hundreds of gleaming apartments, new office space, maybe even a hotel and a public plaza—but is that really enough?

The city is weighing two pitches from developers vying to remake the old government building, and no matter which one wins, hundreds of affordable apartments and other community amenities will bring new life to the publicly owned site. But some politicians still see that outcome as a failure, and a powerful example of the District’s bigger problems in combating its housing crisis.

Why shouldn’t the city demand more from developers if they’re going to get the chance to build on such a prime piece of land, they wonder? Sure, D.C. will get some new affordable housing out of the project, but what if the city asked for much more? What if there were new homeownership opportunities, community land trusts, or even social housing built into these public land deals?

“If you look at any of the development projects on public lands, there is no difference between what they’re doing today and what we were doing 15 years ago,” says At-Large Councilmember Robert White, who is challenging Mayor Muriel Bowser in June’s Democratic primary. “It is clear the administration just will not think outside the box.”

White is probably the most prominent candidate raising these points, but he’s certainly not alone. Many Council contenders have mounted similar arguments about D.C.’s development strategies as they try to formulate some sort of policy response to rising rent prices, and the issue has become a popular talking point particularly among more progressive candidates (though even more moderate voices have joined this chorus).

“We’re giving the keys away to developers, selling land for a dollar and not getting deeply affordable housing,” says Zachary Parker, who represents Ward 5 on the State Board of Education and has claimed the left lane in the open Council race there. “Our current approach is not sustainable.”

These ideas are promising, and have pitfalls. Developers warn that too many requirements on these projects could break the fragile economics of an affordable housing deal, and believe that Bowser’s team is already doing as much as it possibly can to spur more affordable construction. And even the most enthusiastic

policy wonks caution that, while the District may own plenty of prime properties, the housing crisis is so daunting that changing requirements on public land alone won’t solve it.

But if the city isn’t getting the most affordable housing it can with its own land, or using these properties for innovative experiments, then where can the government make a difference?

“We know you can’t just snap your fingers and get 100 percent affordable housing in a project,” says Eliana Golding, an analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “But we can do a better job of asking developers to get on our page versus getting on theirs.” developers say they aren’t opposed to including affordable units in these projects, per se, and it’s far from a totally alien requirement; the District requires that 30 percent of all units built via the sale of public land be affordable.

In other cases, the city ground leases properties to developers (maintaining ownership of the underlying land) and doesn’t include such requirements. But officials often press for bidders to include affordability as part of their proposals to win a lease arrangement. At the Reeves Center, for instance, both potential winners want to build more than 200 affordable units there—no small thing considering the site currently has no housing on it.

The city can certainly ask for more affordable apartments on these properties (or require that the units be affordable to people at lower income levels) but builders doubt they could actually deliver on those requests. Doug Firstenberg, principal at the inf luential development firm Stonebridge, says the government needs to add subsidies like housing vouchers or low-interest loans if it wants to see affordability on these projects.

“Free land isn’t going to be enough to cover the gap and get you to a break-even point,” Firstenberg says. “You’re not going to get a lender, you’re not going to get the equity at a certain point.”

A valuable piece of land is a powerful bit of negotiating leverage for the District in these transactions (and it removes a huge cost for developers). But the industry is often wary of the extra costs associated with a lengthy public process, which can be far more drawn out than a private project.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” says Eric Jones, a top lobbyist for the Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington. “The government is going to give you free land because it knows there are going to be other costs.”

Reeves Center at 14th and U streets NW

Golding is sympathetic to these arguments, to a point. Developers have to turn a profit on these deals, or else they would have no reason to pursue them. But she believes that the city shouldn’t stop trying to push the envelope on affordability just because it gets pushback.

“They’re in private industry, so they want to cut costs as much as they can,” Golding says.

“Any government has a responsibility to interrogate that.” bowser officials believe they have struck a balance between these two sides. The mayor has prioritized affordable housing in city-owned land deals and even begun experimenting with making community land trusts part of these deals. At an old school property near Truxton Circle, for instance, the Douglass Community Land Trust will get the chance to build new townhomes and sell them off at affordable rates, while another developer manages the rental portion of the project. Buyers will own the houses, but the trust will maintain control of the land, a model designed to prevent real estate prices from rising over time.

“The one innovation we can do is a bigger focus on homeownership,” says John Falcicchio, Bowser’s chief of staff and deputy mayor for planning and economic development. “That’s something we’re putting more into our solicitations.”

But White believes the administration simply hasn’t moved fast enough to embrace different development models. He thinks that failure stems, in part, from Bowser’s deference to a certain class of developers that have

found good business in bidding frequently on city projects while donating freely to the mayor and her allies. At Reeves alone, both teams are stocked with Bowser’s close confidants.

“It has absolutely been business as usual with respect to development, and the same people getting the contracts,” White says.

“That is not the way to have a robust, competitive market here in the District … There’s just no exploration whatsoever of better opportunities or new opportunities, like social housing.”

Alex Baca, the D.C. policy director for the nonprofit Greater Greater Washington (and a former City Paper staffer), shares some of White’s frustration, noting the persistent problems with the city’s minority contracting system. But she also wonders whether politicians are ready to embrace solutions big enough for the scale of the problem.

She’s sensitive to developers’ concerns about economics, so why not just make dense projects on public land “by right,” avoiding the city’s lengthy zoning review process as a cost-cutting measure? Or maybe the city could essentially set up a “parallel housing authority” by buying up more properties using its seldom-exercised right of first refusal to buy many buildings for sale? Then the District could manage those buildings on its own and hold down rents.

But good luck convincing neighbors they can’t complain to their ANC about a new building, or that they should live in public housing given the state of such units in D.C. “It’s all possible, but I’m just not sure the will is there to make it happen,” Baca says.

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM MARCH 4, 2022 3

SPORTS BASKETBALL

Public Service Announcement Kelyn Soong

Miles Rawls brings his own style from the Goodman League to his new gig as the Howard University men’s basketball team’s public address announcer.

By Kelyn Soong @KelynSoong Nearly 2,000 fans i nside Howa rd University’s Burr Gymnasium begin to settle into their seats on a late February afternoon when Miles Rawls decides it’s time to raise the arena’s energy level. The Howard men’s basketball team is warming up on the court for its Senior Day matchup against North Carolina Central University. Only two regular season home games remain on the schedule ahead of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference tournament.

“The next two games are crucial for the MEAC seeding, so don’t sit on your hands,” Rawls shouts into his microphone. He surveys the crowd from his perch at the scorer’s table.

“H! U!” Rawls booms. “You know!” the fans respond. Rawls chuckles. “Oh, I love it,” he says.

Anyone familiar with the basketball scene in Southeast D.C., and more specifically the

Miles Rawls

Goodman League—the summer league hosted in the Barry Farm neighborhood that features high school, streetball, and professional talent—recognizes this animated and demanding voice. It’s vintage Rawls, the commissioner and play-by-play voice of the league since 1996.

The Goodman League is ingrained in the Barry Farm community and has drawn NBA superstars like Kevin Durant to its games. Rawls has been a charismatic fixture of the celebrated annual event, which runs from May through August.

Now, the 59-year-old Southeast native is bringing some of that same flair to Howard University as the public address announcer of its men’s basketball games. “My style is just off-the-cuff. I don’t mimic anybody,” Rawls says. Rawls joined the program before the season, as part of third-year head coach Kenneth Blakeney’s mission to “connect Howard with fibers of the DMV.” His presence coincides with

4 MARCH 4, 2022 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

the team’s success and improvement under Blakeney—the Bison are 16-11 and 9-4 in the MEAC as of publication—and the increasing spotlight on historically Black colleges and universities. The position opened up when Tony Lee, the “official voice of Bison Athletics” since 2018, died in January of 2021 due to COVID19 complications. Rawls was the only person Blakeney, a D.C. native, reached out to and recommended for the job. Howard’s athletic director hired Rawls prior to the 2021-22 basketball season.

“Miles is D.C.,” Blakeney says. “What he’s established, what he’s done over at the Farms is really special. ... So it was only natural for me to reach out to Miles and say, ‘Miles, I’d love for you to be a part of what we’re trying to build and establish here to continue to connect the dots with the DMV.’” Rawls proudly tells people he was born

and raised in Barry Farm. Irving Brady, one of the co-founders of the Goodman League, remembers meeting Rawls when he was only 10 years old. Brady’s family lived in the same neighborhood as Rawls, and Brady, 73, worked as a youth leader at the Barry Farm Recreation Center.

The league started off as a bet in 1975 between Brady, Morty Hammonds, Carlton Reed, and George Goodman over who could coach the best softball team. Two years later, the friends decided to change it up and focus on basketball.

“I think we got mad ’cause Morty won, and we said, ‘OK, [Morty] can’t coach basketball,’’’ Brady says. “And we went into basketball, and the rest is history.”

It was around this time that Rawls, then in middle school, started announcing games.

All he had was one microphone hooked into a record player, but Rawls would be there all night, every night, in his words, “just talking shit.” Later, as he got more established, Rawls started doling out nicknames.

“I was amazed because of his attitude and his ability to do it, and at the same time, he would jone on people and give them names,” Brady says. “And today, people have nicknames that Miles gave them.” Brady’s is “Body Move” or “B-Move.” The D.C. go-go band Rare Essence have a song called “Body Moves” and Brady is a manager for the band.

Rawls left Barry Farm to join the U.S. Army in 1983 before returning to his hometown in 1995 after being honorably discharged. At that time, Barry Farm’s summer league had stagnated, so that summer he asked the co-founders if he could take over the event the following year. During his time in charge, the league was renamed in 2000 to the George Goodman League in honor of Goodman, who worked at the Barry Farm Recreation Center as a counselor. Goodman was killed in 1984 at age 31.

In addition to Durant, NBA players Michael Beasley, Victor Oladipo, Gilbert Arenas, John Wall, and Bradley Beal have all played in the Goodman League. Even though the league hasn’t attracted as many big names in recent years, and the neighborhood is dealing with gun violence and gentrification amid plans to redevelop Barry Farm, the Goodman League remains a linchpin in the community. Opening day for this year is May 31, Rawls says.

“I hope he continues to thrive and give back to his community,” Brady says of Rawls.

“Unfortunately the Farms have been torn down, but I’m quite sure the league will continue to go on with his leadership.”

SPORTS BASKETBALL

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Before he came to Howard, where he is considered a contractor and is paid per game, Rawls never worked as a formal public address announcer. He says he’s turned down requests from other schools, but the prestige of Howard University and Blakeney’s personal request convinced him to join.

“Howard is home and it’s historic and a lot of light was shining on HBCU schools,” Rawls says. “So I couldn’t tell him no.”

But he knew there would be some adjustment. This is the same guy who once talked trash to President Barack Obama in 2009 while sitting courtside when the Chicago Bulls were in town to play the Wizards. Rawls calls his persona at Howard his “corporate version,” but that doesn’t mean he completely sheds his authentic Goodman League style.

As a PA announcer, Rawls announces the lineups, fouls, time-outs, and reads off the scripted sponsor ads. He also announces the names of players who score a basket. The job isn’t a play-by-play gig like at Barry Farm, but Rawls occasionally reverts back to what he knows. “Sometimes referees come over to me and say, ‘Hey, hey, hey, you can’t announce games,’” Rawls says. “I plead ignorance on them and say, ‘Oh, OK. I didn’t know.’” In January, in a home matchup against Notre Dame at the MLK Day Classic, Rawls was told to

lower his voice because he was louder than the announcers on the TV broadcast. And before tip-off against North Carolina Central, Rawls said into the microphone, “North Carolina

Rawls says. “The fans, they enjoy it more than I thought.”

Early in the second half against North

“Howard is home and it’s historic and a lot of light was shining on HBCU schools. So I couldn’t tell him no.”

Central is gonna get this whippin’.” (At a Barry Farm game, he would have included the word “ass” before “whippin’,” Rawls explains.) A Howard staff member ran over and told Rawls he couldn’t say that.

At Howard, Rawls has to play by someone else’s rules. But he’s still enjoying the new challenge. People recognize him at games, and Rawls wants to contribute to Blakeney’s goal of making Howard men’s basketball culturally relevant in the college basketball landscape.

“I’ve been having a good time with it,”

Carolina Central, Howard guard Kyle Foster gets a steal and hits a long-range three-pointer on the fastbreak. “Way down town!” Rawls shouts in the microphone. “Kyle Foster from Georgia Avenue with the three!”

He’s only given out one nickname this season—Rawls calls redshirt sophomore forward Steve Settle III “Silky Smooth”—but he finds other ways to add his own flavor.

Rawls punctuates each player’s name like he would at a Goodman League game. Randall Brumant becomes “Bru! Mant!” and Tai

Bibbs is “B-b-b-bibbs!” During time-outs and at halftime, he banters with the DJ and the cheerleaders.

As the final buzzer sounds against NCCU, Rawls shouts “H! U!” for one final time, eliciting a loud, “You know!” from the crowd, before turning to another one of his Goodman League lines: “Please leave carefully,” he tells the crowd, “when you leave.” Howard won 77-67.

Rawls then heads out the doors of Burr Gymnasium for the final time this season—he would miss the following game due to a flareup of a foot injury—but he plans to be back next season. Rawls will retire in June from his day job as a federal officer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, where he’s worked since 1997.

“I’m gonna need something to do,” Rawls says. “So it looks like that’ll be a go again for next year. If that’s what Coach Blakeney wants to do, then I’m going to ride with him.”

That’s an understatement for Blakeney. “I want Miles at my hip,” the coach says. “Because he’s a huge part of what we’re building here.

He’s a huge part of the story. He’s a huge part of the success that hopefully we’ll have as we continue to take steps and build our culture here.

We want Miles here. If we can lock Miles up on a five-year deal, I’d like to do it. I’m going to tie Miles’ contract into mine.”

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CITY PAPER WASHINGTON

It’s performance oversight season in D.C., that special time every year when nearly every local government agency and office lines up in front of D.C. Council committees to describe their work over the past 12 months and answer hours of questions. Constituents provide their own feedback as well, often highlighting major issues that marred the agency in the past year.

D.C. agencies encountered plenty of scandals in 2021: The number of traffic fatalities and homicides surpassed the marks set in 2020, the crime lab lost its accreditation, and one of the city’s biggest agencies will be split in two by this time next year. That got us thinking: Which one is the worst? What if we were to compare them and attempt to determine a victor (or loser depending on your perspective) in a March Madness-style bracket? The timing, after all, is nearly perfect.

First, let us state the terms: This commentary, while based on serious information, is meant in jest. We’re comparing agencies and departments to show how policies become talking points and how problems arise and are or are not resolved. You may not agree with our rankings and that’s OK—share your reactions on social media or by emailing editor@washingtoncitypaper.com.

So who makes the tournament we’re calling the Big Dunce? After consulting with Wilson Building insiders and among ourselves, we seeded a field of eight agencies whose screwups and scandals earned them entry into this tournament to determine the worst of the worst. We also selected five “bubble” teams whose screwups were significant but slightly less bad, either because they caused less harm or shared blame with other agencies and departments. The eight teams in the tournament are ranked based on their budgets, with the biggest budgeted agency, the Metropolitan Police Department, as the top seed.

The information in these descriptions come from interviews with officials and onlookers, the prehearing questionnaires each agency is required to submit, and the hearings themselves. We watched more than 68 collective hours—yes, nearly three days—worth of hearings so you don’t have to. (They’re not the most scintillating things to sit through.) Consider this a more fun way to learn about how your government is working (or not working) and spending your tax dollars.

Who will get their “one shining moment”? Read on to find out.

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—Caroline Jones

On the bubble Department of Housing and Community Development Fiscal year 2022 budget: $150.2 million Director: Drew Hubbard (interim) In a city where the rent is already too damn high, rents continue to climb year after year. The efforts of DHCD affect nearly everyone in the city, though some argue that those with extremely low incomes are not prioritized.

In his opening testimony at the department’s oversight hearing in February, DHCD Interim Director Drew Hubbard highlighted the impact of the Housing Production Trust Fund, a tool established in 1988 to build and preserve affordable housing in the District. Hubbard says that since Mayor Muriel Bowser took office in 2015, there has been no less than $100 million worth of funding in the HPTF, which is more per capita than any other city in the country.

The HPTF has produced more than 14,250 units of affordable housing with another 12,300 under construction or in the pipeline, and has preserved more than 1,500 units of existing affordable housing since Bowser took office, according to a September 2021 press release. That same month, Bowser announced a $400 million investment in the fund, bringing the total contribution to the HPTF during her tenure to $1 billion.

D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute analyst Eliana Golding says the investment in some ways makes D.C. “the envy of the country.” But, she adds, “I don’t think that we’ve gone far enough.” Golding says that households with incomes below 30 percent of the area median income don’t receive enough attention.

The Post reported in October the findings of a report from the Office of the Inspector General, which found that the District misspent nearly $82 million in HPTF dollars. While at least 50 percent of the HPTF is legally required to provide housing to households with incomes below 30 percent of AMI, most of that funding instead went to those at 50 percent AMI and above.

In DHCD’s written responses to the Council’s questions for the oversight hearing, Hubbard wrote that while “more needs to be done,” the “extremely ambitious” goal of dedicating at least half of the HPTF to those with extremely low incomes has potential risks, including “advancing residential segregation patterns” and “concentrating poverty.”

Golding is skeptical of these arguments. “The amount of affordable housing in areas like Ward 3 is just not nearly enough,” she says.

The method of choosing which proposals should receive HPTF funding is also suspect. A report from the Office of the D.C. Auditor from May 2019 found that five out of nine proposals awarded funding from the HPTF in the previous year were ranked

by District staff evaluators in the bottom half of applications. This selection resulted in a loss of 353 affordable housing units and 95 units designed for the poorest District households.

While DHCD has claimed that there are no conflict of interest issues, a whistleblower identified potential political favoritism in the selection process for housing development projects in late 2019.

—Michelle Goldchain

DC Health Fiscal year 2022 budget: $282.3 million Director: Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt In case you haven’t heard, we’re in a bit of a health pickle. The pandemic was at the center of DC Health’s work in 2021, and directly and indirectly affected everything in their purview. Let’s give credit where credit is due: Relatively speaking, DC Health’s handling of the pandemic in 2021 was a success (emphasis on relatively).

An estimated 73.1 percent of District residents are fully vaccinated (DC Health defines fully vaccinated as having completed one vaccine regimen; this does not reflect the number of residents who have received booster doses). That puts D.C. ahead of the national rate (65 percent), and in the No. 10 spot when ranking by state. Strict COVID protocols, vaccination drives, and accessible testing kept positive cases, hospitalizations, and deaths down for much of the year. But relaxed protocols led cases to sky-

rocket in December, as the omicron variant infected an unprecedented number of residents, and made D.C. one of the country’s worst COVID hot spots.

That surge led Mayor Bowser, following DC Health guidance, to reinstate a mask mandate and instate a vaccine mandate—both of which she swiftly revoked a month later, with DC Health’s blessing. “We follow DC Health’s advice,” the mayor stated at the Feb. 14 press conference where she announced the relaxed protocols, with department director Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt at her side. The decision riled critics, including Ward 1 Councilmember Nadeau. “It defies logic.

It defies science. It’s a terrible move,” she told City Paper at the time.

The mandate roller coaster wasn’t DOH’s only fumble in the past year. In November, the department announced it had hired Dr. Thomas Farley as a senior official. That didn’t go over too well after Black Lives Matter DC brought to light that this was the same Thomas Farley who had been asked to step down as Philadelphia’s health commissioner. Why? He’d ordered the cremation and disposal of victims of the 1985 MOVE police bombing without notifying their families. Farley is still with DC Health.

A nationwide school nursing shortage has not spared D.C. There’s only one nurse to go around the entire KIPP DC Douglass Campus, one of the Anacostia charter school’s principals, Miriam Darby, said at DC Health’s oversight hearing. Martita Fleming, Washington Latin’s director of operations, said the Brightwood Park charter is only guaranteed a nurse on site for three days each week—and many weeks, they’re not even getting that. School officials have also been scratching their heads over why they’ve been told that their nurses can’t treat students exhibiting COVID symptoms, like a runny nose or a cough.

Another issue raised at the hearing: A range of medical professionals—from long-term care workers to dentists—described a slow and unresponsive licensing administration, which exacerbates already existing staff shortages. And WUSA9 reported that in 2021, more than 11,300 people called DC Health to complain about rats, a significant uptick from the 7,500 calls fielded in 2020.

Socioeconomic factors continue to determine health outcomes in the District. DC Health recently made a significant step toward amending that.

On Feb. 18, the city broke ground on Cedar Hill Regional Medical Center in Congress Heights, which is slated to open in December 2024. Cedar Hill will replace the crumbling United Medical Center, the only hospital currently located in Ward 8.

—Ella Feldman

District Department of Transportation Fiscal year 2022 budget: $170 million Director: Everett Lott In 2021, 40 individuals died as a result of traffic fatalities in D.C. That statistic alone, which surpasses 2020’s total of 37 traffic fatalities, should move the District Department of Transportation into the running for worst performing government agency.

Assigning blame is not that easy, of course—the Metropolitan Police Department investigates crashes in tandem with DDOT and ultimately charges those at fault. But paired with increased complaints about everything from curb cuts and streateries to bike lanes and old trees, the increased fatality numbers do not bathe DDOT in glory.

DDOT impacts the most residents and visitors every year—if you drive on the streets or step on the sidewalks of D.C., you’re on their turf. Its current director, Everett Lott, assumed his role over the summer and was confirmed by default in January, after the Council failed to vote on his appointment within the required timeline. In interviews and in the department’s performance oversight hearing, Lott espoused his commitment to equity, though the District’s Pedestrian Advisory Council, Bicycle Advisory Council, and Multimodal Accessibility Advisory Council. But members of the general public would beg to differ. Uneven sidewalks limit the mobility of those who use wheelchairs or other assistive devices, and 311 requests aren’t filled in a timely manner. Drivers hit children walking to school or fatally strike them in crosswalks, even as the executive branch repeats its commitment to ending traffic fatalities through its Vision Zero initiative. According to Lott, roughly 20 crossing guard roles were vacant as of mid-February.

The problem, as councilmembers and community members see it, stems from a lack of communication between DDOT and other agencies. In the performance oversight hearing, Lott lauded his colleagues

for closing 1,137 traffic safety investigations in FY 2021 and 2022 after reviews, but those only communicate part of the story to MPD and the Department of Public Works, the more powerful agencies that can charge or ticket individuals who violate traffic laws. Even if a traffic investigation results in action, such as installing a four-way stop, DDOT has little incentive to act quickly—its installation deadline is longer than four months.

The department remains too reliant on MPD’s crash data, councilmembers and residents say. “It seems to me that DDOT’s approach to traffic safety is to wait for a crash to happen and then respond to those specific circumstances. It is reactive and not proactive,” Jessica Hart, a Ward 5 resident whose 5-yearold daughter, Allison, died after a vehicle struck her while she was bicycling in a crosswalk in September, testified. “Residents’ lived experiences are not given enough weight in traffic safety decisions.”

“What steps have you taken to improve the crash data DDOT uses to inform TSI analysis?” Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George asked Lott later in the hearing. That data only tells part of the story and doesn’t even consider potential crashes.

At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson told Lott she was almost in an accident when she stepped out during the hearing, which lasted more than seven hours.

DDOT doesn’t make it to the Big Dance because it cannot solely assume the blame for all the traffic incidents in D.C. But as it approaches its 20th birthday, the organization doesn’t deserve pats on the back, it needs visionary action. The new Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge might look great, but let’s not forget about the June collapse of the 295 overpass bridge. —Caroline Jones

Office of Unified Communications Fiscal year 2022 budget: $55.4 million Acting director: Karima Holmes Karima Holmes will be returning to her old job as head of the Office of Unified Communications, the agency tasked with handling millions of nonemergency 311 and emergency 911 calls in the District.

Dave Statter, a public safety advocate and former reporter who writes about public safety issues, broke the news that Holmes will replace interim director Cleo Subido.

Holmes previously served as the director of OUC from 2016 until her resignation in December of 2020, during which the agency faced an audit for allegedly mishandling emergency dispatches. Bowser recently praised Holmes for overhauling OUC’s “technical infrastructure and critical public safety programs.” But her nomination was immediately met with criticism and skepticism.

“I have concerns about seesawing in the leadership of such an important agency, because we can’t afford to backslide on the improvements OUC has been making recently in 911 and 311 service delivery,” Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen tells City Paper in an email. “I’ll hold an open public hearing to give the nominee an honest opportunity to address concerns being raised, but the findings from the D.C. Auditor’s review—especially the problems of management and leadership—will weigh heavy on my mind and require strong answers.”

Last October, the D.C. Auditor released a 114-page report that details the problems impacting OUC, including inconsistent use of location determining technology tools, inadequate oversight, and a culture of “cliques” and “bullying.” These issues have led to delays in residents receiving help. In June of 2020, Sheila Shepperd suffered a heart attack, and her 13-year-old child called 911, but it would take nearly 21 minutes before first responders arrived because the dispatcher sent crews to the wrong address. Shepperd later died at the hospital. Five months later, Holmes apologized to the family in a statement to Fox 5.

In a Jan. 27 oversight hearing before the Committee on Public Safety and Justice, OUC call-taker Yolanda Geter described an agency struggling with severe staffing issues. “Right now we’re in a state of emergency,” Geter said. “I’m here to tell you, you have employees that work 12-hour shifts, and on their days off they’re working 12-hour shifts.”

During her testimony, Subido, then the interim OUC director, said the agency is working with the National Association of Government Employees, the Department of Human Resources, and the Office of Labor Relations and Collective Bargaining “to implement a new shift schedule from 12-hour to 8-hour shifts

for call takers and police dispatchers.” Subido also told the committee that there is a new class of 10 call center workers who were selected from an applicant pool of around 200 after basic testing and background checks. The low number of trained staff concerns Allen.

“OUC continues to struggle with staffing levels and ensuring call takers and dispatchers are adequately supported in their very demanding and intense jobs,” he says. “The agency needs to continue to work on resolving these staffing issues and their unsustainable reliance on overtime, as well as quality assurance, training, and technology improvements.”

—Kelyn Soong

Department of Behavioral Health Fiscal year 2022 budget: $356.1 million Director: Barbara J. Bazron With its gargantuan budget and support from city initiatives, you might expect great things from the Department of Behavioral Health, the agency charged with psychiatric and behavioral health services across the District. DBH also heads a recently expanded initiative that diverts 911 calls involving individuals with mental illness away from police and to crisis response services. But then you would have to divert your disappointment to a more helpful stance, like figuring out why “chaos” reigns at some behavioral health facilities, according to testimonies at the agency’s performance oversight hearing last month.

Advocates of patients with mental health disorders described overcrowding at mental health and psychiatric facilities, illegal involuntary discharges, and incidents where staff scream at each other and at patients, as the most common complaints their offices receive. These issues aren’t exactly conducive to improving mental health in individuals already facing instability. Neither is overall incompetency in deescalating situations and, when all else fails, overmedicating patients to calm the tempest.

Katerina Semyonova of the Public Defender Service and Mark Miller of Legal Counsel for the Elderly attested to these frequent reports from patients at psychiatric facilities.

As one of the agency’s treatment support arms, Assertive Community Treatment teams are designed to reach folks not getting access to vital mental health services. But they’re failing at following up with psych center patients after discharges, according to Jaclyn Verner, staff attorney at Disability Rights DC. When DBH’s teams don’t respond to crises involving patients with mental illness, police step in instead—a path DBH is supposed to help the District move away from. Ward 4 Councilmember Lewis George has also cast doubt on the 911 diversion program, citing incidents in which police have responded first or exclusively at the scene and escalated situations involving folks with mental illness.

Another focus on early and preventative behavioral intervention—school-based counseling—has been coming up short. Long wait lists for counseling and connection issues with the DBH access helpline and referral agencies are the core of the problem. While DBH Director Barbara J. Bazron has mentioned understaffing, it doesn’t lighten the load on children facing unprecedented trauma and isolation.

DBH is also in charge of Mayor Bowser’s pre-pandemic vow to cut opioid-related deaths in half. But a 46 percent surge of opioid overdose deaths in the District from 2019 to 2020—411 deaths—reflected a nationwide trend during COVID isolation and the proliferation of fentanyl. Pending 2021 overdose death rates look just as grim, with 344 overdoserelated deaths reported as of October 2021, according to Bazron.

That means there are about twice as many overdose deaths as homicides, in a year when homicides are at a near 20-year high.

Officials and advocates are asking why DBH hasn’t done more to move the needle on the surge of substance use relapse and opioid overdoses. Its “LIVE. LONG. DC” strategy to target substance use, now in phase 2.0, shows some promise with its street and peer response teams and partnerships with D.C. influencers and faith leaders. But even Ward 7 Councilmember Vince Gray, more prone these days to deal out kudos to agencies rather than dragging them, has wondered aloud about the lack of clear vision from DBH on how to reduce future opioid deaths. —Ambar Castillo

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM MARCH 4, 2022 7

Top 8 Seeds

Contee touts his efforts at transparency by pointing to data on use of force, stops, and arrests published on MPD’s website. Disciplinary hearings are publicized online now, too.

And MPD is contributing to the national index of terminated officers in order to prevent them from joining another department. Under Contee, D.C. officers receive active bystander training that teaches them how to intervene if they see misconduct from a fellow officer.

That training didn’t prevent officers from drag racing in marked police cars, nor did it stop an officer from repeatedly punching a restrained man in the face. —Mitch Ryals

1.Metropolitan Police Department Fiscal year 2022 budget: $516.8 million Director: Chief Robert J. Contee The Metropolitan Police Department is D.C.’s primary law enforcement agency. Chief Robert Contee was sworn in as top cop in January 2021, and he leads a force of about 3,500 sworn officers (though he’s asking for about 500 more), whose ultimate responsibility is to keep the District safe.

Contee ended his first year as chief with a devastating 226 homicides—the most in nearly 20 years—and slight increases in property crime and violent crime overall. His officers shot 16 people, killing five of them. That’s as many fatal shootings as the previous three years combined. All five people D.C. police killed in 2021 were Black men.

At the top of MPD’s oversight hearing in February, Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen ran through a list of incidents that he calls “embarrassing at best, [and] in many cases illegal.”

Two officers are facing criminal charges for murder and obstruction in the death of Karon Hylton-Brown. Officer Terence Sutton and Lt. Andrew Zabavsky chased Hylton-Brown until he rode a moped into traffic and then tried to hide their involvement, prosecutors allege.

There are 21 current and former employees, most of whom are Black women, who filed multiple lawsuits alleging sexism, racism, and retaliation throughout multiple levels of the department.

D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson released two reports in 2021 revealing serious flaws in MPD’s investigations into its officers’ use of fatal force. The auditor found that MPD’s investigators mischaracterized evidence and failed to explore essential questions about potential policy violations. In one case, investigators collected so little evidence that auditors could not reach a conclusion. In another, investigators interviewed officers involved in a fatal shooting for less than 10 minutes.

Another former employee has come forward with details of corruption in MPD’s public records office. A recently filed lawsuit claims former MPD Chief Peter Newsham delayed and withheld public records from journalists and police critics. The suit says Contee has continued the practice. Both he and Newsham have denied the allegations.

And Lt. Shane Lamond was put on paid leave last month while he’s under investigation for improper communication with a member of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group.

Weighing in MPD’s favor is the fact that homicides increased in most other major U.S. cities from 2020 to 2021 (though D.C.’s 14 percent increase is above the 5 to 6 percent average increase, according to analyses of crime in major cities).

And Patterson recently published a follow-up to her reports on failures in the department’s internal investigations. Most of the auditor’s recommendations are either complete or in process.

2.Department of General Services Fiscal year 2022 budget: $493.5 million Director: Keith Anderson It might seem counterintuitive, but D.C.’s public school system doesn’t maintain its own buildings. And the agency that does can’t seem to get it right.

The Department of General Services has many functions that don’t draw much attention, such as managing the city’s real estate portfolio, but its school maintenance efforts have attracted complaints from parents, teachers, and students for years. Those issues have come under a particularly harsh spotlight during the pandemic, considering that air quality in schools is suddenly of paramount importance in order to keep kids healthy.

Even with students out of classrooms for long stretches of time, DGS failed to make many badly needed HVAC upgrades in time for the new school year. The agency told the Council last year that it managed to complete just 30 percent of all HVAC-related work orders by the time schools opened on Aug. 30. DGS had similar troubles on roofing issues, completing 64 percent by the time students returned, and on “fire and life safety” matters, with just a 39 percent completion rate.

“They had all of last year to do this,” says Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, who has been visiting a variety of schools to discuss the issue in recent weeks. “What were they doing all that time?”

DGS officials said during a September Council hearing on the matter that supply chain issues contributed to those delays, as has a recent spike in work orders. But parents are skeptical of those excuses, arguing that the agency has been promising improvements (and failing to deliver them) since long before COVID-19 emerged.

Certainly, schools all over the country have struggled with how best to manage air quality during the pandemic. Yet this lack of attentiveness seems particularly egregious to the agency’s critics when compared with other issues—teachers at several schools have reported coming to work to find blistering hot classrooms or leaky roofs.

“Our city has failed to take care of our children in places where they should be safe and healthy,” Ward 4 State Board of Education Rep. Frazier O’Leary told the Council in September.

—Alex Koma

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3.Department of Employment Services Fiscal year 2022 budget: $226.5 million Director: Dr. Unique Morris-Hughes Think of the Department of Employment Services as the District’s little Department of Labor. The agency was thrust into the spotlight during the pandemic because it’s charged with administering the city’s unemployment insurance system. It has other responsibilities too, such as helping job seekers find work, career training opportunities, or apprenticeships. The agency is also supposed to ensure employees are protected from unsafe working conditions and wage theft.

If DOES was a restaurant, it would have a hard time attracting diners with its 1.9 star rating on Google. Most of the one-star reviews come from D.C. residents hungry for their unemployment benefits during the pandemic.

They decry rude customer service, conflicting information, and phone calls that end in hang-ups.

While the agency, like its counterparts across the country, was pushed to the brink as it fielded more than 200,000 jobless claims tied to pandemic-related layoffs, many of those claimants and people with oversight of the agency describe DOES as a black hole; interacting with the agency is a nauseating vortex of confusion that comes with with major life consequences. Hundreds of claimants are still awaiting back pay.

“One month of delayed UI benefits means no rent, five months means being at risk of eviction, and a year later it means being on the brink of homelessness,” Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George said at a February oversight hearing while agency director Dr. Unique Morris-Hughes oscillated between preaching perseverance and deflecting blame.

“It’s not just financial consequences—the mental and emotional health of residents is severely impacted.”

D.C. was doomed from the start. As At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman put it, “We need a new unemployment system that’s not from the era when disco was popular.” Parts of the website hosting the city’s unemployment system are more than 40 years old and contributed to why claimants went without benefits whenever there was a system update. In the budget lawmaking process, the D.C. Council set a September 2022 delivery date for a new website. Morris-Hughes says February 2023 is more realistic, leaving Silverman questioning aloud if there’s enough will and urgency to go around.

DOES even got an injection of $11 million a year ago to hire and train more employees, add a chatbot, and send text updates. Wait times seemed to improve, but whether that was money well spent is hard to evaluate as customer service complaints persisted once the tsunami of fraudulent unemployment claims surprised residents in the summer of 2021.

DOES has received 13,000 reports of fraudulent claims.

Legal Aid of D.C. sued DOES in January 2022 for cutting off or denying people unemployment benefits without notice, but that’s not

the only legal hot water DOES is simmering in. In October 2021, a former employee of the agency sued for hundreds of hours of missing overtime pay. “This is definitely one of the most ironic cases I’ve had to file over the last decade,” the plaintiff’s attorney tells City Paper. Since last fall, two additional plaintiffs from the unemployment insurance office joined the active lawsuit.

DOES was able to pull off something special during the pandemic, which Morris-Hughes will no doubt consider part of her legacy. D.C. joined only a handful of other states in offering paid family leave in July 2020. That meant Washingtonians were able to care for family members with serious health conditions or bond with a new child without fear of financial ruin should their private employer not offer similar benefits. In October 2021, the law was expanded to include more support, like two weeks of prenatal leave. Morris-Hughes says about 15,000 of those claims have been processed. —Laura Hayes

4.Child and Family Services Agency Fiscal year 2022 budget: $220.2 million Director: Robert L. Matthews The Child and Family Services Agency is tasked with ensuring the safety, permanence, and well-being of D.C.’s abused and neglected children, as well as supporting and strengthening local families.

On June 1, the 32-year-old federal class action LaShawn A. v. Muriel Bowser was settled, ending decades of court oversight of the agency that has been frequently accused of closing cases inappropriately, overloading social workers, and retaliation. Such actions can and have led to the death of children.

Robert Matthews became CFSA’s director in July. Previously, he led the implementation of plans to help the agency end court oversight.

Matthews wants to move CSFA from a child welfare agency to child well-being agency, with the goal of keeping families together and keeping more children with extended family if removed from their homes.

Of the 24,504 hotline calls received in fiscal year 2021, 4,308 resulted in an investigation.

So far in fiscal year 2022, according to CSFA’s responses to the Council’s oversight questions, 7,144 calls have been received; 1,330 have led to open investigations.

In the calendar year 2021, five children with active in-home cases died: One died of natural causes and another was killed by a driver who ran a red light. The death of a 3-month-old has been identified as “Undetermined/Eutylone and Fentanyl intoxication.”

The backlog of CFSA investigations increased by nearly 600 percent in the last fiscal year.

Matthews told the Committee on Human Services on Feb. 17 this is due to the “great resignation.” As of January, the agency had almost 30 vacancies, which creates a bottleneck. They’ve hired a recruiter to look for social workers across the country.

The D.C. Council is currently working to appoint the first ombudsperson for children, who will offer greater insight into the agency’s protection of children, which has improved greatly in the past few years, on paper at least.

But metrics are hard to track without access to CFSA’s case management system, which councilmembers are legally blocked from seeing.

An ombudsperson stationed inside the agency would provide full, comprehensive reports and ensure children are protected from abuse and neglect, especially in allegations of sexual and physical abuse, which can be difficult to substantiate.

Kinship diversion, an informal practice that keeps children with family members and out of the foster care system, remains an area of interest and concern. Research shows keeping kids with relatives is best for their short- and long-term well-being, but because it’s an informal practice, CFSA does not track diversion outcomes. Marla Spindel, executive director of DC KinCare Alliance, noted in the hearing that “there’s no methodology to determine whether the practice hurts or helps children because there are no outcome measures associated with it.” Spindel added that CFSA’s limited data tracking of diversions is deeply flawed.

CFSA reported four diversions in fiscal year 2021, but Spindel’s organization is aware of at least five more, she said. —Sarah Marloff

5. Department of Public Works Fiscal year 2022 budget: $206.8 million Director: Michael Carter (interim) The Department of Public Works is both backstage crew and center stage in its own garbage theater. Cleaning up after its everyday messes—constituent complaints that range from missed leaf collections and trash pickups to a failure to enforce against dangerous drivers—isn’t easy when you’re starting from the ground up with new leadership. It’s fitting that current Interim Director Michael Carter, who has previously overseen firefighters, is working in another department where he’ll be putting out fires. In January, Mayor Bowser withdrew her previous nominee, Christine Davis, from Council consideration.

The colossal failures don’t stop at delays in snow, leaf, and trash removal, though breaking a leg in the snow or ice and piled-up trash leading to rodent infestations is no joke. Neglect breeds potential for injury and disease. And D.C. residents’ 311 calls about rodents and bugs soared 15 percent from 2020 to 2021 and have climbed 130 percent since 2017.

In short, the agency, built more than any other on everyday public services and requests, has flopped, according to Ward 4 resident and ANC Commissioner Zach Israel. DPW spent its fall season parceling out misleading leaf collection information—and touting success rates of 96 percent collection completion while neighborhoods overflowed with abandoned leaves, as Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau pointed out at a DPW oversight hearing on Feb. 8.

DPW has also closed out unfulfilled service requests and missed a plethora of calls from residents concerned about traffic safety. Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh has said the agency’s widespread failure to enforce against vehicles with multiple violations is a major contributing factor to the recent rises in traffic deaths and injuries in the District. Apart from

Vision Zero neglect, DPW is enabling another crisis—climate change—by dragging its feet with curbside composting and other waste diversion plans.

But in every pile of trash there’s a chance to make some cash. Through a collaboration with the city’s violence reduction initiative, DPW hired residents at high risk of gun violence— many of them formerly incarcerated or from neighborhoods known for historic feuds—during the last leaf-collection season to collect leaves and fallen trees and help with odd public jobs like playground and streetlight repairs.

DPW may keep its vow to convert about 80 qualifying employees to full-time roles, but only kind of. The positions are term-limited up to the fiscal year 2025 grant period. Even if it fulfills this 80-person promise, the agency comes up short of its staffing needs: DPW has 290 staff vacancies, Carter confirmed at the Feb. 8 hearing.

“What we have is a management problem, a leadership problem, a vision problem,” Cheh said at the end of DPW’s performance oversight hearing. “It’s like a sleepy little lastcentury operation that doesn’t cut it anymore.”

—Ambar Castillo

of uninhabitable public housing units. With that, he left behind an estimated $2.5 billion maintenance backlog for his successor, Brenda Donald, the consequences of which are a matter of life and death for some residents.

Adding to the leadership chaos is the resignation of former Board of Commissioners Chair Neil Albert in October after revelations that he approved contracts for his girlfriend, Paola Moya. Albert, Moya, and DCHA have received federal subpoenas, though the status of the investigation is unclear.

Bowser soon appointed a political ally, Dionne Bussey-Reeder, to replace Albert. Like Donald, Bussey-Reeder has no experience in affordable housing development. She was technically ineligible to serve on the board when Bowser appointed her. Shortly after taking over as chair, the Washington Post reported that she owed $15,000 in unpaid taxes, which disqualified her for the seat. Bussey-Reeder has since paid her debt, according to a DCHA spokesperson.

Donald, another Bowser buddy, has not said how she intends to approach the maintenance backlog but indicated she may not adopt Garrett’s approach of focusing on the 14 most decrepit properties.

Providing affordable housing is difficult enough. But when the people in charge are messy themselves, it becomes nearly impossible. —Mitch Ryals

6. D.C. Housing Authority Fiscal year 2022 budget: $175.2 million from the D.C. government, $606.5 million total Director: Brenda Donald The D.C. Housing Authority is experiencing a leadership crisis at a critical time. While federal funding for public housing has been in decline, local housing costs continue to rise. Delays, mismanagement, and internal conflict have hampered the agency, whose core mission is to house the District’s most vulnerable and lowest income residents.

Former DCHA Director Tyrone Garrett was ousted last May following a rocky three-and-ahalf-year stint. He often clashed with staff and the 11-member board of commissioners, who act as his collective boss. Under his watch, hundreds of permanent housing voucher subsidies went unused due in part to delays in processing applications.

The agency also wasted $1.3 million on a “strategic plan” that it never received, according to an audit that his administration worked to keep secret. DCHA’s internal auditor later resigned amid allegations of intimidation and retaliation.

Garrett also failed to close on a deal to redevelop DCHA’s NoMa headquarters, a project that’s lingered for about seven years.

But that shortcoming might end up counting as points in Garrett’s favor, as the deal included a “leaseback” agreement that would have DCHA paying millions to lease its own headquarters from the new owners. Critics also slammed the proposal for its lack of housing units reserved for the population of folks DCHA serves. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority recently announced a proposed 12-year lease with DCHA for up to 51,000 square feet of office space in its L’Enfant Plaza building.

DCHA would pay $1 million per year, according to WMATA. And Garrett made little progress on his signature 20-year plan to renovate thousands

7.Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs Fiscal year 2022 budget: $90.7 million Director: Ernest Chrappah While D.C.’s other agencies may have their problems, only one is so bad that it won’t exist this time next year: the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.

Lawmakers have been so persistently frustrated with the sprawling agency that they’re breaking it up, hoping to reshape a calcified bureaucracy that has often neglected tenants living in deplorable conditions and failed to protect others by sniffing out dangerous construction practices. By Oct. 1, a new Department of Buildings will handle the agency’s housing and construction inspection duties, and a Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection will take over its myriad permitting functions. But the problems at DCRA are so ingrained that many fear things will never really change.

Director Ernest Chrappah has earned some positive marks from business groups for his data-driven agenda, but otherwise, “there’s been no sense of any improvement,” even as the agency has faced the threat of a major reorganization, according to Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, one of DCRA’s main antagonists over the years.

He can rattle off a list of vacant properties that have gone uninspected, costing D.C. tax dollars it could be earning on blighted land.

Advocates observe that housing inspections haven’t been much better—out of 887 inspections where DCRA observed housing code violations in fiscal year 2022, the agency ensured landlords made required repairs in just 34 percent of cases, according to DCRA data.

That’s down from 42 percent in fiscal year 2021

and 45 percent in FY 2020.

That failure can leave residents stuck living with mold or a rodent infestation. A botched inspection can even turn deadly: DCRA mishandled its assessment of an illegal Brightwood boarding house that later became the site of a fatal fire.

And Mendelson believes Mayor Bowser could be replicating DCRA’s existing problems based on her preliminary plans for the new agencies.

She expects to maintain the same number of housing inspectors, for instance, even though DCRA can’t keep up with existing demand.

—Alex Koma

8. Department of Forensic Sciences Fiscal year 2022 budget: $36.2 million Director: Anthony Crispino (interim) Our blood boils when we hear of potentially innocent people locked away because of shoddy evidence, lab blunders, and what a national accreditation board has called “fraudulent behavior.”

The latter charge was leveled at the D.C. crime lab in an April 2021 letter. The lab’s accreditation was revoked soon after, sparking demands for the review of potentially thousands of cases involving fingerprint and firearms evidence dating back to the mid-1990s.

How did a state-of-the-art forensic lab go from opening in 2012 with the promise of objective crime analysis to closing the bulk of its operations amid evidence that its entire existence might have been mired in failure?

In a 2015 homicide case, the DFS lab incorrectly linked two killings to the same gun. A 157-page report on the agency’s overall operations, ordered by Mayor Bowser and released in December, found failures in lab work, leadership, quality management, and a culture where employees feel unsafe disclosing problems. Another investigation, conducted by the D.C. Office of the Inspector General, identified finger-pointing and cover-ups as the crux of the problem. It’s not just that the department made huge mistakes, it’s that employees at every level were complicit in covering them up, according to the national accreditation board. Consider, for instance, the time the lab lost two vials of the bacteria that causes the bubonic plague and then the report of the incident suddenly went missing.

The ensuing agency leadership departures have included its former director, quality assurance manager, and head of the Firearms Examination Unit before the unit was disbanded in September. But the heavier consequences of the crime lab’s failures are for both potentially wrongful convictions and perpetrators going free in D.C., officials remind us. Without its accreditation, DFS is unable to do most of the forensic testing and data sharing necessary to link crimes and identify unknown offenders. More than nine months after the lab lost its status, the agency still had no concrete solution in place to get its crime lab operations running, a finding that “shocked” Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen at the DFS oversight hearing on Jan. 20. In a letter Attorney General Karl Racine addressed to Allen last month, he wrote that “trust in DFS has been eviscerated.” —Ambar Castillo

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM MARCH 4, 2022 9

Round 1, Match 1 Final Score

#1 Seed

Metropolitan Police Department

96

Department of Forensic Sciences

64

#8 Seed

Metropolitan Police Department vs. Department of Forensic Sciences DFS is the victim of an unfortunate first round matchup. After a season of extraordinary fuckups, with revelations about grievous errors in its firearms and fingerprint testing that has the potential to upend years of criminal cases, the smaller agency was no match for the mighty MPD in the end.

Round 1, Match 2 Final Score

#3 Seed

Department of Employment Services

88

D.C. Housing Authority

87

#6 Seed

Department of Employment Services vs. D.C. Housing Authority DCHA’s scandals may be sexier—cronyism, internal dysfunction, and lucrative contracts handed to romantic partners—but those problems aren’t necessarily out of the ordinary for the housing agency. DOES’ failure in its newly urgent mission—providing unemployment benefits to tens of thousands of people during a pandemic—gives D.C.’s employment agency the edge. It’s a buzzerbeater, but DOES ekes out a victory to advance to the Final Four.

10 MARCH 4, 2022 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

Round 1, Match 3 Final Score

#2 Seed

Department of General Services

67

Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs

77

#7 Seed

Department of General Services vs. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs One major complaint against DGS is its failure to prepare HVAC systems before students returned to the classroom. But there are many other factors that play into preventing the spread of COVID, starting with putting kids back in classrooms in the first place. DCRA’s chronically broken housing inspection system gives it the edge in this matchup. Consider the collapse of a five-story condo construction on Kennedy Street NW last July, in which several workers were injured and one was stuck under debris for more than an hour. In what is likely its last year of existence, DCRA and its specific failures to prevent harm top DGS’ wider portfolio of responsibilities.

Round 1, Match 4 Final Score

#4 Seed

Child and Family Services Agency

80

Department of Public Works

70

#5 Seed

Child and Family Services Agency vs. Department of Public Works DPW draws an unfortunate matchup after a year in which leaf and snow removal—relatively menial but regular tasks for the agency—was so bad that Mayor Bowser yanked her preferred director from consideration before the Council could vote (Bowser hasn’t given a reason for her change of heart). Despite the blunder, the 600 percent increase in CFSA’s backlog of cases is enough for the win.

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM MARCH 4, 2022 11

Round 2, Match 1

#1 Seed

Final Score Metropolitan Police Department

85

Department of Employment Services

80

#3 Seed

Metropolitan Police Department vs. Department of Employment Services Two powerhouse agencies with a combined budget of about $1 billion face off in one of the most anticipated matchups of the tournament. In the end, DOES’ failure to keep people’s personal information secure, resulting in at least 13,000 reports of fraudulent claims, was no match for MPD’s own leak. Hackers lifted troves of data out of the department in a ransomware attack. The hacked information led to news reports about MPD’s flawed gang database and the 64 cops who the department’s own investigators concluded had committed crimes.

Round 2 Match 2

#7 Seed

Final Score Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs

96

Child and Family Services Agency

64

#4 Seed

Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs vs. Child and Family Services Agency Both of these agencies have long legacies of failure but very different missions. Although the stakes are higher for CFSA (child abuse versus building inspections, for example), DCRA wins. The family services agency just got out from under three decades of court oversight. On the other hand, DCRA’s failure to improve prompted legislation that will split the agency in two. DCRA was so bad, it will literally cease to exist.

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WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM MARCH 4, 2022 13

MADNESS

MARCH

Round 1, Match 2

Round 2, Match 2

Round 1, Match 4

Round 1, Match 3

Anyone hoping for a competitive championship game is disappointed in this one. MPD continued its dominance with a victory over DCRA, and it wasn’t even close. DCRA can’t compete with MPD’s two cops on trial for murder and obstruction, criminal officers remaining on the force despite efforts to fire them, and the 16 people officers shot, five fatally, in 2021.

Metropolitan Police Department vs.

Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs

Metropolitan Police Department

#7 Seed

Round 2, Match 1

62

Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs

Round 1, Match 1

#1 Seed

83

Metropolitan Police Department

Final Score

CHAMPIONSHIP ROUND

D.C. AGENCY EDITION

WASHINGTON

CITY PAPER

FOOD YOUNG & HUNGRY Darrow Montgomery/File

Old & Full Food editor and Young & Hungry columnist Laura Hayes signs off.

By Laura Hayes @LauraHayesDC I first put pen to paper as a City Paper staff member in July 2016, one month before Bon Appétit named D.C. the “Restaurant City of the Year.” Opening announcements flowed like Basque cider from a porrón. Tail Up Goat, Timber Pizza Co., Shouk, Espita, and HalfSmoke are just a few of the establishments that made their debut around that time and are still open today. Michelin released its first D.C. guide the same year. Washingtonians were high on small plates, craft cocktails, open kitchens, and live-fire cooking.

In that first year, I brought you a story about restaurants behaving badly on social media, enlisted a Chinese-speaking friend to translate restaurant signs in Chinatown, paid a small fee to dubiously certify my corgi as an emotional support animal in order to demonstrate how easy it is to dog the system, and questioned if bars have an intellectual property problem.

But beneath the surface of these seemingly trivial dramas, there was real trouble. Finding staff to support the District’s ballooning restaurant scene was daunting because D.C. is an expensive place to live and isn’t very dense.

Stressed-out workers struggled to care for their physical and mental health. And, if you glance back at the sampling of restaurants that opened in 2016, only HalfSmoke is Black-owned. The restaurant boom wasn’t equitable, particularly in communities east of the river.

Fast-forward through the headline-makers over the next few years—the premiere of The Wharf, the swift collapse of Mike Isabella’s empire following sexual assault allegations, and the emotional, well-funded fight over eliminating the tipped minimum wage—and we arrive at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020.

In my final two years at City Paper, I pivoted from pontificating about what’s on the plate to covering restaurant owners fighting to save their businesses and the plight of the hospitality workers they kept on payroll, as well as the ones they laid off. The industry grappled with dramatic sales drops, unruly customers, sick employees, ruthless landlords, and disrupted supply chains. The city tasked servers, hosts, and managers with enforcing yo-yoing restrictions that changed with little notice.

Despite these challenges, restaurants proved their resilience by stifling their anxiety and dread long enough to reinvent their business

models, serve neighbors in need, fight to hold on to jobs for employees who wouldn’t qualify for unemployment benefits, and devise ways to box up hospitality to go.

For many, it feels like the pandemic has released its clutches on D.C. As of this month, there are no longer indoor mask or vaccine mandates and social-distancing rules disappeared before the delta and omicron variants started spreading. If you stroll down nightlife corridors such as 14th Street NW or H Street NE on a Saturday night, you’ll see full establishments.

But talk to restaurateurs and they’ll tell you they’re not doing three turns on Tuesdays; they’re limiting their hours because they can’t find sous-chefs and shortening their menus because they have no idea if the monkfish

14 MARCH 4, 2022 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

they ordered will arrive. The omicron wave was financially devastating as diners rightfully stayed home. Beloved Burmese restaurant Thamee closed for good in January, saying the sales just weren’t there. Businesses that didn’t get a Restaurant Revitalization Fund grant are finding the road to recovery even more daunting.

I leave my post grateful to my colleagues, readers, and all those who trusted me to tell their stories. I'm hopeful that the region will eventually have a thriving dining scene that’s a better place to work for everyone, no matter their job or identity. Below are some thoughts on how we might get there if we work together.

The City Mayor Muriel Bowser wants a pulsing

nightlife economy so badly that she allocated money to establish an Office of Nightlife and Culture in 2018. But how can the District compete with a city that never sleeps, like New York, if much of our public transportation system goes to bed earlier than a teen with a curfew?

Operating hours were a pain point when Bowser allowed hospitality businesses to fully reopen before Metro extended its operating hours in the spring of 2021. At the time, trains stopped running at 11 p.m. and hired-vehicle pricing was so high that Ubers home wiped out tips from a hard day’s work. Restaurant owners rarely foot the bill for reliable parking, and walking, biking, and taking the bus aren’t always options because some workers live far outside D.C. While Bowser has made some

FOOD YOUNG & HUNGRY progress on her affordable housing goals, the rent is still too damn high in the neighborhoods where popular restaurants cluster.

City agencies also need to step up in case there are more crises. The Department of Employment Services consistently failed those who experienced pandemic-related layoffs, many of them bar and restaurant workers.

System updates, technology glitches, multistate wage claims, a malfunctioning website, and misinformation from call-takers delayed benefits for weeks or months.

Other agencies, such as the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs and DC Health, can be so slow to complete licensing, permitting, and inspection requests that they doom small business owners who are already paying rent on restaurants that haven’t gotten the green light to open. The same goes for the alcohol licensing process that involves advisory neighborhood commissions.

The D.C. Council can lend support by continuing to regulate predatory third-party delivery apps as the public health emergency expires. It capped commission fees during the pandemic, but these fees are too aggressive even during good times. The Council could also consider legislating better protections for delivery drivers.

Landlords and Developers If the people in control of leasing spaces in D.C. continue to put profit over the big picture, the District’s dining scene will no longer be distinct. People come to D.C. to taste the world at restaurants such as Bad Saint, Anju, Zenebech, Cane, Izakaya Seki, Jaleo, Thip Khao, and Lapis.

An onslaught of imports have set up shop in D.C., which often isn’t bad on an individual restaurant basis. Philadelphia’s Stephen Starr gave us Le Diplomate for prime people watching. But taken as a whole, it’s troubling that outsiders can more easily afford to rent or own commercial property in the District.

Hell’s Kitchen from Gordon Ramsay and Taffer’s Tavern from Jon Taffer are on their way. At a time when there’s an outcry for better working conditions, developers at The Wharf and in Penn Quarter inked deals with TV celebrities who normalized screaming in kitchens and bars. Taffer even complained about restaurant workers receiving unemployment benefits on Fox News in August 2021, arguing they should be starved into obedience like dogs. (He later apologized.)

Meanwhile, talented local chefs such as Paolo Dungca are eager to open their first restaurants but can’t afford spaces. Instead, Dungca's trying to make magic in the mezzanine of a food hall. “For chefs like me—immigrants and people of color—it’s so hard to find opportunities to open a fine dining restaurant of this magnitude,” Dungca said in February.

“You need to know enough investors and people with capital that can fund millions of

dollars.”

There’s more to worry about than wouldbe restaurateurs. Recognizing that longtime businesses might not be able to afford their leases when they come up for renewal, Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie and Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen introduced three pieces of legislation in 2019 that would help legacy businesses stay put and stave off further gentrification threats. None of the initial bills made it to a full Council vote, but McDuffie reintroduced the Protecting Local Area Commercial Enterprises Amendment Act in 2021. The next step is a public hearing. Here’s hoping all three bills get fresh life.

Diners America is addicted to affordable food and no wants one of life’s greatest pleasures to feel out of reach. That said, diners need to pay more for nights out or the middle could drop out of the hospitality industry. The dichotomy of fast casual and fine dining leaves out the kinds of restaurants that currently cost a table of two $100 to $150 to eat and drink well.

These places, like The Red Hen, Estadio, Nina May, Stable, and Chloe, toil over how to stay in business while making diners feel like they’re getting a decent value. The average restaurant profit margin usually falls between 3 and 5 percent.

When you dine, you’re not just paying for someone to turn proteins, vegetables, and starches into composed plates. You’re paying for the space you’re sitting in; the ambience created by art, decor, and plateware; the wages and salaries of the people cooking, serving, and cleaning; upkeep and maintenance; the technology platforms that transmit orders; and, as of late, personal protective equipment. The pandemic didn’t make anything cheaper or easier to find.

Keeping meal prices artificially low to keep customers coming back also harms the workers in the satellite economies that support the restaurant industry—like the farmers and fishers who grow, raise, and catch our food; the truckers and distributors who ferry it around; and the trash haulers and linen cleaners who work while the city rests. Cheap food begets cheap labor.

It’s up to restaurants to make more expensive experiences feel worth it, but diners will need to tolerate moderate price bumps, even at a time when service might fall short of flawless. The workers who stayed in the industry are burned out and stretched thin and newer employees are still learning. Long training periods for fresh hires aren’t always possible if a slew of people call out with COVID-19.

Most diners did whatever they could to support their favorite restaurants and watering holes during the pandemic—they ordered extra takeout, bought gift cards and apparel, and tipped with abandon. Even though pandemic fatigue is forgivable, it’s not yet time to let the

empathy well run dry.

Restaurants Increasing pay, fortifying benefits, and improving work culture will continue to be critical tools to attract and retain staff. I liken the current moment to the beginning of the farm-totable movement, when diners wanted to learn more about local sourcing and appreciated transparency on the topic. Now diners are curious if the line cooks who worked life-threatening jobs during the pandemic have health insurance, if their favorite bartender can take paid sick leave, and if Black and Brown employees feel supported. They might notice when they don’t see the same faces when they visit.

New restaurants continue to open, which means more competition for customers too.

If restaurants want to reliably fill their dining rooms, they could take steps to attract groups who have felt alienated in the past—solo diners, senior diners, and diners with disabilities. As I reported in 2019, accessibility means more than merely measuring if a wheelchair can wedge through a door. It’s about attitude.

Food Media I learned from voraciously reading writers I admire and through my own reporting that the most interesting stories don’t always come from the head chefs and restaurateurs whose names and faces have dominated coverage for decades. Readers latched on to articles that shared the perspectives of crab sellers at Jessie Taylor Seafood, bouncers who aren’t big men, local rice farmers who only wear purple, and hosts tired of wearing high heels.

And the most impactful coverage doesn’t always come from the keyboards of people who look like me. A city’s food scene can always use more narrators who tell hard stories and find hidden gems that exist outside the PR vortex.

That’s one reason we hired a freelance carryout food critic, Crystal Fernanders, in 2021.

It doesn’t help that we lost big local voices this year when Anela Malik, Sabrina Medora, and Jessica van Dop DeJesus moved away.

The lack of diversity in food media exists for systemic reasons like hirers favoring unpaid internships over varied lived experiences, but also because breaking into the field can be expensive if you buy the meals that inform your coverage. Freelance rates and salaries don’t always hold up to high costs of living but should.

Still, the food beat is the best because of the people you meet and the unlimited storytelling potential. Food coverage can touch on labor, politics, race, immigration, history, culture, and the environment. If you need proof, consider my favorite City Paper story. After submitting negative TB tests, staff photographer Darrow Montgomery and I crawled into the lemur cage at the National Zoo to learn how keepers and commissary staff feed 350 species of animals.

JOSEPH

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AND MANY MORE!

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Follow City Paper on social media. @washingtoncitypaper @wcp @washingtoncitypaper

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM MARCH 4, 2022 15

ARTS FILM

The Film of the Irish Courtesy of Capital Irish Film Festival

The 16th annual Capital Irish Film Festival returns with 15 features, lots of shorts, and an array of genres, including two psychological thriller debuts written and directed by women filmmakers.

By Sarah Marloff @sarahmarloff

Here Before suggesting infanticide, but slips into a slow burn as teenager Char (Doupe) struggles to understand her mother’s implied depression, disappearance, and her altered state upon her return home.

Set in north Dublin, in what is clearly one of the city’s less wealthy neighborhoods, the film lives in a color palette of Irish winter: greens, grays, touches of yellows and brown. By contrast, nightmares are portrayed in vivid red, reminiscent of blood or fire. And fire, for its part, plays no small role in Dolan’s film, which she also wrote. While wielded as a weapon, fire is described as an agent of cleansing.

You Are Not My Mother interjects hair-raising jumps throughout its 90-plus minutes, but it does not move at a typical horror movie’s clip.

Indeed, even the jumps feel psychological when paired with grotesque body horror: hair falling out in clumps, an arm being inserted into one’s mouth, limbs bending at unnatural angles.

Though the story employs the darker folklore of fairies, it also offers a narrative on being a teenage outsider, the importance of friendship, and family complexity. As one character states near the movie’s climax, “Family is the scariest fuckin’ thing in the planet.”

Family is also a central theme in Gregg’s Here Before, which follows Laura (Andrea Riseborough), a grieving mother still dealing with the death of her young daughter when a family with a girl about her daughter’s age moves in next door. Laura’s son and husband

16 MARCH 4, 2022 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

Courtesy of Capital Irish Film Festival

From March 3 to 6, AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center will transport attendees to the various cities and countrysides of Ireland by way of the big screen. The Capital Irish Film Festival returns for four days offering an indepth and comprehensive examination of Irish filmmaking and cultural identity.

Co-presented by AFI Silver and Solas Nua, the local arts organization dedicated to showcasing the array of contemporary Irish arts, this year’s festival screens 15 feature films, two shorts programs, and hosts a special showing of An Irish Goodbye, winner of the inaugural Norman Houston Short Film Award. The 2022 showcase of modern Irish cinema spans the gamut of genres, including drama, horror, romance, documentaries, and more. Other notable screenings include the black comedy Redemption of a Rogue, which won Best Feature and Best Debut Irish Feature at 2020’s Galway Film Fleadh; the Irishlanguage film Foscadh (see review on p. 17)— the country’s 2021 submission to the Academy Awards—and Death of a Ladies Man, starring Irish actor Gabriel Byrne and inspired by the music of Leonard Cohen.

“Storytelling is an ancient Irish tradition that has found a beautiful and robust voice in film, which has spawned a thriving industry,” Pat Reilly, the festival’s director for the past seven years, tells City Paper. “Like filmmakers everywhere, Ireland-based artists reflect their society, which is diverse, rapidly changing, and open to the world.”

But adrenaline junkies and scary movie fans, take note: The country may not be known for pumping out horror film after horror film, but Ireland’s history and folklore is rife with inspiration for unsettling tales. This year, CIFF screens two chilling features by women filmmakers that draw from Irish history, lore, and trauma to strike fear into the hearts of viewers.

Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother and Stacey Gregg’s Here Before premiered last year at Toronto International Film Festival and SXSW Film Festival, respectively. Both have received critical acclaim and both grapple with mother-daughter relationships. Likewise, both find space within the genre of elevated horror—much like 2014’s The Babadook (also written and directed by a woman)—to explore greater issues. As of late February, Dolan’s feature debut has received nominations for Best Director, Best Film, and Best Screenwriter by the Irish Film & Television Academy. Its teen star, Hazel Doupe, has been nominated for Best Lead Actress.

Not for the faint of heart, You Are Not My Mother opens with an aggressive scene

You Are Not My Mother are supportive and, at times, they seem a happy unit. But the more the neighbor girl comes around, the more haunted Laura becomes.

Written and directed by Gregg, Here Before is the Northern Irish filmmaker’s debut and was filmed in and around Belfast. Like You Are Not My Mother, there are doubtless moments when viewers can’t help but question the character’s sanity. Told mostly through Laura’s point of view, Here Before offers a glimpse at mental illness and questions the line separating it from grief. It’s a lot to ask of a single actor to carry a film, but Riseborough does so effortlessly— drawing the audience into her pain, confusion,

and, ultimately, her wanting.

Gregg’s story puts a creative twist on the classic ghost story. Also a slow burn, Here Before embraces the plot-twisting thriller genre by keeping viewers constantly guessing, always on edge, and trying to decipher what’s real and what’s not.

The Capital Irish Film Festival runs March 3–6 at AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $120, individual tickets also available. You Are Not My Mother screens March 3 at 9:45 p.m. and March 6 at 9:30 p.m. Here Before shows March 4 at 6:45 p.m. solasnua.org/ciff.

ARTS FILM

A CELEBRATION OF CHOSEN FAMILIES

Courtesy of Capital Irish Film Festival

Foscadh Frustrates Without Fleshed-Out Plotlines

Foscadh John, the protagonist of Foscadh, also screening at this week’s CIFF, does not understand the pain that befalls him. He suffers from an affliction that writer-director Seán Breathnach, adapting a novel by Donal Ryan, declines to articulate. Does John have an undiagnosed learning disability? Or perhaps he lacks the necessary experience to handle the world outside his home? Either way, his parents did little to prepare him for life after they’re gone. Breathnach depicts John’s foray into adulthood with constant inscrutability, focusing primarily on how he lacks the wherewithal to understand kindness, mistreatment, and everything in between. The purity of this approach is admirable, albeit a little frustrating, since the main character’s internality is obscure for most of the film.

When we first meet John (Dónall Ó Héalai), there are immediate examples of his unusual behavior. He comes home from a menial job to find his mother dead on the floor, but doesn’t call emergency services right away. He stares at her body, and while we do not understand what he feels, the actor contorts his face just enough to make the audience curious. The off-kilter behavior doesn’t stop there: At his mother’s funeral, John leaves the service to masturbate in the bathroom.

There are multiple ways to interpret these choices—maybe he’s looking for an emotional release, or acts compulsively—but all that becomes secondary after a vicious attack leaves him in the hospital. In the throes of convalescing, John meets two people who shape his future: a vulgar fellow patient named Dave (Cillian O’Gairbhi), and Siobhán (Fionnuala Flaherty), a nurse who pities him.

Once John leaves the hospital and embarks on a romantic relationship with Siobhán, as well as a friendship with Dave, Foscadh catalogs the pain that John has repressed his entire life. His desires are ordinary—he wants friendship, and some kind of romantic life, though he lacks the resources to achieve them. In John, Dave finds a buddy he can keep around as a kind of ego boost, whereas Siobhán, in a development that stretches the limits of believability, begins an intimate relationship with him.

Perhaps she is sick of the Daves of the world, except Breathnach’s script denies her a fleshedout explanation. This subplot does lead to the film’s emotional apex, a sex scene that becomes downright harrowing, and the path there requires a suspension of disbelief that is rarely found in character-driven drama.

Another more compelling subplot involves John’s future in more practical terms. He inherits a sizable plot of land from his parents; his neighbors pressure him to sell it because they want to build a wind farm there. John has little interest in wealth, which leads to a palpable sense of frustration among the neighbors, but the question of whether to sell does mean he must reckon with what his parents left—in physical as well as emotional terms. If John resents his newfound struggles as an independent adult, he lacks the ability to articulate them.

This storyline resolves in a predictable way, with John finding little flourishes of defiance and rebellion. As a young man who meanders toward something like normalcy, Ó Héalai adds some nuance through his performance, but beyond that Breathnach creates a bizarre incongruity. Natural light, economical editing, and a gray color palette suggest the film values realism, all in the service of a story that stretches the limits of what is plausible.

Foscadh, meaning “shelter,” is an Irishlanguage film, which deepens John’s sense of alienation. Few lines are spoken in English, and if John understands a second language (other than Irish), it is through television—one of his few reliable companions. In fact, the film contains multiple scenes with Dave, John, and Siobhán drinking beer while watching television, and all the excitement that entails. It is as if Breathnach stumbles into a paradox he cannot overcome. John’s life is full of tedium, and in order to show that tedium accurately, the film asks for considerable patience. In this particular example, the rewards do not match the demands, and while John’s final measure of happiness is hard-earned, it is difficult to share the feeling with him.

—Alan Zilberman Foscadh screens at AFI Silver Theatre as part of CIFF on March 6 at 5:10 p.m.

MARCH 12 3PM & 8PM LINCOLN THEATRE 1215 U ST NW For more info or tickets: Visit GMCW.org or call 202-888-0050.

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ARTS BOOKS

It’s All in the Subtexts

By Hannah Grieco Contributing Writer There is a variety of poetry to explore on bookstore shelves, from classical closed forms, such as William Shakespeare’s sonnets, to open forms, also known as “free verse,” which don’t follow a specific set of rules related to line groupings or meter. But one of the more complicated, and misunderstood, forms of contemporary poetry is erasure poetry. DanBrady, an Arlington poet wellversed in more traditional fare, explores this unique form in his new collection Subtexts, released on Feb. 22 from Publishing Genius.

“I was ready to show a new side of myself with this book,” Brady says.

His previous collection, Strange Children, was a beautiful exploration of the way poetry can feel both narrative and lyrical. A deeply personal look at love, Strange Children offered a conversation about the poet’s marriage, his wife’s stroke, and their experience with adoption. Brady is a poet who tells stories, and his first collection lingered in that space. Subtexts continues to draw on his gift for storytelling, but with an exciting, layered new approach.

Erasure poetry usually involves a previously written text, such as a newspaper article, where the poet removes, or erases, certain words and phrases to create an entirely new work with a new meaning. It is sometimes called blackout poetry or newspaper poetry, and has been used to highlight everything from social and political causes to the smallest of moments.

Erin Dorney’s book I Am Not Famous Anymore is one of the better-known examples of an erasure collection, published by local indie press Mason Jar in 2018. Dorney took interviews from actor Shia LaBeouf, erasing and borrowing his own words to discuss plagiarism and the distance between celebrity and reality.

In Subtexts, Brady modifies the form, writing the original work himself, adding in more and more words and phrases to create new poems.

In “Face to Face,” we see this process clearly: Now that you can read my eyes, there is nothing between us, just a feeling we cannot know. *** Now that we are here you can read everything in my eyes.

Misunderstanding us.

There is no us, no speech, just a feeling, a sense we cannot know each other.

Adam Robinson

Cassidy DuHon

Arlington poet Dan Brady redefines form, exploring the space between what we say and what we mean in his latest book.

Dan Brady *** Now that we are here face to face, you can read everything I mean in my eyes.

There can be no misunderstanding between us when there is nothing between us, no hazy medium of speech, just presence and feeling and a quiet sense that we truly cannot know each other.

This continues, step by step, adding layers of nuance and meaning, a modified erasure that takes us by surprise at each stage. Brady plays with the form, sometimes adding and then taking away in all new explorations. In “Cabin Fever,” he writes about a snowstorm and a weeklong stay at home, beginning with one line: how magical it had been He builds this up, poem after poem, page after page, into a short essay about the mundane experience itself and the subsequent transition back to regular life. Then he erases—words and lines, phrase after phrase—until he leaves us with: our

we were everything

What was mundane becomes an unexpected emotional journey.

“I stumbled into using erasure because I was

18 MARCH 4, 2022 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

really thinking about layering in visual art, how you can apply different layers to create a sense of distance and physical depth in a 2D object,” Brady says. “I wanted to see if I could do something like that in poetry and erasure was a natural fit.”

Brady uses these layers to talk about both the personal and broader world in Subtexts, expanding on the microcosm of his immediate experience, unlike his previous collection. Here he writes about government surveillance, the climate crisis, the relationships in his life, and more. “[The collection’s] real concern is the gap between what we say and what we mean,” says Brady. “How language can come so close to meaning, but always falls short of our intention.”

That yearning is pervasive throughout the collection, with each series of poems feeling like a search for one’s place within the larger world.

Whether it’s who we are at home versus our community, the speck of humanity within the geologic time scale, or even an examination of a dismantled argument between lovers, Brady highlights and elevates the spaces between— both literally and figuratively. The big and little pictures collide, and the result is transformative.

From “A Disagreement”: That’s not what I meant there’s a little truth to everything What I meant was we were on the same page You’re right

I take it back But do you believe it?

Maybe just a little

Brady wrote Subtexts before any of us had heard

of COVID-19. It was scheduled to come out in early 2020, but he and his press decided to wait for what they hoped would be a quick resolution and recovery to the virus and the literary scene. Then that wait extended, as it did for all of us. Brady, like many writers, found it difficult to create much of anything during that first pandemic year, and he knew that selling a poetry collection would be nearly impossible. Now, two years later, it finally feels like the right time to get Subtexts onto bookstore shelves.

“That first year was so tough,” he says. “I’m glad—now as things start to open up and, hopefully, we’ve put the worst of this pandemic behind us—Subtexts has its chance to find its audience.”

In addition to writing poetry, Brady is also the poetry editor for the indie press Barrelhouse, and he currently works as the literary specialist for Arlington Cultural Affairs. You can often find him teaching workshops, in conversation at events at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, and attending panels, such as Day Eight’s conference on Book Reviews held last month. He’s a well-known member of the D.C. literary community, and a big fan of local poetry.

“People need to recognize that the D.C. area has some of the best, most exciting poets working right now!” says Brady, naming Alexa Patrick, Courtney LeBlanc, Jenn Koiter, Kyle Dargan, Sandra Beasley, Teri Cross Davis, Kelly Forsythe, Holly Karapetkova, and Paul Killebrew.

Brady is, himself, an exciting addition to this list, with Subtexts adding an important new voice to the evolving form of erasure poetry.

Brady reads from Subtexts at Readings on the Pike on March 19 at 7 p.m., virtual.

ARTS PODCAST

He’s So Popular: A New Podcast Dissects D.C.’s Gay Culture Photos are courtesy of William Keiser

Hosted by William Keiser and released by the Gay & Lesbian Review, the three-episode series investigates the “middle school bullshit” in the District’s LGBTQIA community.

By Ella Feldman @ellamfeld The most progressive iteration of the pride flag suggests a united queer front. The traditional bright rainbow stripes we’re all familiar with are still there, representing folks who identify as LGBTQIA (or any other letter under the sun).

For added inclusivity, a triangular formation of stripes comes in from the left—pastel pink, blue, and white for the trans community; black and brown for queer folks of color. It brings to mind a crowd of people of all genders, races, and identities marching together, chanting, “Love wins!” with wide eyes and grins.

But the reality is not so much of a Netflix original movie. Queer communities are, and have always been, rife with racism, transphobia, misogyny, classism, ablelism, and plain old bullying. A new three-episode podcast from the Gay & Lesbian Review and haus of bambi explores this dark underbelly of the District’s queer community, with a specific focus on the cliques and cliches gay men face. Titled Popular, it uses popularity as a framework to explore the social hierarchies that D.C. gays create for themselves.

Host William Keiser, 25, moved to U Street NW right before the pandemic, he tells City Paper.

He fell into a “clique of really mean, White gays,” where he never felt totally included. So when vaccines rolled out last year, and made traditional modes of socializing feasible once again, Keiser made a point of branching out—right into the heart of D.C.’s gay life. It was in this context—going out to gay bars, hooking up with men on dating apps, joining a queer kickball team—that Keiser became interested in “middle school bullshit.”

“I consciously chose this childish way in, and this character of somebody who cares about middle school popularity, because I think that identity politics—even though it’s been smeared by the Right—started as a new enlightenment about how we interact in the world,” Keiser says. “We’re in this new age of embodied knowledge. We’re able now, finally, to talk about how the body that we’re in influences the experiences that we have.”

On Popular, Keiser gets much more specific than mere identity categories such as race, class, and gender to talk about D.C. queers. In the first episode, he introduces listeners to a gaggle of “VIDA gays” sprawled across the grass in Logan Circle. “A dazzling array of shirtless Adonises.

Insta-gays with washboard abs. They sit in neat, entirely homogeneous circles, and sport identically brutal fades. Their mouths hang open, laughing at some inaudible joke, displaying perfectly white teeth.” Keiser named the men for

William Keiser their membership to VIDA Fitness, the luxury gym popular with gay men. It’s like a “gayer version of Equinox,” Keiser tells listeners.

The first episode of Popular explores the role that D.C.’s geography plays in popularity. Keiser takes listeners on a tour of gay hangouts—Number Nine, Trade, Nellie’s Sports Bar, Uproar, Pitchers, Green Lantern. These spots are largely concentrated in Northwest, particularly 14th and U Streets. Keiser traces the transformation of these neighborhoods from centers of Black excellence to sites of gentrification driven by young, well-off out-of-towners—people like Keiser himself. He explores how the same forces driving gentrification and displacement also drive injustice in gay spaces, such as when Nellie’s security personnel violently dragged a Black woman down the stairs last summer.

Episode two of Popular investigates who gets left behind while the VIDA gays get crowned prom kings. Listeners hear from queer women and nonbinary people who have been harassed by cis gay men in “safe spaces,” an older, plus-size Black man who was ignored by White gays in his kickball league, and Justin Boatner, an autistic gay man who’s faced double the discrimination for those two facets of his identity (Boatner hosts his own podcast, Autism With A Voice).

In episode three, Keiser dives into gay hookup culture and apps—Grindr, specifically. He breaks down the glossary of sex terms gay men identify themselves and each other with (power bottom; verse top, etc.), and investigates how that categorical process creates social hierarchies. Each episode of Popular is interspersed with interviews with D.C. gays such as author of 1978’s Dancer From the Dance Andrew Holleran, choreographer Tariq Darrell O’Meally, and young men Keiser met through dating apps.

Keiser also weaves in details from his own life.

In a particularly touching moment in episode three, he makes a call for normalizing consent:

“I wonder if I would have to be such a so-called ‘power bottom’ if men would just ask me what I wanted,” he says. “And at my most impractical, I imagine what that would be like. If asking—not assuming, not objectifying—were just … normal.”

Popular asks more questions than it answers.

Keiser is well aware of that. He’s not an experienced journalist or podcast producer—he’s a former dancer who now resides in Austin and is trying to make it as a screenwriter. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the social hierarchies he observed in D.C.’s gay community, so he pitched the idea of a podcast to the Gay & Lesbian Review. “My impression was that other people around me were thriving. It took me actually concentrating on this question and asking people to realize that nobody feels … nobody I talked to felt like they were coasting—even if they seemed like they were absolutely coasting— or like they absolutely belonged.”

Though Popular makes a point of calling out the injustice of cis, White, gay men tending to have the most power in queer spaces, it also centers that demographic in its narrative. And while it hands the microphone over to many others,

some communities are still left out. D.C.’s trans community, for example, is almost entirely absent from the podcast. It’s a blind spot Keiser seems aware of. “I would love to have spent more time on questions surrounding what the trans community looks like,” he says. “There are honestly just so many things that I didn’t get to.”

For his part, Keiser has no plans to produce more episodes of Popular. He’s interested in continuing his exploration of these topics through his screenwriting instead. But his biggest hope for the podcast?

“My biggest hope would be that somebody would listen to it, someone from a more marginalized experience would listen to it and be like, ‘Oh, this is comprehensive. This is interesting.

I want to do one of these … I feel empowered to speak, I feel like my voice has value,’” Keiser says.

“If you don’t like it, and you’re like, ‘Mmm, this is wrong,’ I want you to make your own.”

The Gay & Lesbian Review would be quite interested in such a project, he adds.

Listen to Popular on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM MARCH 4, 2022 19

ARTS MUSEUMS Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

ARTS FILM

Daisy Edgar-Jones in Fresh

Fresh Take the Horrors of ModernDay Dating to the Extreme The opening scenes of Fresh pinpoint the anxieties of modern dating with terrifying precision. Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a perfectly pleasant young woman, goes out with a turd in a scarf who calls her a bitch when she politely turns him down for a second date. Then she gets an unsolicited dick pic from a guy on a dating app. So when she meet-cutes the adorable Steve (Sebastian Stan) in the produce aisle, she skips the bullshit and jumps right into a relationship with him. And why not? He’s handsome and charmingly old-fashioned—he sheepishly admits to not being on social media. There are no red flags, except that he seems so into her, and that only feels wrong because she’s accustomed to being treated like crap, right?

Fresh works best before it answers this question definitively. Early on, the film gets its power from the performance of Edgar-Jones, who expresses the perfect cocktail of desire and doubt. In close-up, we watch her respond physically to Steve’s formidable charm; her eyes glisten, her mouth turns up at the corners, and her body turns toward him as if pulled by magnetic force. But her reactions are purposefully rote, and there’s a slight, almost imperceptible hesitation in her responses when he takes her hand for an impromptu dance party or, more alarmingly, invites her on a weekend getaway after just two dates. She knows something is off, but she’s desperate to be wrong.

It’s at this point that Fresh takes a turn for the horrific, and all this wonderful nuance gets thrown out. After being drugged, Noa wakes up chained to the wall in Steve’s home.

She hears other women held captive throughout the house. The mystery doesn’t last long, and soon the blood is spilling. While Steve’s grotesque plans for them (which I won’t spoil here) do track with the film’s central thesis— for women, dating is the stuff of nightmares— Noa’s struggle takes a back seat. The camera,

controlled by first-time feature director Mimi Cave, is so drawn to the gore and gristle that you might be compelled to turn off your brain just to survive it. Somewhere along the way, the message gets lost.

It’s a film torn between its sensory experience and the exigencies of its plot. Noa tries to charm her way out of her shackles by making Steve fall in love with her, while her friend Mollie (Jojo T. Gibbs) works to track her down by playing detective. These machinations feel awkward.

They never quite grind the film to a halt, but Fresh is undoubtedly most alive when delighting in its ambivalence, particularly toward its male psychopath. A nightmare for Noa is a fantasy for Steve, who somehow sees himself as being in a romance with his victims, even as he is subjecting them to unimaginable torture (no, I won’t spoil it). The film indulges in his delusion, giving Stan pop songs to dance around the house to, and ogling him in the kind of luxurious framing that is typically reserved for the likes of James Bond.

There is plenty to admire in Fresh, but with every minute of run time, it becomes less like satire and more like unimaginative horror, replete with jump scares, revenge killings, and decisions by the protagonist that will have you shouting at the screen. The obvious contrast here is Get Out, another horror film in which microaggressions slowly give way to real violence. The difference is mostly in the pacing, with Fresh getting to its ghastly plot twist so quickly that it runs out of insights and has no choice but to devolve into horror movie cliches. Its observations about the brutality of our mating rituals would have easily been sharp enough to hold our attention for longer.

Instead, Fresh spoils itself.

—Noah Gittell Fresh will be streaming on Hulu starting March 4.

20 MARCH 4, 2022 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

Dueling Duchamps How the Hirshhorn’s in-person Marcel Duchamp: The Barbara and Aaron Levine Collection, and virtual exhibit, It’s Art If I Say So, work together and separately to convey the artist’s beliefs.

Museum fatigue is the sensation of becoming physically and mentally exhausted in the course of museum-going; taking in art can use up a lot of brainpower, and no artist can zap viewer’s cerebral energies quite like Marcel Duchamp.

The early 20th century French painter and sculptor championed art that engaged the mind over the eye, which can present Marcel Duchamp, “The Green Box,” 1934, Barbara and Aaron Levine, Hirsha challenge in showcasing his horn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Photo: Cathy Craver, Association pieces, since the work is often Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society, New York 2019. more interesting to think about than it is to look at. Two exhibits at the Hirshhorn, some of his experiments with optical illusions like one virtual and one in person, sidestep that issue illustrations to be viewed through 3D glasses and by presenting Duchamp’s legacy as a collection of Rotoreliefs that become animated when placed on a turntable. There’s also a coffee table’s worth of gorideas and questions.

Upon entering Marcel Duchamp: The Barbara geously designed book covers for surrealist publicaand Aaron Levine Collection, the visitor is greeted tions and gallery catalogs.

“The creative act is not performed by the artist by a massive projection of Andy Warhol’s video “Screen Test: Marcel Duchamp,” immediately alone,” Duchamp said in a 1957 lecture, meaning focusing on the impact that Duchamp had on sub- that the audience’s observation and interpretation sequent artists and art movements rather than was a crucial part of the artistic process. The exhibit his actual work. Around the corner, a cartoon by closes on this final thought, with a chess table availJ.F. Griswold parodying “Nude Descending a able for those who fancy a match, and a light proStaircase” is blown up to mural proportions, while a jector set up for participants to trace a friend’s small reproduction of the original painting rests on Duchamp-inspired silhouette portrait.

It’s tough to re-create that kind of activity the wall next to it, demonstrating the often outsize online; It’s Art If I Say So was originally intended furor that Duchamp’s ideas generated.

Duchamp’s biggest and best-known idea was as a companion exhibit alongside the in-person the readymade, his sculptures made from preex- show, but was forced to go online due to COVIDisting, manufactured objects, transfigured into 19. Though virtual exhibits can easily fall flat art by the act of the artist choosing them. The ones compared with the experience of observing physion display here (including “Hat Rack,” “Comb,” cal works of art, Duchamp’s work and ideas are and “With Hidden Noise”) mostly come from edi- uniquely suited to this format. This exhibit pulls tioned sets; because the idea was more important from the Hirshhorn’s collection to demonstrate than the object itself, Duchamp had no qualms Duchamp’s influence on the artists that followed about buying replicas of earlier readymades and him. Organized around four core themes that signing them, or creating collotypes or other cop- drove Duchamp’s work, each section is anchored by a masterwork, and related back to the works ies of his paintings and drawings.

Duchamp’s seminal work “The Bride Stripped by other artists. This approach forces viewers to Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)” think about the underlying concepts and theories can’t be moved from its home at the Philadelphia driving the work, not just the aesthetics.

The online exhibit unfolds like one of his suitMuseum of Art, so it’s re-created on a mesh panel.

Duchamp spent years thinking about this glass case contraptions and becomes a choose-yourpanel with shapes drawn in lead, depicting a own-adventure, letting viewers ping-pong off in schematic that imagines erotic desire as a com- different directions and explore whatever ideas plex mechanical process. Also on display is “The they choose. In addition to descriptions that Green Box,” a painstaking reproduction of all of echo the wall text of a traditional gallery, several his notes and writings related to “The Large Glass” works feature links to videos, further reading, or that proves the written word can’t fully capture an hands on crafts: make a Giovanni Anselmoartist’s ideas, as well as several other editions of inspired light stencil, or watch an artist talk with book and box works that unfold in clever ways to the Guerrilla Girls. Even online, it’s the spectator that completes the work. —Stephanie Rudig show miniature reproductions of his pieces.

In the latter half of his life, Duchamp became increasingly absorbed in playing chess and his cre- At the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden ative output slowed significantly. The show includes and online through May 8. hirshhorn.si.edu.

CITY LIGHTS Through March 6

March 7

Fatoumata Diawara

144

Courtesy of JAB Arts

True To Form at Grand Duchess

Photo by Aïda Muluneh; Courtesy of City Winery

A new pop-up gallery sets out to prove that one square foot is plenty of space to create powerful art—and 19 local artists are stepping up to the challenge. The show, 144, is the second that Grand Duchess has hosted to reconnect the community to its underlying art scene. But this time, all mediums and styles are welcome—the only parameter is that artists must ensure each piece is 12-by-12 inches. According to Jason Bowers, curator and project manager for JAB Arts, this should help 144 become even more successful in reaching a wide audience. Grand Duchess’ November pop-up exhibition, True To Form, signaled interest in pieces priced in the $150 to $500 range, Bowers tells City Paper. JAB Arts wanted to garner interest from more people and feature work from more artists, which is how 144 took shape. “The added benefit is it also allows viewers to see how various artists represent their work when there are no rules, except the dimensions,” Bowers says. A few contributors are returning from the November show, including Emon Surakitkoson and TJ Buttner. Other participating artists include Kelly Towles, Brandon Hill, Xenia Gray, Jack Labadie, Cortney Mohring, Clarence James, E$, Kasey Ott, Rikasso, Hannah Atallah, Nate Mann, Lauren Bessette, Charlie Visconage, CESAMO, Janelle Whisenant, Rick Gogh, and Brendan Mullin. With more artists, fewer thematic limitations, and new plans for quarterly pop-ups, 144 promises to once again bring together a beloved local restaurant, artists—both new and established—and community members eager to snag drink specials from Ilegal Mezcal, and perhaps some new art to take home and love. 144 runs through March 6 at Grand Duchess, 2337 18th St. NW. grandduchessdc.com. Free.

—Sarah Smith

Malian singer, guitarist, and actor Fatoumata Diawara exudes courage, charisma, and vision.

When Diawara was young, her parents dubbed her rebellious and sent her to an aunt in Bamako, Mali, to be raised in a traditional manner. But at age 18, Diawara jetted off to France to become an actor. She briefly went back to Mali to film a movie, but soon fled back to France to avoid being forced into an arranged marriage by her family. Instead of getting married, Diawara took up the electric guitar and started performing her own hybrid blend of music, drawing from the emotional call-and-response compositions from the Wassoulou region of Mali as well as global pop. In recent years, Diawara’s alternately husky and sweet vocals have been heard not only with her own band on NPR’s Tiny Desk, but as a guest vocalist with Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz, and electronic dance duo Disclosure. On her 2018 Grammy-nominated album, Fenfo—which means “something to say”—Diawara shows off her vocal range in the Bambara language, and an Afro-psychedelic style on the electric guitar. Matched with her band’s guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums, the result is often loud and polyrhythmic. But the band also knows how to be subtler and to allow the vocal melodies and lead guitar patterns to shine. Diawara often takes on difficult subjects in her lyrics—female genital mutilation on “Boloko,” the heartbreak when a boyfriend feels forced to migrate for work in “Nterini,” and fundamentalist terrorists in northern Mali in “Mali-ko (Peace/La Paix).” Diawara, an exuberant live performer, also merges seriousness with joy in “Negue Negue,” in which she urges young people to join hands in unity, and chants, “let’s have fun” in the song title’s chorus. Fatoumata Diawara performs at 7:30 p.m. on March 7 at City Winery, 1350 Okie St. NE. citywinery.com. $25–$38. Masks required.

—Steve Kiviat

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Through April 24 Photo by Ethan Hickerson; Courtesy of Friends Artspace

Earth Mother Bloom

Through May 1

One Nation Underground: Punk Visual Culture 1976-1985

Unknown artist; Courtesy of Georgetown University Art Galleries

Hoesy Corona is used to migration—he is of Mexican descent, and moved to Baltimore after living in Mexico, Utah, and Wisconsin. The experience of moving around so much seeps into Corona’s media installations and storytelling. The queer artist centers and promotes nomadic forms of art in his work to confront the issues that come with migration and seeking refuge. In Earth Mother Bloom, Corona presents scenic, eye-catching ponchos painted with mothers and other migrants as they journey to find a home. The pieces are pops of color along the walls of the brightly lit Friends Artspace exhibition hall in Arlington. The newly designed venue provides a 360-degree experience—Corona’s designs animate the entire space. Constructed from waterproof vinyl and bordered with leather cording, the ponchos could be worn on the body, invoking a sense of security and protection so many wish for as they make perilous journeys across the world. In the painted scenes, migrants traverse nature as they seek a home. “Each poncho is a wish and a prayer for safety and flourishing,” Corona notes in his artist’s statement. His ponchos also cast light on the climate crisis, his queerness, and isolation. Taken alone, each of these themes still relate to trying to find home, safety, and belonging. In Corona’s creations, they intersect with the experience of literally being displaced from home, and being forced to look for one elsewhere. “My hope is to create otherworldly, colorful manifestations that seduce and draw in the audience closer to the work, while challenging their preconceived notions,” Corona artist’s statement continues. Earth Mother Bloom is on display through March 12 at Friends Artspace, 2400 N. Edgewood St., Arlington. friendsartspace.com. Free. By appointment.

—Anupma Sahay

You’d have to be at least in your 50s to remember firsthand the glory days of the D.C. punk scene, as chronicled in this small exhibit of relics on Georgetown University’s campus. I can recall some bits and pieces from what’s on display, dating back to my 1980s high school years in the local area—including references to Georgetown’s hip, touchstone boutique, Commander Salamander, and buying tickets at “Monkey Wards”—the defunct department store Montgomery Ward. But for those with even less of a direct connection to the era, what will stand out about the exhibit is its collection of items crafted within the punk DIY aesthetic—the notion that you don’t need credentials or experience to put together, say, a concert poster. Basic, blocky typography? Got it. Writing that mimics blood drippings? Of course. Cut-andpaste, handwritten lettering? Yep. Cartoonish drawings that could have been done by someone in your middle school art class? Truly everywhere. In this collection of advertising flyers, halftone reproduction and dual-color printing were a luxury; the corner-store Xerox stylings were everything.

You can see traces of punk DIY heritage in graphic design today, but no artistic element it birthed has carried through as strongly to the present day as the moody, grainy, self-serious band portrait.

That look probably won’t ever disappear. One Nation Underground is on display through May 1 at Georgetown University’s Spagnuolo Art Gallery, 1221 36th St. NW. delacruzgallery.georgetown.domains.

Free. Masks and proof of vax and booster required.

—Louis Jacobson 22 MARCH 4, 2022 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

Orchids: Hidden Stories of Groundbreaking Women We are emerging from the nadir of the cold season—bitter and frigid, gray skies, slippery streets, and wan daylight. It’s enough to make one droop or wither. If you are a delicate hothouse flower, there is at least one vernal escape. It is time again for the annual Orchids exhibition in the glass-enclosed Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard, centrally located in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery. Flashes of fuchsia, varying shades of pink, violet, yellow, coral, and bright white. Spotted, dotted, and striped. Delicately thin but sturdy green stakes. Whether one startling symmetrical flower spike, or a cluster of beautiful designs, this most fascinating of flowers blooms and seduces with its bursts of vibrant color, uncanny blossoms morphing into familiar (bees, lizards, faces, and humanoid forms) and alien shapes, and deliciously fragrant aromas. In addition to the exotic orchids, this year’s accompanying exhibit is dedicated to the Hidden Stories of Groundbreaking Women. Described as “barrier-breaking botanists, cutting-edge conservationists, and inspired illustrators,” the didactic panels between the blooms celebrate figures such as modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe; the 17th-century Chinese courtesan turned poet and painter Gu Mei; and the “Julia Child of orchids,” Rebecca Tyson Northen, whose Home Orchid Growing, published in 1950, remains the perennial how-to on domestic orchid care. Several Smithsonian botanists, including Melissa McCormick and Sarah Hedean, join their ranks. Stop by the Courtyard Café, sit among the orchids, read a favorite book (maybe Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief ), and find a tropical respite during these last few weeks of winter. Orchids: Hidden Stories of Groundbreaking Women runs through April 24 at Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, 8th and G Streets NW. gardens.si.edu. Free. Masks required.

—Colleen Kennedy

March 15

Kim Gordon Photo by Natalia Mantini; Courtesy of 9:30 Club

Through March 12

“For me, performing has a lot to do with being fearless,” Kim Gordon famously stated in her New York Times bestselling memoir, Girl in a Band. “The only really good performance is the one where you make yourself vulnerable, while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone.” The fearless and fierce postpunk visionary has done it all during her outstanding career. As co-founder and bassist of postpunk art noise band Sonic Youth, Gordon helped usher in New York no wave in the early ’80s, before the incredibly influential band hit the mainstream in the ’90s by headlining Lollapalooza and appearing on MTV’s 120 Minutes. As a performer, she is a spiritual mother to both the riot grrrl movement and, with her contralto voice—by turns disaffected, growling, bratty, or sexy—fuzzedout guitars, and heavy drums of Sonic Youth’s earlier works, a forerunner to grunge’s signature sound. She even produced Hole’s angsty debut, Pretty on the Inside. Gordon studied art at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in the late ’70s, and exhibits of her works have been shown around the world. Unlike many celebrity forays into fashion, the NYC streetwear line X-girl, which Gordon started in 1994 with Daisy von Furth, is still going. And she has appeared in numerous indie films, as well as popular television shows like Gossip Girl and Portlandia. She formed the duo Body/ Head with experimental guitarist Bill Nace shortly after the dissolution of Sonic Youth. The two Body/Head studio albums, 2013’s Coming Apart and 2018’s The Switch, are studies in stasis, fuzzy fermatas, and pregnant pauses, a deep dissonance that reaches into the abyss before ascending into the atmosphere. It’s surprising that Gordon didn’t make a solo record until 2019’s No Home Record. The album features the known soundscapes of Gordon’s 38 years making music—staccato beats, distorted guitars, and spoken-word poetry—but there are also flourishes of unexpectedly rich production, making this a joyful, grimy, weird, delightful album to listen to again and again.

High art and lo-fi, Gordon isn’t so much an icon as an iconoclast, breaking the mold, challenging conventions, collaborating with fellow rebels and rule-breakers, and forging new paths across all genres and modes of art. She plays 9:30 Club this month, with Nace opening. Doors open at 7 p.m. on March 15 at 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. 930.com. $30. Proof of vax required.

—Colleen Kennedy

DIVERSIONS SAVAGE LOVE I’m a 34-year-old straight cis male. About 18 months ago, I met a lovely human that I’m crazy about. When we started dating, she said she needed us to be poly, and I agreed. It was a first for both of us! I’d always been interested—my parents are queer and have been poly my whole life—so it wasn’t a new concept to me. Early on, we went on some random dates, made out with some other people, but took it slow because we wanted to build a foundation of trust and love first. Now we’re there. She recently started dating a close friend of ours. In theory, I’m good with it. I adore him and he cares about us as a couple. There’s lots of communication happening in all directions. We’ve even tossed around the idea of some threesomes or foursomes. I can’t wait for the day when I am truly stoked for this, and we can all play and love on each other. But I don’t want to “overcome the jealousy” or “deal with it.” I want being poly to be something that makes life amazing! But I am still being restricted by silly feelings put in my head via some nefarious patriarchal capitalist hack. Any advice for moving on as quickly as possible into a polyamorous paradise? I want to feel queerer and a little less mainstream! —Seeking Polyamorous Effortless Wonders No relationship—closed, open, or poly—is a paradise. Ideally, a relationship brings more joy into your life than pain. (Unwanted pain; wanted pain is its own kind of joy.) But misunderstandings, disagreements, and hurt feelings are a part of every romantic partnership. And the longer that partnership goes on, the likelier the people in it—couple, throuple, or quad—are going to face the kind of relationship-extinction-level event that requires contrition, forgiveness, and aggressive memory-holing to survive.

As for jealousy …

My husband has been with his boyfriend for five years; there are times when I see them together, and I am not just happy for them, SPEW, but made happy by them. (I’m straining to avoid the term “compersion” here, or “the other c-word,” as it’s known at our house.) But there are times when I feel jealous, and if I’m still experiencing jealousy after 20-plus years in an open relationship, and still experiencing jealousy after 30-plus years being pretty fucking queer, I don’t think jealousy is something you need to completely overcome before opening your relationship or that being “queerer” cures.

And it’s important to distinguish between different kinds of jealousy. There’s the healthy kind of jealousy (someone is being neglected or taken for granted, and their feelings need to be considered); there’s the unhealthy kind of jealousy (someone is controlling and manipulative, which is a red flag for abuse); and then there’s sexy and energizing kind of jealousy (seeing your partner through another’s eyes and recognizing—or being reminded—of your partner’s desirability). Instead of trying to expunge all feelings of jealousy from your emotional repertoire before opening your relationship (which no one does before entering into closed relationships), ask yourself what kind of jealousy you’re feeling at a particular moment.

If it’s the healthy kind, ask for what you need; if it’s the unhealthy kind, get your ass into therapy; if it’s the sexy and energizing kind, enjoy the ride.

And finally …

It’s good that you’re taking your time, because rushing things is a good way to fuck this up. But

paradoxically, SPEW, if you wait until you’re no longer experiencing any jealousy—or having conflicted feelings about this—you’ll never get there.

—Dan Savage I’m a 36-year-old cis gay man who came out a decade ago and found widespread acceptance from friends and family, but I fear my unique situation now might change that. Last summer, my husband died unexpectedly, leaving me widowed and trying to pick up the pieces. I couldn’t sleep much for a while and went online to chat. I wound up meeting this great guy who lives across the country. He’s a sexy leather daddy, and I’ve traveled to stay with him on two occasions and had some of the hottest sex I’ve ever had. Plus, I really like him! He’s funny, smart, deep. Here’s my dilemma: He’s married to another man, and I also have feelings for the husband. I plan to move there soon to see where this goes and start the next chapter of my life. (I will be getting my own apartment, at least at first.) It’s still early, but I feel like I could fall in love with both these men. How do I pursue this and start over somewhere new while making this all understandable to the straights in my life? Is there a way to explain this to my mom and the rest of my family without freaking them out? I know it shouldn’t matter, and I’ll follow my heart either way, but I’d hate to lose this close connection with my family if they get weirded out by my dating life.

—No More Mr. Heteronormative I’m so sorry for your loss, NMMH, and I’m so glad you were able to find the support you needed online—and it’s nice to be reminded that people don’t just go online to share conspiracy theories and post revenge porn. People find connection online, they find support, and sometimes they find new love in the form of a sexy leather daddy.

As for what to tell your family about your relationship …

For now, NMMH, nothing. Just like you’re getting your own apartment after you move because you want to wait and see where this relationship goes before moving in with these guys, you’re going to want to see where this relationship goes before you tell your family about these guys.

This isn’t about hiding things from your family, NHHM, but about waiting to roll out your new relationship if and/or when it gets serious. You most likely didn’t introduce mom to your late husband after your second date; similarly, there’s no need to introduce mom to these guys after seeing them on only two occasions.

And in my experience—in my own highly personal and highly relevant experience—it’s often easier for the families of gay men to accept that we’re open or poly than it is for the families of straight people. Our families have some practice letting go of expectations and prejudices. And while it’s possible your family has made it clear their acceptance was conditioned upon you marrying and settling down and behaving “heteronormatively,” it’s also possible you’re projecting. You want them to think you’re “one of the good ones,” i.e., one of the monogamous ones, while they couldn’t care less. But even if they do care and would prefer to see you monogamously married again, they will embrace your new relationship if you make it clear you will accept nothing less from them.

—DS Email your Savage Love questions to questions@savagelove.net.

CLASSIFIEDS Legal INGENUITY PREP PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS – CHROMEBOOKS Ingenuity Prep Public Charter School solicits proposals for the following goods: * Chromebooks for students Full RFP available by request. All proposals must be submitted in PDF format and emailed to bids@ingenuityprep.org no later than 5:00 PM on Tuesday, March 15, 2021.

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PERRY STREET PREPARATORY PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL MULTIPLE REQUESTS FOR PROPOSALS Classroom Furniture, Design & Build Outdoor Learning and Play Space, and Bathroom Renovations. Perry Street Prep PCS—a nonprofit, PK-8th Grade Public Charter School serving approx.

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Contact Information: Kelly Smith, ksmith@ pspdc.org

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DIVERSIONS CROSSWORD

How Embarrassing

By Brendan Emmett Quigley

30. Chatty Broads with ___ and Jess (podcast) 31. “Not ___ out of you!”

34. Wrestling partnership 35. Blog that posts news for IT professionals 36. Dispenser at a French petrol station 40. British noble 42. “What I think,” initially 43. Vitals checker 44. Jacksonville to Miami dir.

45. Indentation setting 46. Stumped folk?

47. “Getting in the car now” 48. Some who make take a gap year: abbr.

49. Workout program with punches and kicks 54. Sling content 56. “Hmm ... hadn’t considered that” 58. Tunnel builders 59. Skating commentator Lipinski 60. CODA actor ___ Kostur 61. They may be done while crawling 62. Squeaks (out) 65. Brief question to 47 down 66. Fodder for dad jokes 67. Javier’s that

Across 1. Blackout state 7. Crow’s nest holder 11. “Must we hear everything?,” for short 14. Twelfth Night duke 15. Tiny bit 16. ___ vivant 17. Civilian cleaning up debris in the park, e.g.

19. State that straddles two time zones 20. Marsh birds 21. Cobbler ingredients 23. Doctor’s order 26. Speech therapist’s topic 27. Tiny cuckoo 30. More exposed 32. Spumante’s home 33. Detecting of umami, say 37. It keeps your car in place, for short 38. “___ is me!” (melodramatic line) 39. “Póg mo thóin” speaker, maybe 41. They pile up during vacation 45. They provide Aquafresh automatically

50. Chair designer Jacobsen 51. 52 across rapper 52. “___ Dance” 53. Crimson Tide, for short 54. The Big Board, for short 55. Act as a gobetween?

57. Challenge another rapper in freestyles 63. Moving job 64. Suffer embarrassment by your own actions, and a hint to this puzzle’s theme 68. Singer Rita 69. Accusatory phrase 70. Allegory and euphemism, etc.

71. Skinner box subj.

72. Fournier on the Knicks 73. Asserts it Down 1. Spread seed 2. Star ___ (treadmill manufacturer) 3. Where Volodymyr Zelenskyy was born 4. Bread with hummus 5. .txt file size,

roughly 6. Pulley part 7. Thing dropped after a memorable performance 8. Just peachy 9. Renewable resource 10. Infield coverage provider 11. Georgia’s capital 12. California home for E & J Gallo Winery 13. Twirling around 18. French river or its department 22. Flat land 24. Latchkey child, e.g.

25. With the bow 27. Polished off 28. Snatch 29. Haifa’s home: abbr.

& $ 1 & ( / 6

$ 5 $ / 6 ( $

0 ( ; , & $ 1 ) 3 $ 2 & 5 2 6 7 '

( 1 2 & + . , / 1

* $ + 2 < : 2 5 0 1 ) 7 6

/ 8 6 $ 6 6 + ( 5 ( 5 ' 5 ( ( ; 1 ' ( 2 6 8 7 * ( 7 $ 7 + 7 + ( ( 7 5 $

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) ( 7 $ 7 5 , ; 7 ( $ 6 ( ( 1 / * 0 6 / ( ( 3 < 0 < 7 + 6 ( ( 6 6 $ * 6 5 / 2 2 ( ( / ( 5 ' ' 8 6 7 7 , 3 3 , $ ) , 5 ( * < 1 2 6

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