Washington City Paper (Oct. 8, 2021)

CITYPAPER WASHINGTON

NEWS: ERIN PALMER WANTS TO CHAIR THE D.C. COUNCIL 3 FOOD: RESTAURANTS RACE TO WOO WORKERS 12 ARTS: AN AFGHAN FAMILY TELLS THEIR STORY VISUALLY 14

THE DISTRICT'S FREE WEEKLY SINCE 1981 VOLUME 41, NO. 10 OCT. 8–21, 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

End of an Ear-a Don Zientara’s legendary Inner Ear Studios closes a chapter

By Christina Smart

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

Page 4

TABLE OF CONTENTS COVER STORY 4 End of an Ear-a: Inner Ear Studios, where Don Zientara recorded some of the most iconic music made in the D.C. area, closed this month after more than 30 years. Its magic, and its legacy, extends beyond the music.

NEWS 3 Loose Lips: Ward 4 ANC Erin Palmer is looking to unseat D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson. Is she different enough from his last challenger?

SPORTS 10 Pardon the Disruption: After 20 years, ESPN’s original sports debate show still resonates.

FOOD 12 Perk Up: Restaurants are recognizing the value of providing benefits for their employees, among them days off, mental health care, and professional development.

ARTS 11 Film: Gittell on Lamb 14 Drawing Closer: A visual storytelling workshop gives one Afghan immigrant family an outlet for grief in the aftermath of the Taliban takeover of their country.

CITY LIGHTS 17 City Lights: Tap it in at a terrifyingly campy mini-golf course, settle in for some author readings, and tickle your itch for social justice and live music.

DIVERSIONS 18 Savage Love 19 Classifieds 20 Crossword On the cover: Photograph

by Darrow Montgomery

Darrow Montgomery | 2700 Block of S Oakland Street, Arlington, Sept. 26 Editorial

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NEWS LOOSE LIPS

Rocking Chair Darrow Montgomery

Ward 4 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Erin Palmer is challenging Phil Mendelson for chair of the D.C. Council. He’s not concerned.

By Mitch Ryals @ MitchRyals A lunch meeting at Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse in CityCenterDC laid some of the groundwork for D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson’s challenger for the Democratic nomination in 2022. At an auction benefiting a neighborhood school, Erin Palmer bid on, and won, the opportunity to dine with the Council chair. They sat down in the summer of 2019, right around the time former Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans’ ethics scandal, which ultimately forced him from office, was heating up.

Though she didn’t have plans to run at the time, Palmer says she bid on the lunch with Mendelson because she saw the issues with Evans as indicative of a larger problem at the Council. To Palmer, then and now the advisory neighborhood commissioner for 4B02, it seemed like under Mendelson’s leadership, each Council office functioned as its own island where members shied away from holding each other accountable.

“That was bizarre to me to watch,” she says. “The press were really hammering the issues with Jack Evans, and then [Advisory Neighborhood Commissions] and community members were just hammering the Council, like ‘Why aren’t you doing something?’ It was reactive and not proactive.”

The dynamic reminded Palmer of her work as a staff lawyer for the U.S. Judicial Conduct and Disability Committee, which is responsible

for handling complaints of misconduct against judges.

“One of the criticisms of judges is that they run their own chambers in a very isolated way and that’s part of what creates risk factors for workplace misconduct issues,” she says. “You have a very large power differential and isolation. It struck me as, in some ways, a similar setup.”

Palmer is a mother of three children and was elected an ANC in 2018—both characteristics shape her thinking. In an interview with Loose Lips, she highlights her work on the ANC pushing for changes to solar panel installation guidelines on historic homes and for transparency around HVAC installation and repairs in schools.

Palmer’s views on institutional accountability are largely shaped by her work as an ethics lawyer. But she’s also driven by a more personal experience. She was sexually assaulted in high school and has endured sexual harassment from co-workers, one of whom was a partner at a law firm where she worked.

“While it doesn’t define me, it’s part of how I see the world,” she says. The debate over Initiative 77, which would have eliminated the lower, tiered minimum wage for tipped workers, was largely about workplace power dynamics, from Palmer’s perspective. “It does play a role in how I see issues.”

Palmer is looking to join the increasing number of left-leaning councilmembers on the 13-member body, whereas Mendelson more often aligns with the shrinking moderate bloc. And though she is well known in

certain progressive circles (and was rumored to be a potential challenger for former Ward 4 Councilmember Brandon Todd in 2020 before Janeese Lewis George announced her run), she faces a formidable opponent in Mendelson. He was first elected as an atlarge councilmember in 1999 and assumed the chairmanship in 2012, replacing Kwame Brown, who resigned amid a financial scandal.

Palmer acknowledges that Mendelson “has done some good things,” but she says “it’s time for someone with new ideas and new energy.”

Palmer says she appreciates that Mendelson appears to concentrate on the work more than the spotlight, to his credit. But her respect for him started drying up when the Council debated D.C.’s law that gives employees paid time off to care for themselves and their families.

After the Council approved the basic benefits, they debated several changes to the law, one of which would have eliminated the city-funded benefit for large employers and required them to provide paid leave on their own.

Palmer testified about her experience working at a large law firm that was required to provide paid time off and described the pressures employees felt to not use it, which she argued wouldn’t exist if the program was entirely government run.

She recalls that, in Mendelson’s response to her, he emphasized that the amount of paid leave remained the same regardless of whether the employer was required to offer the benefit or the government provided it, which wasn’t her point.

“I don’t know if he didn’t want to respond to me on it or just felt like he knew better,” she says. “But that’s when something struck me that thinking about the specifics of how something works and how it impacts people is sometimes overlooked.”

Mendelson, for his part, is quite comfortable in his path to reelection.

“Look at 2018,” he says, referring to his decisive victory over longtime progressive advocate and budget wonk Ed Lazere. Although Palmer rejects the notion that she is “Ed 3.0” (Lazere also lost the at-large Council race in 2020), many of her views align with Lazere’s.

She’s supportive of the Council’s vote to raise taxes on incomes over $250,000—a measure Mendelson worked to defeat.

“I’m a different person and a different candidate,” she says. “I respect Ed, and I think he does great work, but I think our focus is different.”

Distinguishing herself from a vanquished progressive champion is one obstacle for Palmer. Another is connecting with voters in parts of D.C. where Mendelson has had a decades-long head start and a track record of getting votes, including neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River.

For her campaign manager and treasurer, Palmer tapped Ron Thompson, a 23-year-old who grew up in Anacostia and also managed progressive Mysiki Valentine’s unsuccessful campaign for an at-large seat on the State Board of Education in 2020. Thompson believes Palmer will find common ground in her experience as a mother and elected commissioner.

“I wouldn’t get behind a candidate who wouldn’t be able to resonate with people on that personal level and who wouldn’t be able to talk to my grandmother, or my mom or my aunts,” he says. “These are the women that you’re talking about, single moms trying to do it on their own, who are probably skeptical of a White lady from Upper Northwest. I’ve seen Erin do that, talk to anyone and everyone.”

Palmer is running on a platform of good governance and accountability, and will use D.C.’s publicly funded campaign program, which bars donations from corporations and political action committees and provides matching public funds for small-dollar donations. Mendelson is raising money the traditional way. He has already taken in more than $101,000, according to his most recent financial report, which lists support from several lobbyists and PACs. In an interview, Palmer also suggests she would decentralize power inherent to the Council chair.

Authority to appoint and remove chairs of committees rests with the Council chairperson. But that authority shouldn’t be used as leverage for votes or as retaliation, Palmer says, recalling former At-Large Councilmember David Grosso’s removal as the sole chair of the Committee on Education. Grosso previously told DCist that Mendelson used the education committee chairmanship as leverage for his vote to overturn Initiative 77.

Grosso voted along with Mendelson and the majority to overturn the voter-approved initiative. But Mendelson later usurped Grosso’s autonomy and appointed himself as co-chair of the education committee after a year of scandals. Now that Grosso is gone, oversight of the education system rests under Mendelson’s Committee of the Whole.

“I think we’ve seen the failures that have come out of that in terms of dealing with schools and children during the pandemic,” Palmer says, pointing to HVAC issues as buildings reopened for in-person classes earlier this year.

Mendelson touts his longevity and experience as the reason why voters should rehire him.

“You just need that, otherwise you’re going to get chewed up by your colleagues, you’re going to get chewed up by the mayor,” he says.

“Some of these issues are tough issues.”

Palmer isn’t surprised that Mendelson is unconcerned about her campaign.

“He’s underestimating me,” she says. “Like decidedly. That’s OK. I kind of appreciate it.”

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End of an Ear-a Arlington’s legendary Inner Ear Studios, a cradle for D.C.punk, left its space of three decades on Oct. 1.

By Christina Smart Photos by Darrow Montgomery

A

nyone who thinks peer pressure only happens to teenagers has never been in a recording studio. On a Friday evening in early September, a couple of punks are pressuring Michael Reidy, former lead singer of D.C. rock band the Razz, to sing on a track.

“I’ve had throat cancer!” he protests.

It’s rare to hear outbursts like that in a workplace. But this place of business is Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, the birthplace of some of the most iconic releases of the past 40 years from D.C. bands including Fugazi, Bad Brains, and Scream.

Finally coaxed into providing some b a ck g ro u n d vo c a l s , R e i d y i s j o i n e d by the punks, who happ en to b e Ian MacKaye (of Teen Idles, Minor Threat, and Fugazi) and Scream’s Franz Stahl.

They’re gathering around a mic and laying down multiple takes on harmonies on a new Scream song called “Lifeline,” a track from the forthcoming release D.C. Special, their first full-length album in 30 years. For anyone familiar with D.C.’s music scene, it’s obvious a lot of its history is standing in one room at the moment.

Patience is required. The immediacy of hearing a three-minute song is far different from the intricate process of

recording said song. In the control room, the owner and founder of Inner Ear, Don Zientara, helms the mixing board and provides the playback for the trio.

The studio and control room walls are lined with artwork from kindergartners, the artist Jay Stuckey, and Zientara himself. It’s there to help absorb the sound emanating from the hundreds of recording artists who have played there over the years, and it’s soaked up countless musical notes of all genres over the past three decades. There’s also a stuffed moose in a hat hanging from the ceiling and a surfboard that belongs to Zientara.

It’s an unexpected hobby for a 73-yearold originally from Rochester, New York.

The walls of the narrow hallway, which have seen the likes of everyone from Keane and Dag Nasty to the Walkmen wander through, are filled with posters, album artwork, and photos of the multitude of musicians who have recorded at Inner Ear over the years.

“There’s John Frusciante, of course, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” Zientara notes, pointing out photos like he’s going through a family album. “Here’s Henry Rollins in a tutu. Of course, that’s Minor T h reat … T his wa s Dismemb erment

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Plan. This was toward the end of their career. They just broke up after that.”

Musical peer pressure aside, the atmosphere is a relaxed one; it’s the kind of place where swigs of Red Stripe beer happen between takes, quiche and pie are in the break room if you’re hungry, and chops are busted on the regular. War stories about low-attended shows are told.

Friends like Brendan Canty (of Fugazi and Rites of Spring) wander in to say hello and see what’s going on. Given the jovial environment, if a complete stranger were to wander in, they would have no idea that Inner Ear was about to close and that all of this would be gone in a matter of weeks.

Rumors of a potential closure began circulating in April 2021, when Arlington County prepared to vote on purchasing the lot that includes the building where Zientara has been renting Inner Ear’s space since 1990. This idea had been floated by the county for decades, but hadn’t come to be.

“Initially in the late ’90s, they thought of developing because this was the last industrial area for Arlington and they had plans,” Zientara says. “But of course plans and budgets don’t always match sometimes. So it was put on hold. And I think back around 2008, they had some more plans out but

that didn’t match up due to the downturn in the economy. So now they have a plan for a cultural arts and industries area, I guess they call it, and I guess they have the money so they bought this building.”

When the building owner was looking to sell, the county saw potential for the space. “It’s the confluence of a landowner, a property owner who was willing to sell and who fortunately gave us a first look at it before putting it on the open market,” says Arlington County Board Member Christian Dorsey. But even with the purchase in place, Arlington County doesn’t have any definitive plans for the lot as of yet.

“It’s a strategic opportunity that the county leverage and purchase this property, but there’s no plans immediately for a facility or building,” explains Michelle IsabelleStark, director of Arlington cultural affairs.

“So, in the near terms what we plan on doing is preparing the space, an outdoor space, for performance, for festivals, for markets, for community get-togethers. So it’s going to be more of a—I think it’s overused—the word ‘pop-up.’ But it’s more in line with that.”

The building itself is nothing grand, but it’s the age of the structure that is forcing the move. “It’s not that the county wants to see Don or any other tenant go,” explains

Dorsey. “Once the property transfers to a different owner, that owner bears the responsibility for ensuring ADA access systems at a cer tain structural level.

We’re not grandfathered in. Knowing that the building would require substantial investment to make compliant with those standards, it’s just not a good use of public dollars to go ahead and do that rehabilitation, so we’re going to have to get rid of the buildings, which unfortunately means that people who were tenanted there have to do something else.”

When Arlington County confirmed in June that Inner Ear’s final day would be Oct. 1, giving Zientara three months to empty out the studio so that the county could go ahead, you couldn’t help but feel that the man was finally sticking it to the punks.

News of the closing spread like wildfire, as did the outrage. Artists including Laura Jane Grace, lead singer of the punk rock band Against Me!, took to social media; Grace tweeted, “Damn. What a day. First thing I read about this morning was that Vintage Vinyl in Jersey is closing. Now Inner Ear too?! We mixed Searching for a Former Clarity at Inner Ear. Recorded the song ‘Joy’ there too.”

Carl Bon Tempo, bassist of the defunct band My Life in Rain, tweeted, “My band was lucky enough to make two albums with Don at Inner Ear in the 1990s. This was unequivocally a highlight of my life.

Don made us feel comfortable, confident to experiment, and gently nudged us when we got off-track. Looking back, I now understand he was mentoring us.”

The outcry wasn’t unexpected. This was the place, after all, that Foo Fighters’ frontperson (and, as one of the former drummers of Scream, Inner Ear’s most famous alum) Dave Grohl spent nearly an entire episode of his 2014 HBO Sonic Highways series profiling, ending with the Foo recording the song “The Feast and the Famine.” (Grohl also gave a shoutout to the studio during the Foo Fighters’ surprise show at the 9:30 Club on Sept. 9, explaining that he and his former bandmates from Scream were recording there.) The only person who seems to be nonplussed by the situation is Zientara.

“You know, I’m not pissed off or anything like that,” Zientara says. “It’s fine. I mean, I kind of believe in the evolution of things.”

The creation and existence of Inner Ear

is a remarkable result that evolved from Zientara’s combined interests in music and electronics, both of which started at a very young age. “I had always been interested in electronics and tape recorders, and had always played [music] since about 10 years old,” says Zientara, who also had the good fortune to have grammar school teachers who encouraged his interest in electronics.

“One of them was a rocket scientist from the Navy,” recalls Zientara. “It turns out another one was a research scientist for Xerox. So, they taught me a lot of stuff. They’re the kind of people where I said I wanted to build a stereo amplifier.

They came with a paper bag full of parts and said, ‘Here. Here’s the schematic.’”

In pursuit of an artistic life, Zientara graduated from Syracuse University in 1970 with a BFA in painting and printmaking, and he was headed to West Virginia University to get a master’s degree when the U.S. Army drafted him. “So I figured that my number’s up, so to speak,” he says.

But Zientara realized that he could use this to his advantage. “If you signed up for a training program in the Army, you’re guaranteed the program training,” says Zientara. “I said, ‘Well, maybe this a good chance for me to find out something about electronics.’” Given the United States’ government’s history of surveilling and investigating musicians deemed disruptive to the fabric of society, if the U.S. Army had any idea how pivotal Zientara’s electronics training would be in the recording of punk music, they probably would have let him stay in college.

A few months after his basic training was completed, the Army offered Zientara a job as a painter in Alexandria.

He realized this was a far better option than fixing field radios in Vietnam, and he would be able to use his college degree drawing, painting, and retouching photographs on this assignment. From then on, the DMV would be his home base.

A f t e r h i s r e l e a s e f r o m t h e A r my, Zientara got a job at the National Gallery of Art in 1976 in the prints and drawing department. A tour of the gallery several years later allowed him to show

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The House That Punk Built Dischord House, only a year younger than the label it nurtured, just turned 40.

“There’s truly nothing like Inner Ear, anywhere,” says Mystery Friends’ lead singer Abby Sevcik. “The sense of place that you immediately feel when you walk in. Don is such a presence. I feel like I’ve met so many people because of Inner Ear in the music community.” off his electronics training, unknowingly putting him on the path for a fulltime career as a recording engineer.

“They gave us a tour of the National Gallery,” says Z ientara . “ They were just putting together a recording studio and they were having trouble wiring up this one place and I said, ‘Here’s how you do it. You just do it like that.’ [They said] ‘You wanna be the engineer here?’

S o I just flipp ed and I b ecame their engineer for the next five years or so.”

Zientara had already started operating a small version of Inner Ear from the basement of his home in Arlington the year before. “Very humble,” says Zientara.

“We’re talking like a stereo tape recorder recording a single person playing guitar.”

Thanks to that and his own involvement in local bands including Ravenstone, plus his work as a solo performer, a recording career was born.

“It was pure serendipity,” says Zientara.

“I’d been playing in bands all the time.

S o when the bands broke up, one of the people that was in one of my bands said, ‘Hey, can you record us in my new band?’ ... and playing along with them were the Slickee Boys. When I got there to record them, the Slickee Boys asked me, ‘Hey, if you’ve got an extra roll of tape, can you record us?’ I said I could.”

The Slickee Boys were managed by the late Skip Groff, owner of Yesterday and Today Records in Rockville, who became pivotal in directing bands toward Inner Ear. “When they came to mix [the Slickee Boys] tape, Skip came along with them and he liked what I was doing and liked the way I approached recording,” says Zientara. “He said, ‘Hey, I’ve got these people, the Teen Idles, coming. Record with them.’ So they came over, recorded them. He said, ‘Hey, I’ve got these people, Bad Brains, to record.

Record them.’ And it just snowballed from

there. Really there was very little advertising involved. It was just a matter of just being in the right place at the right time.”

Then a member of Teen Idles, Ian MacKaye had already recorded at a studio in Maryland, but wasn’t thrilled with the results.

“It was very alienating, this experience,” MacKaye says. “I hadn’t even been playing bass for a year at that point. I was so new to my instrument and the whole idea of recording. We just figured you go in and you just bash it out and somehow they capture how great you are or how crazy or whatever. We didn’t understand there’s different philosophies with recording with people who are running studios, and sometimes some of them say, ‘Well, you know what you really need to do is have less distortion on your guitars.’ Or they try to help you by altering your sound to make it more palatable. But we were involved with a form of music that was revolutionary at the time.”

In 1980, Groff directed MacKaye and his bandmates to Inner Ear, and they set off for Zientara’s house. There, they found a much different setting than their original stu dio experience, from the room they recorded in down to the mixing board that Zientara had built himself.

“It was like a little four-track thing,” recalls MacKaye. “His control room was on the second floor of the house and we recorded in the basement. He had two children, two little girls … and we played in the rec room where all the toys were.”

The recording experience was completely different from the band’s previous one, thanks to Zientara’s complete lack of prejudice toward punk music.

“In the music world, there is a kind of a snoot,” says MacKaye. “But Don was not like that at all. It was almost immediately clear that what Don was interested in was helping us capture what it was we wanted to capture. So he didn’t alter anything. He just

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Most people acknowledge important anniversaries with some sort of celebration or fanfare. Ian MacKaye, formerly of Teen Idles, Minor Threat, and Fugazi, is not one of those people, letting the 40th anniversary of the label he cofounded in 1980, Dischord Records, go by last year with neither pomp nor circumstance. October 1, 2021, marked the 40th anniversary of Dischord House, the building that is the home base for the record label. MacKaye, while still not into fanfare, agreed to tell us the story of how it came to be.

While one might think the house was part of a grand plan to promote D.C.’s punk scene, the house was a result of parental pressure on his first band, Teen Idles. “Jeff [Nelson], Nathan [Strejcek] and I graduated from high school in 1980 and then we attended ‘punk university,’” says MacKaye. “We didn’t go to college. We all lived at home. Summer of ’81, our parents are like, ‘OK, what’s the plan?’ and the plan was to be in bands.” Needing a place of their own to live, rehearse, and operate their burgeoning label, they established three criteria for finding a space: It had to be cheap, detached (so the neighbors wouldn’t complain when bands rehearsed), and in a safe neighborhood for their younger friends when they visited. “It was already hard enough, the abuse that punks were getting on the streets,” MacKaye recalls.

Kismet, in the form of a real estate ad, brought the band to its current location—the first house they looked at. “It was fortuitous.

The landlord was great. Just didn’t give a fuck,” says MacKaye.

The house served its purpose. Its basement, with a ceiling that’s less than 6 feet tall, has hosted rehearsals for bands including Rites of Spring, the Faith, and Fugazi (“It’s either sitting down or putting your head up in the rafters,” says MacKaye) and it has a small galley area that served as the first Dischord office. As a bonus, it was located near Inner Ear Studios (both the first and second locations), where 90 percent of Dischord releases have been recorded, and served as a way station in the ’80s for touring American hardcore punk bands to get a break from sleeping in vans. When the house came up for sale in 1994, MacKaye was in the “throes of Fugazi” and constantly on the road. “I couldn’t possibly imagine moving out at that point because this was the base of operation [for Dischord], so I bought the house,” says MacKaye. Now 40 years on from establishing the label and moving into the house (please don’t show up seeking a tour), MacKaye understands the interest in the anniversary, but like any punk with a DIY work ethic, wants to get on to the next thing. “I just wanna do my work.” —Christina Smart

tried to mic it and make it sound the way [it did]. He just tried to capture what it was we were doing, and I think that it was just such a different experience ... He’s interested in capturing what’s being created.”

“It’s hard to describe how small this basement is,” says Eli Janney, recalling the first location of Inner Ear, where he started as an intern in 1986 while attending George Washington University. He later formed the D.C. post-punk band Girls Against Boys in 1988; today, Janney is the associate music director for Late Night with Seth Meyers. “It’s a very typical, small suburban house with a very tiny, little basement. It’s very funny—the stuff that we made there was pretty crazy.”

As the musical craziness was cultivated, what started off as a side gig eventually grew so popular that Zientara decided to pursue it full time, much to the surprise of some in Inner Ear’s inner circle.

“One day he said, ‘I’ve decided to quit my job,’ and I was completely freaked out,” says MacKaye, laughing. “I said, ‘You can’t quit your job to do this! This can’t possibly happen!’ But he was like, ‘I want to do this.’

That’s the way Don is. ‘Just want to do it.’

He started recording full time and then

he actually grew the studio. He went from four-track to eight-track to sixteen-track.”

Zientara simply says of the decision, “Never decided on the leap. It leaped on me.”

Through Inner Ear, Zientara not only nurtured generations of bands and musicians but also budding producers and engineers, like the teachers who would bring him schematics and paper bags of parts.

“When I would have questions, I would call Don because he was very, very helpful. I didn’t understand any of the basic concepts, really, so he started giving me very basic info … I started working there and started learning all the machines there and also learning more,” says Janney.

I n n e r Ea r ’s p o p u la ri t y h a d g row n to the point that Zientara was working seven days a week, and the extra help was definitely needed. Eventually, a larger location was needed as well.

“Around 1989, I figured I needed a location,” recalls Zientara. “I was doing it out of my house and there was just no room there for it at that point. Just too much equipment. Bands were coming in like mad and so I had to just get a bigger place.”

That bigger place ended up being the Arlington studio Inner Ear occupied from

1990 until last week. That location was an ideal one: a building with cinder blocks, no electrical interference, and no time limits.

“As opposed to home where it’s, ‘Hey, the kids are trying to get to sleep,’” says Zientara.

J. Robbins, owner, producer, and engineer of the Magpie Cage Recording Studio in Baltimore, first experienced Inner Ear in 1990 as the lead singer of D.C. band Jawbox, who recorded their first album at the studio with Janney. Robbins developed a similar mentor/mentee relationship with Zientara. As Robbins’ interest in producing and engineering grew, he started collecting recording equipment, setting it up in the band’s group house, and recording other artists for free to get the experience. When a position opened up in Inner Ear’s Studio B, it was MacKaye who suggested Robbins to Z ientara .

“That was really the beginning of me trying to have a career as a producer [and] engineer,” says Robbins. “I learned so much from working at Inner Ear just from being around Don. He was always very generous with his knowledge. He’s just a very generous-hearted individual.”

“It was a place of not just recording lessons but life lessons,” Robbins

c o n t i n u es . “ Pa r t o f i t i s l ea r n i n g … things about trusting your collaborators.

Trusting your own instincts. Diplomacy.

All kinds of social skills ty pe stuff.”

Z i e n t a ra’s a p p r o a ch t o r e c o r d i n g went beyond just trying to capture a particular sound or timbre of the instruments, s omething he’s pass ed on to those who have worked at Inner Ear. “What I came to learn was that the most important thing that’s happening in the studio is this energetic, ephemeral thing between people,” says Robbins. “It’s not as if the sound of things isn’t important. Of course it’s important … But really what you’re doing is capturing a moment among people who have created something together.”

“Sometimes the very best thing you can do as a producer or engineer or someone who’s facilitating the session is find ways to make sure that people can trust themselves,” Robbins adds. “It’s a mysterious skill that you can’t quite quantify, but you know when certain people have it and Don is definitely one of those people.”

A s t h e de ca des p ro g res s e d , I n n e r Ear continued to capture moments that ranged from a 2001 acoustic performance from emo rock band Jimmy Eat World

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to Hüsker Dü’s former singer-guitarist Bob Mould recording tracks for his 2005 album, Body of Song, and Zientara continued to embolden baby bands in the DMV music scene over the decades.

David Mohl, guitarist of D.C.’s electropop dance band Mystery Friends, recalls his first time recording at Inner Ear in 2018.

“It was our first true studio experience,” says Mohl. “Don has this sort of Jedi master aura about him. Then, also, being in Inner Ear where you really do feel like you’re in this lineage, or you look on the wall and you see every Fugazi cover and Bad Brains and then there’s Dave Grohl. It’s such a ‘Wow! This is part of a special tradition that is so interconnected and so vibrant.’”

“There’s truly nothing like Inner Ear, anywhere,” says Mystery Friends’ lead singer Abby Sevcik. “The sense of place that you immediately feel when you walk in. Don is such a presence. I feel like I’ve met so many people because of Inner Ear in the music community.”

Since the confirmation that Inner Ear would be closing, Zientara has been busy making the final recordings and selling off equipment and gear to help clear out the space. There are tentative plans for an auction of Inner Ear items to be held on Reverb and spaces including Lost Origins Gallery in Mount Pleasant, the D.C. Punk Archive at the MLK Library, and the Las Vegas Punk Museum have approached Zientara about having Inner Ear items on display. (Note to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: If you can have CBGB’s awning on display, you can re-create Inner Ear’s studio as part of the Garage.)

There is a chance that a new version of Inner Ear might be part of the forthcoming arts district that Arlington County hopes to build, but that may be years in the making.

“I would love for there to be something that we either build in that area or find elsewhere that could house this kind of program with Don’s equipment with him,” says Dorsey. “His providing mentorship and experience, teaching other folks so that we can ensure that sound studios and the production quality and the engineering skill that goes into it doesn’t become a lost art.”

“I feel like we’re really going to feel that loss,” says Sevcik. “It’s such a big piece of D.C.’s music history. It’s definitely sad.

Whatever Don’s wishes are, we’ll be happy for whatever he decides. The sense of place is not something you can replicate.”

While he has started to look at other commercial space in Arlington, Zientara’s immediate plan is to return Inner Ear to where it all started: the bas ement at his home in Arlington .

On the first Friday night in October, Inner Ear’s last day in its Arlington location, a crowd has gathered at New District Brewery Company, a few buildings down from the studio, to attend a musical wake for the recording studio. It’s reminiscent of a high school reunion: hugs, handshakes, and pats on the backs are abundant. From the looks of the crowd, every generation that has recorded at Inner Ear 8 october 8, 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

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is represented. Brendan Canty wanders in, as does MacKaye. But the mood isn’t a sad one: Zientara makes sure of that by setting up nearly four hours of live music, including himself on the lineup.

Early in the show, Zientara, accompanied by drummer Gary Michael Smith (formerly of Zientara’s band Ravenstone), plays a slowed- down, stripped- down version of Michael Penn’s 1989 hit, “No Myth.” When he arrives at the lyrics to

the bridge, he sings: “Some time from now you’ll bow to pressure/ Some things in life you can not measure by degrees.”

It’s striking how perfectly this sums up not only Inner Ear’s current situation but also Zientara’s life’s work. Some things—the impact of a guy who wanted to build his own amps, of a studio space where artists were allowed to be exactly who they were— can’t be measured.

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FBI washingtoncitypaper.com october 8, 2021 9

SPORTS

Pardon the Disruption ESPN’s original sports debate show celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. Many shows have tried to emulate it since.

Before ESPN hired Erik Rydholm to be the producer of its then-new talk show, Pardon the Interruption, 20 years ago, he needed to meet with the show’s co-host, Tony Kornheiser, and make his case on why he would be the right fit. Rydholm arrived second at the hotel dining room on that day and vividly remembers Kornheiser sitting with his back against the glass as the sun turned him into a silhouette. Kornheiser was wearing sunglasses.

“I couldn’t read his eyes at all,” Rydholm tells City Paper. “Tony is incredibly pointed, incredibly opinionated, and very acerbic. And I walked in intimidated ... I felt very insecure.”

Rydholm eventually shared his vision about what the show could be, and during the conversation, he related something in sports to Britney Spears. He doesn’t remember what the exact analogy was, but he does remember Kornheiser’s response. “At that point, there was a moment where he just said, ‘And that’s why you should produce this show,’” Rydholm says.

Twenty years later, PTI—with co-hosts Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, two former Washington Post columnists—is still on the air and remains one of ESPN’s most popular shows, with Rydholm as its longtime executive producer. Kornheiser thought, as he says in the recent ESPN documentary about the show’s anniversary, PTI20, that the show would last three weeks. Several core members of the team have been with the show all 20 years. Matthew Kelliher, Frankie Nation, and Matthew Ouano on the editorial side and Tom Howard and Bonnie Berko on the technical production team all joined around the same time, according to Rydholm. PTI, which is taped at the ABC News studio in D.C., celebrates its 20th anniversary on Oct. 22 and many shows, including those on ESPN, have tried to emulate PTI with varying degrees of success. The show revolutionized the sports talk show formula by introducing some levity and humor. The hosts occasionally wear costumes, and Wilbon signs off by saying, “Same time tomorrow, knuckleheads.” In a media landscape where sports debate shows are now ubiquitous, PTI stands out as an original.

“I’m so proud of the longevity of the show, but I’m more proud of the reasons behind the longevity of the show, or that people still turn to us for entertainment and enlightenment about the world of sports every day,” Rydholm says.

“I think it’s really rare.”

The debates between Kornheiser and Wilbon

Randy Sager/ESPN Images

By Kelyn Soong @KelynSoong

Erik Rydholm started long before PTI was even an idea, in the Post newsroom. Kornheiser came to the Post from the New York Times in 1979 to write for the sports and Style sections, while Wilbon, a Chicago native, started as a summer intern at the Post in 1978 before being promoted to a full-time reporter two years later. Both writers worked for then sports editor George Solomon, who fondly recalls their banter in the newsroom and felt that their personalities would make a good fit for a show like PTI. (Full disclosure: Solomon was one of my journalism professors at the University of Maryland.)

“My initial thoughts were, they’ve been doing this act in the office of the Washington Post for years, I think America should see it, too,” Solomon says. “And I was hopeful that … the country would appreciate it as much as I and many other people at the Washington Post who heard these disagreements and arguments over the years did, but saw their affection for one another.”

But not everyone, as Wilbon notes in PTI20, enjoyed their constant bickering. The sports department was located at the end of the hall, which was at one point adjacent to the paper’s Book World section.

“On a number of occasions, the editor of Book World says, ‘Is there any way you could get them to tone down the volume?’” Solomon says. “And I will say, ‘No.’ So Book World moves.”

The same thing happened when the Outlook section moved in—and then out. Only the investigative team could handle Wilbon and Kornheiser’s volume. “They were as loud as

10 october 8, 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

Tony and Mike so they didn’t have any complaints,” Solomon says.

That constant arguing is part of PTI’s charm, according to fans of the show and those who know both Wilbon and Kornheiser. “They might differ, but it’s like [when] best friends argue … they remain best friends,” Solomon says. “I think that’s the chemistry that they realistically have, and have developed over the years. It comes through on PTI.” In the documentary, Kornheiser succinctly explains why he believes PTI works: “The magic of this show is 11 words: ‘Black guy, white guy, yell at each other, love each other.’ It’s the relationship in a sports show that everybody wants. Everybody wants to be able to yell at his dear friend and then hug his dear friend after the yelling is done.”

Rydholm grew up in Chicago and read the two “religiously” in the Post. He also listened to Kornheiser’s radio show, watched them on legendary D.C. sportscaster George Michael’s TV shows, and read their chats on the Post website. Rydholm briefly worked as a Chicago bureau producer for ESPN in 1994 but left to start a financial and investment company called the Motley Fool based out of Alexandria.

Before the launch of PTI, Rydholm’s former ESPN boss, Jim Cohen, saw a sports column that Rydholm had written and reached out for his thoughts on creating a daily sports show like PTI. In turn, Rydholm handed in an 18-page document about why and how the show might work that earned him the job as PTI’s coordinating producer. He believed that it had the right ingredients to potentially last 20 years.

“What I based that on originally, when we were developing the show, is I look backward over the previous 20 years, and there had been shows like Siskel and Ebert, … Crossfire, … [and] Sports Reporters,” says Rydholm, who owns and operates the production company Rydholm Projects, Inc., which ESPN contracts with. “All three shows provided analysis. All three shows were based on the chemistry of the people who were on them. All three shows lasted 20 years; when we were launching, they’d already been on the air for 20 years.”

To prepare each day for PTI, Rydholm wakes up at 7 a.m., and starts filling out a Google Doc with ideas for the show along with the other members of the editorial team. At around 10 a.m., the producers meet—virtually, during the pandemic—to discuss the topics. Kelliher, PTI’s coordinating producer, then calls Wilbon and Kornheiser and the three get a sense of topics on that day’s show. PTI tapes between 4:30 and 5:30 p.m. and then the show airs at 5:30 p.m.

“Everybody knows the beats of their job,” Rydholm says, “and then they all intersect at a point that produces this thing we do.”

But back in 2001, there were questions about the viability of a daily sports talk show. ESPN was taking a risk by putting two newspaper columnists on TV nearly every day. Kornheiser says in the documentary that he told his staff before the show’s launch to “rent, don’t buy.”

“This was an era without all of the shows that you see today, so PTI was the first of its kind,” Rydholm says. “Some of the uncertainty wasn’t just about launching a new show, it was, ‘Will there be enough to talk about every single day that will be compelling to viewers?’”

The answer for the past 20 years has been yes, even as similar—and inferior—shows have come along. “I see them doing this as long as they want,” Solomon says. “They’re that good.

People enjoy the show. And I know I do, and I hope it never ends.”

Rydholm doesn’t have any pointed thoughts on other sports debate shows, but says that he is “thrilled” that the whole industry is growing. “Just like any industry where there seems like there’s a lot of demand, there are gonna be some products that work and then there are some products that don’t,” he says, adding that the entry to the business seems to have fallen now with podcasts, blogs, and micro media companies. And as for PTI, Rydholm is, to quote an athlete cliché, taking it one day at a time.

“Tomorrow, I will wake up and pick up the computer and our whole team will get to work on building tomorrow’s show,” he says. “That’s the future.”

ARTS REVIEW

2021–2022

CHAMBER MUSIC AT THE BARNS

WU HAN AND FRIENDS

THE LAMB LIES DOWN IN ICELAND Lamb Directed by Valdimar Jóhannsson Our relationship with animals has probably changed more in the past two decades than it has in the prior two centuries.

The movement to abstain from eating them is stronger than ever; lawsuits that argue for the personhood of nonhuman animals are moving through the courts; and whereas once dogs and cats lived entirely outdoors, people now treat their companion animals like children. But have we considered the full impact of this dramatic shift? If we blur the line between human and beast, can we maintain control of that relationship? What happens when we take it too far?

These are the questions that swirl through the sparse but engaging narrative of Lamb. It’s set in an expansive Icelandic valley, and the film is open just as wide. In between its arresting setup and its shocking climax, there is room for the mind to play in its fields.

Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) lead a quiet life on their small farm. They raise sheep and goats, and they plant vegetables. They share their meals mostly in silence. There’s love in the house but also unspoken pain. The lack of children is conspicuous—not because all married couples must have children, but because we can feel and hear their absence. One day a lamb is born on the farm who is somehow different. Maria brings him into the house, swaddles him in a blanket, and rocks him to sleep. She puts him in a crib in their room. Ingvar understands this one is different from the rest and doesn’t object. This, we take it, is love.

There are surprising mythic elements at play in Lamb that only a sadist would spoil, but let’s just say the tone achieved by first-time feature

director Valdimar Jóhannsson places Lamb in the realm of ancient folklore. The story is set out of time with few markers of the modern world. The aching score recalls creaking floorboards and wind chimes. Then there are the strange animal noises that spook the livestock and the family dog, leading to one of my favorite, oft-repeated lines in cinema: “What’s gotten into you, boy?” Whenever you hear those words, you know something freaky is about to happen, and while there is an eventual gnarly payoff, Lamb is more interested in setting a mood than offering cheap thrills. It’s the sort of film that feels like horror but somehow stays just outside the genre.

If you don’t buy the mood, however, then the film won’t work for you, and Lamb doesn’t always make that easy. The characters swoon with passion for each other and affection for their new progeny, but the filmmakers add a cool layer of detachment over it that Yorgos Lanthimos or even Stanley Kubrick would admire. It’s a bold choice, but it creates a sense of consistent unease, and you might find yourself yearning for something to reconcile the competing moods. We think this might come with the arrival on the farm of Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), an old friend who shows up for a visit and seems aghast at the prospect of sharing a dining table with a furbearer in a high chair. Lamb mines this situation for a few cathartic laughs—finally, we see our own confused stare represented on screen—but it seems unsure of what else to do with the character. It hints at a past relationship between him and Maria but never explores it, and the subplot simply peters out.

Throughout Lamb, you sense that the filmmakers have a profound opposition to didacticism, manufactured tension, or even the contours of traditional drama. Like most great folktales, it teases a lesson or some sort of guidance for how to move through a complicated world, but it holds back its judgment at the last minute, instead letting the audience chew on its hearty ideas without worrying if they’re too tough to swallow.

—Noah Gittell

WU HAN, PIANO ARNAUD SUSSMANN, VIOLIN PAUL NEUBAUER, VIOLA DAVID FINCKEL, CELLO

LINDA EDER OCT 14 | 8 PM

OCT 24 | 3 PM

JOHN LLOYD YOUNG’S BROADWAY!

LAURA BENANTI OCT 30 | 3 PM + 8 PM

PAT McGEE BAND

NOV 11 | 8 PM

CALIFORNIA GUITAR TRIO TRACE BUNDY

OCT 22 + 23

HARLEM 100 FEATURING MWENSO & THE SHAKES CELEBRATING THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

NOV 18

AN ACOUSTIC CHRISTMAS WITH OVER THE RHINE DEC 2

CHRISTMAS WITH CANTUS

NOV 4

LESSONS AND CAROLS FOR OUR TIME

KAYHAN KALHOR

CHAMBER MUSIC AT THE BARNS

NOV 10

SPANISH INSPIRATIONS CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER

CHAMBER MUSIC AT THE BARNS

NOV 12

MUSIC DIRECTION BY TOMMY FARAGHER

DEC 3

AN EVENING WITH BRANFORD MARSALIS JAN 26 + 27

AND MANY MORE!

Lamb opens in theaters this Friday. washingtoncitypaper.com october 8, 2021 11

Darrow Montgomery

YOUNG & HUNGRY

Queen’s English co-owner Sarah Thompson and server Alain Daniel

Perk Up Some restaurants are racing to become better places to work through perks and benefits. But what are workers really after?

By Laura Hayes @LauraHayesDC What if I told you a D.C. company is footing the bill for mental health counseling for all of its employees—and their families? That alone would be impressive. Now consider the company is a locally based restaurant group, and let the shock sink in.

The hospitality industry lags behind other employment sectors when it comes to benefits such as health insurance and paid time off. Ask owners why, and they’ll tell you restaurants operate on thin profit margins, diners reject price hikes, and part-timers typically aren’t eligible for benefits packages.

Then there’s the stubborn stigma that the restaurant industry is a field for people who are just passing through. This notion places the blame on “fickle” employees instead of on the employers who have played a role in creating atmospheres where it can be tough to stick around.

Time away during the pandemic made clear

to restaurant workers that their jobs take a toll on their health, their relationships, and their ability to save for the future. Some left the District or the industry in the dust, creating a staffing crisis.

Owners know they can no longer delay improving their work cultures or the alarming trend of people fleeing the industry will continue. Some have been implementing new perks and benefits in recent weeks to attract, retain, and even convince would-be workers that a restaurant job can be a career.

Restaurant groups report that they can better afford introducing boutique perks such as therapy or financial advising while small stand-alone restaurants say they’re working within their means to provide better training, nurturing work cultures, and time off.

Workers, meanwhile, are after better pay, impactful benefits, and supportive work environments where they don’t feel dispensable.

When Farmers Restaurant Group partnered with Talkspace, it was to walk the

12 october 8, 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

walk. “We’ve always been a workplace that talks about mental health,” says co-founder Dan Simons. His restaurants include five locations of Founding Farmers. “We tell people from day one orientation, ‘Don’t leave your problems at home,’” he says. Providing text and video counseling for free to full-time and part-time employees and people in their households “systemizes that culture.”

Talkspace confirms FRG is the first fullservice restaurant group to partner with them.

Kids who are 13 and older can participate. “I’m a parent so I understand that you really can only be as happy as your unhappiest child,” Simons says.

Julie Sharkey, FRG’s director of marketing operations, was one of the first to try Talkspace after the program launched Aug. 25. A few dozen others have joined since. “I believe in text therapy for stress management,” she says.

“It’s great to have a mental health outlet that’s not family, friends, or coworkers.”

Simons thinks smaller restaurant groups

and individual restaurants will be able to afford similar counseling because there’s “a ton of capital rushing into the space.” Mobile, textbased therapy companies will need customers. Talkspace is a $40,000 annual expense, but to Simons it’s invaluable. He says he’s had an employee die by suicide. “You can’t afford not to do it,” he says.

City Paper asked La Jambe Executive Chef D’Angelo Mobley about FRG’s latest move.

“That’s beautiful to hear they make something like that,” he says. “A lot of the guys who work in the back come from rough backgrounds.

Coming into such a volatile environment, they need it by the end of the shift. I could use it myself.”

From a business perspective, Simons thinks Talkspace will pay off. “What is your productivity loss based on mental health struggles of your employees?” he asks. “What’s your financial loss based on days of missed work? To raw capitalists, this is still an investment. It’s creating value, maybe not in a 30-day window, but over six months.”

Simons doesn’t see investing in benefits and raising pay as mutually exclusive. FRG’s purchasing power means it can pay much less for Talkspace than any individual could on their own. And, he says, FRG is simultaneously “driving up wages.” They say they pay their non-tipped hourly workers $16 to $20 per hour, for example. (FRG settled a $1.49 million class action lawsuit for labor violations in 2018.)

Another small restaurant group is bringing financial planning to its full-time and parttime employees at its five Cuba Libre locations, including one in Penn Quarter, starting this week. The new benefit grants workers access to Wealth Steps—an online wealth learning system—and counseling with financial advisor Olivia Allen. She specializes in supporting hospitality employees because she once was one.

“They work so hard for every dollar they make, if there’s a way to help them be more financially prepared we’d love to do that,” says Cuba Libre HR Director Jackie Klee.

Workers can learn about insurance and debt consolidation. Two managers going through significant life changes vetted it and recommended it to others, according to Klee. One is expecting a baby and another is sending a child off to college.

Employees pay nothing, nor does Cuba Libre. The restaurant’s CEO Barry Gutin met Allen through his work with a nonprofit that aids restaurant workers with children who fall on hard times. Allen subsequently volunteered to help. “The investment is from a time perspective,” Klee says. “[Allen] is donating her time and I’m the liaison on the inside.”

Time will reveal if Klee and Allen can keep up if hundreds of employees show interest, but the program demonstrates what can happen when owners leverage their personal networks to make their businesses better places to work.

Fast-growing local restaurant group KNEAD Hospitality + Design will roll out a “4Days@Work” initiative for midlevel managers as soon as one of its restaurants, such as

YOUNG & HUNGRY Succotash or Mi Vida, is fully staffed. The scheduling strategy asks them to work four 12-hour days in the restaurant and a fifth at home where they can complete administrative duties they weren’t able to finish on site.

Assistant general managers and sous-chefs will be eligible to participate. The goal, KNEAD cofounder Jason Berry says, is for staff to experience a taste of the “remote work lifestyle” and maybe even enjoy three days off.

KNEAD considers 4Days@Work a recruitment tool to “dislodge some great people working their tails off somewhere else” and a way to prevent managers from leaving with their institutional knowledge. “What happens when a regular guest comes in and doesn’t see someone they know?” Berry asks. “They’ll think, Why is someone sitting at my table?

New people didn’t know. All that goes away when you lose people.”

He believes in a formula: happy managers, happy staff, happy guests. “A happy guest returns more often,” Berry says. “Can I quantify those dollars? Probably not. Can I yearover-year look at sales increases? Sure.” Still, Berry was nervous approaching investors. He estimates the annual cost of adding two managers and a chef to make testing 4Days@Work possible is roughly $250,000. “One of our biggest investors, who I thought would be unhappy, said, ‘This sounds like a good idea,’” Berry says.

“He recognizes that the world is changing.”

A manager who works for a large restaurant group in D.C. heard Berry talking about 4Days@Work on the news. He has 22 years of experience in the industry and asked to remain anonymous because he’s not authorized to speak on behalf of his company. We’ll call him Geoff. “It’s kind of revolutionary,” he says.

“We’re expected to work five days. But it’s way more than 40 hours. Some restaurant groups expect you to work a sixth day if someone calls out. That’s untenable. A lot of places have lost key people because there’s no emphasis on work-life balance.”

Berry has been there. “I was a general manager before,” he says. “I worked all the time. I worked nights and weekends. I made it work because I didn’t have kids and I had an understanding partner. A lot of people have child care issues. They have lives. They want work to be part of life, not the focus.”

He hopes his approach wins him experienced professionals such as Geoff. “My whole life I’ve heard money isn’t the most important thing,” he says. “People quit people, not companies.”

Kapri Robinson, who ba r tends at Allegory and recently co-launched the Soul Palate Podcast, agrees to some extent. “We all want more money,” she says. “But understanding that other things also amount to wellness and wealth is very important. If I can have someone look at my finances or have someone invest in my mental health, that balances itself.

I’m one of those people where working is not always about the money. For me, it’s about how I am mentally. How I’m feeling physically. I can get more pay, but at the end of the day, what does more pay look like?”

A server at Bresca who’s changing jobs soon has a different take. “People don’t come to work for the love of a job or the [food and wine] knowledge you get,” Naderia Wynn says. She was part of a group of employees who quit jobs at Del Mar after penning a letter to owner Fabio Trabocchi demanding changes.

“I go to work to earn currency for goods and services. I don’t think employers should forget that. If you don’t have competitive pay to back the bells and whistles and perks you’re giving, then what’s the point?”

The small restaurants that make up the majority of the District’s dining scene have to get scrappy to upgrade their work culture and coax new employees through the door because they don’t have the purchasing power Simons

According to him, it’s working. “Ofelia, our kitchen manager, came to us as a prep and line cook and she’s now in charge of the kitchen,” Irabién says. Managing others, doing inventory, and creating recipes comes with a pay raise. “The people who have stepped up and said ‘I want to try this’ have taken strides.”

Robinson looks for employers like Irabién who value education. “Just some kind of investment to say, ‘I want you to grow to your best ability in this establishment,’” she says.

In addition to on-the-job training, that means covering tuition for courses, entry fees for competitions, and field trip costs. There’s something in it for the business. “Anything that helps you become more of an expert allows you to up that price.”

Free time is coveted too. Recognizing this,

“I worked all the time.

I worked nights and weekends. I made it work because I didn’t have kids and I had an understanding partner. A lot of people have child care issues. They have lives. They want work to be part of life, not the focus.”

describes and might not have a deep bench of investors like KNEAD, which has shown proof of concept many times over.

Muchas Gracias! chef a nd ow ner Christian Irabién offers professional development opportunities to his all-immigrant team of 11. He holds intermittent workshops on days the restaurant is closed to discuss obstacles to growth and to set goals. “Whether a lack of resources, time, or staff, there’s never time for any of that,” he says. “Even the best places, you get in there and it’s day two and you’re in the shit and you’re taking a section or you’re on the line.”

Irabién is trying to formalize his trainings on leadership, communication, and other soft skills. He hopes other restaurants can replicate his “Hospitality Humans” curriculum. “Just because it was hard for me doesn’t mean it has to be hard for everyone else,” he says. “Maybe we can pave the way for an easier upbringing of young staff.”

Bammy’s co-owners Chris Morgan and Gerald Addison close their restaurant on Mondays and Tuesdays to give employees two consecutive days off. “Even in a day and age where staffing is tight and I’d love to staff people edge-to-edge to make sure the restaurant stays afloat, we are both of the mind that time off is by far one of the most important things in the industry,” Morgan says.

Queen’s English takes a similar approach by closing on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The restaurant pulled off something special in August: Co-owners Sarah Thompson and Chef Henji Cheung closed for the month after paying their dozen employees in advance. “Go to the beach, hang out, and don’t worry about rent and bills,” Thompson says. “That’s what people get when they have a career and it shouldn’t be different because they’re selling food instead of bonds.”

Thompson cut salaried employees their usual checks and paid hourly workers $18 an

hour for four simulated 40-hour work weeks.

“Henji showed me how much money it would be, but after the year and a half we’ve had, we needed to do it,” she says. Staff retention is the goal. “I don’t want to have a revolving door.

I want to work with them for the rest of the lease,” Thompson says. “It takes some sacrifices, but it’s taxing to go through so many personalities and training.”

Alain Daniel has 30 years of experience in the industry and has been serving at Queen’s English for almost four months. He calls the owners “the nicest most genuine people” he’s ever worked for by far. “A restaurant can offer many benefits,” he says. “The best one is actually caring for your employees. If the owners care about their employees’ well-being, like this one, it should be easy to tell.”

He visited Daytona Beach, Florida, in August. “It was my first paid vacation while waiting tables,” he says. “I haven’t had a vacation in years really.” He thinks his industry colleagues would be satisfied with a month off, even if they weren’t compensated. Forced closures alleviate a common problem in understaffed restaurants where employees can’t take the vacation they were promised.

Daniel, Wynn, Robinson, Geoff, and Mobley tell City Paper that health insurance is among the benefits they seek and value most. D.C.’s smaller restaurants don’t always employ enough people to trigger benefit offerings. (Employers who are required to offer benefits but don’t face a tax penalty.) Hospitality workers often go without coverage or pay out of pocket.

This and other factors stop local residents from staying in the industry later in life. “As we are getting older and some of us are starting families, a lot of restaurants still don’t offer any sort of parental leave,” Geoff says. “That’s a big one people are considering now.”

Geoff echoes others in saying the biggest challenge for owners and managers is keeping talent. “The way you do it is by having a strong culture in your restaurant,” he says. “You hold onto your hourlies by being in the trenches with them. Show them you’re going to do everything you’re telling them to do.”

Mobley agrees. “Some of the roles in restaurants aren’t the most glitzy jobs,” he says. “You have to put yourself in some people’s shoes to understand their grievances.” The owner of La Jambe, Anastasia Mori, sets an example Mobley hopes others emulate. “She comes in and works like she’s the dishwasher. She washes dishes, folds towels, cleans silverware, whatever needs to get done,” Mobley says. “We recognize that and we don’t let her do anything because we know she’s willing.”

The chef is pleased angry kitchens are becoming things of the past. “You don’t have to be an asshole for people to get their jobs done,” he says. “If people have healthier work environments, you will have less callouts and walkouts.

Show someone how to do something and if they don’t get it show them again.”

Not being an asshole is free.

washingtoncitypaper.com october 8, 2021 13

ARTS

Drawing Closer

Erika Berg

One Afghan family is trying visual storytelling to help process their intense emotions around the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

Painting by Sudaba

By Ambar Castillo @AmbaReports In the weeks leading up to Aug. 15, as tension mounted before the deadline for the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan and images poured into social media streams and broadcast channels worldwide, Sudaba and her 4-year-old son’s eyes were fixed on a TV screen showing a series of films they frequently watch—the Avengers movies. The Marvel universe felt like the safest place for her child, away from the headlines and into a fantasy judgment day where energy blasts and empathy could save the world.

Whenever something went wrong in Afghanistan, Sudaba says, her goal was to distract her son from the news. He was too young to digest the situation and she didn’t want it to affect him. It wasn’t tough to keep her son busy with the Avengers. But when the crisis abroad accelerated, Sudaba couldn’t shield him from the reactions of family members, with whom she had migrated from a rural province in western Afghanistan to Northern Virginia two years earlier.

“He’s like, ‘I’m the Spider-Man, and you’re the Iron Man, and the evil guy is the Taliban,’” Sudaba recalls. “So I’m like, ‘Oh my God, he’s listening.’ ” The Taliban was infiltrating major urban

areas in Afghanistan then. In February 2020, the Trump administration promised to withdraw all U.S. troops by May of this year; in return, the Taliban promised a cease-fire and to share power. Although the Biden administration pushed that date back to Aug. 31, the Taliban had been claiming territory for 18 months. The Trump deal had emboldened them: With an end date in sight for U.S. aid to Afghan security forces, the Taliban had hustled to expand their reach in rural provinces before graduating to more heavily guarded cities.

This came at a time when many Afghan soldiers and police in rural areas, far from the Kabul-based rulers, had already gone months without pay, food, or proper training. Some were replacements during a chronic turnover of Afghan fighters and not adequately prepared for battle. Many were demoralized by both the U.S.’s imminent departure and Afghan government corruption. Seeing a choice between survival and fighting in a war set to end soon, they had abandoned their posts or surrendered to the Taliban, which promised amnesty to troops and their families.

Although the Western media focuses disproportionately on repression of women’s rights, men have also faced heightened consequences since the Taliban takeover,

14 october 8, 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

according to Tazreena Sajjad, Ph.D., senior professorial lecturer in the Global Governance, Politics, and Security program at American University. “Men have also endured f loggings and beheadings, they have been publicly humiliated, they have been beaten,” she says. Sajjad cites the beard-growing rule, regulations for how men can express their gender identity or advocate for women or LGBTQ rights, and retaliation against men who have served with Afghan forces or government as reasons that men can be targets of violence, assassination, and socioeconomic violence.

“There’s a lot of Orientalist—and some would persuasively argue, racist and certainly patronizing—attitudes toward women and men from the Global South,” says Sajjad, who has been a consultant for Afghan global rights organizations. Western nations have historically seen themselves as protectors and saviors for Brown women from Brown men, she notes. This potential liberation of women from the Global South was used to justify both the U.S. and Soviet invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and 1979, respectively.

The takeover of Kabul on Aug. 15 was the headline event. Sudaba had just lulled her infant to sleep when she saw the images of the Taliban posing for photos in the Arg, the presidential palace in Afghanistan, and the people swarming the tarmac at Kabul Airport on social media. When her son found his mother sobbing, her face illuminated by images of their homeland, he knew what to do.

“Afghanistan was handed over to the Taliban basically, and ... I couldn’t hold my tears and I started crying,” she says. “He came and said, ‘Mommy, it’s Spider-Man. I can go and catch the Taliban. Everything will be fine.’” His childlike hope and reassurance did help, though not in the way he intended.

“He looks at things like this, like war, like, Yeah, there will be something like a good side that would come and cover all these bad things that have been going on,” says Sudaba. “[Children] have this hope alive in them, and sometimes I wish it was that easy.”

One week later, she thought of her son’s worldview during a bout of painter’s block.

Her younger sister, Mahsa, had pushed the family to participate in a visual storytelling workshop; they needed to do something other than grieve. The workshops were the brainchild of Erika Berg, who has worked with refugees in and outside the D.C. area for two decades. Her workshops are designed to give refugees, who are forced into their situation and migration, the agency to tell the story of their relationship to the crisis back home.

Paintings that emerge from workshops are also meant to complicate the Western narrative around refugees and migrants, particularly Black and Brown bodies, which Sajjad sees as a dangerous road that needs to change: “Without that, we don’t understand the full experience of what displacement is like,” Sajjad says.

Berg had been holding workshops with ot her ref ugee commu nit ies, and had

contacted a local resettlement agency last year to inquire about what mental health services were available for Afghan refugees.

Someone at the agency had connected Berg to a young woman who happened to be from Afghanistan and was in medical school: Mahsa.

When the A fghan crisis unfolded in August, Berg reconnected with Mahsa, who consulted with Berg on the workshop prompts and translated the questions and instructions for her father, who didn’t understand English. Then she recruited participants who would be willing to face their feelings. Berg had reserved a room at the City of Fairfax Regional Library where Sudaba, Mahsa, their mother Hassina, their father, and friends were given art supplies and got to work.

Sudaba’s paper soon spread with familiar masses of green and sea blue, plus pigments of bright blue and red. She painted the shape people see when they google-image a map of Afghanistan, she says, and inserted SpiderMan, suspended in a blue space, catching the bearded, turbaned Taliban with his web and “dragging down the darkness.” She also painted mud brown, representing all the news that was consuming her family, and her son playing with a Spider-Man toy in another blue safe space. “Still, in this chaos, he has this calm and hopeful mind,” she says.

The empty spaces in the painting are also revealing: She’d put down watercolor blue to represent Facebook and other social media, she says, but it faded away. Her fear of surveillance via social media remained. Her friends, fearing for their lives, had already changed their names on social media, and she was communicating with them mostly through calls and voice memos.

The Taliban is using social media platforms in violation of Facebook and YouTube’s explicit bans on the group and the social media giants’ policies against hateful conduct and violent organizations. The day of the takeover, a Taliban leader told Al Jazeera that it had sent WhatsApp messages to Kabul residents en masse declaring, “We are in charge of security for Kabul.”

“It breaks me every time,” she says, describing the plight of her cousin in Afghanistan, who had one semester of medical school left when the Taliban took over and restricted educational opportunities for girls and women. After vowing it would rule differently this time, the group swiftly curbed freedoms for both genders but girls and women in particular. Before Afghan schools reopened in mid-September, the Taliban announced that women could study at universities, just not alongside men, and would adhere to a new dress code. But as universities don’t have the resources for separate classes, many criticized the rule as performative. Meanwhile, the Taliban banned girls between 13 and 18 from secondary school education, keeping further generations from academic and career possibilities. The Taliban also told professional women to stay home, citing safety concerns. It is unclear whether women will

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Painting by Hassina Erika Berg

be able to return to work and universities.

The last time the Taliban curtailed women’s rights, Hassina witnessed and helped mobilize resistance such as underground schools for girls who couldn’t attend, women educators who couldn’t teach, and male teachers who were banned for being too liberal for the Taliban curriculum. This time, she says, Afghan women are disillusioned about having earned advanced degrees only to now be unable to practice in their fields.

“After [20] years, they are at home with their master’s, with their bachelor’s, and now again this situation is repeating for their children,” Hassina says.

During the second visual storytelling workshop she attended, this time co-hosted

by Berg and another Afghan woman on Sept.

12, Hassina thought of cages. Her vision on paper featured three cages lined up vertically inside the 2D sphere on her page. The cages face a figure shaped like the moon with the glow of the sun and “the figure of a woman, because women are not involved in war,” which Hassina refers to as simply “the light.” The bottom two cages are occupied by children of the adults outside the enclosures shoving the cages, which won’t open.

One adult depicted in the drawing is her sister-in-law, a former high school teacher, pushing against the cage that holds her three daughters and son: “She says that just I have to save the life of my children,” Hassina explains, “and they should go out—they are in cages and there is another side of the world [where] some people are trying to welcome them and trying to save their life.”

The other parent is her brother-in-law, a physician in Afghanistan. He’s drawn pushing so hard that the cage his daughters inhabit is soaked with blood from his hand. Like many other Afghans outside Kabul and in rural provinces with heavily guarded checkpoints, he wasn’t able to get past Taliban forces to the airport and evacuate by the Aug. 15 deadline or flee on foot to Iran or Pakistan. During a recent conversation, she says he told her, “I will bear the situation—I don’t care if I be killed by someone, but I am concerned about my daughters’ future. And I am trying my best to get them out of the country.”

The image of her brother-in-law pushing his three daughters’ cage open to the point of pain and bloodshed stayed with her while painting: “He’s trying to push them to go but the cage door is closed and they are inside …

They are struggling,” Hassina says. “Because he is a man, he is not in a cage, [but] the daughters are in a cage.”

In Hassina’s painting, the door to the top cage is ajar, and three girls or young women take f light in a f lurry of violet and pink, their dark hair waving behind them toward the light. “They are the students that ... got access to the light because they live in the capital of Afghanistan,” she explains. “They could get access to the airport, they could get access to airplane—even with so much difficulties … But what happened about the provinces that they don’t have any access?”

Erika Berg

ARTS

Painting by Mahsa Hassina was one of the young women who ultimately fled the cage after the last period of Taliban rule in the 1990s. Since then, she has been an advocate and activist in her community. In the D.C. area, where she moved two years ago, she recently helped coordinate protests in support for Afghans facing the crisis abroad.

Hassina’s other daughter, Mahsa, helped organize a quieter type of resistance when she partnered with Berg to run the first workshop after the Taliban takeover. “I’m doing these visual storytelling workshops with

16 october 8, 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

especially those who are kind of serving as a bridge within the family, trying to help their parents or their grandparents to dip their toe in the shallow end of American society and feel safe,” says Berg.

During the second storytelling workshop, Mahsa at last felt free to put her emotions to paint, as she wasn’t co-hosting the event and had had time to process the crisis. She wanted to show the two worlds in Afghanistan, she said: the one before and the one after Aug. 15. “In one day, everything turned upside down,” she says, showing the

sharply divided world in the two halves of her painting. For her, the easiest way to explain this shift is also the most personal: through her cousin from med school.

“I kind of find myself in her and her in myself because we’re on the same path,” she says. Mahsa and her cousin grew up together dreaming of the day when they would practice medicine. She describes her cousin, one year older, as smarter and more hardworking than her. They both received top marks in school and went on to med school. Even after Mahsa and her immediate family got a special visa to the U.S., their similarities remained: Mahsa specialized in neurology or neurosurgery; her cousin in heart surgery.

In Mahsa’s painting of Aug. 14 Afghanistan, there is lush grass and a tree—“like the trees and grass we have in Afghanistan … so natural, so organic,” she says—under a clear sky.

In her painting, thought bubbles illustrate a woman’s dreams of becoming a doctor and bringing the dream of the little boy in a wheelchair beside her to life; he wants to be able to walk and become a kite runner, Mahsa says, explaining the Afghan practice of running after drifting kites.

On the other side of Mahsa’s painting, the Taliban beats her cousin, and her dream, down. The girl, who is in chains, faces up and continues to struggle for that dream, but the dream bleeds and the tree burns.

“And you know, things are connected to each other,” Mahsa says. “So a dream is connected to another dream, a country is connected to another country. And when something happens in one side of the world, in a country, it doesn’t matter how little or how big it is, it impacts all the world. These people that are in Afghanistan, they are not different than any other people.”

When asked, Mahsa, Sudaba, and Hassina said the visual storytelling benefits offered temporary relief—the sessions didn’t suddenly melt away their stress or heal their trauma. But they were able to share the experience with family and friends, including Mahsa and Sudaba’s more reticent father and other friends, some of whom tend to keep their feelings bottled up. They were able to name some of their worries, fears, and hopes in pictures. They also had a vehicle to take action locally when they felt helpless.

“R ight now [t here is] a ver y, ver y severe mental health crisis,” Mahsa says.

“Sometimes ... I think, you know, what can I do about it? But here’s something [where] I’m like, ‘OK, the recent refugees [who] came, I can’t imagine the mental crisis they are [experiencing] right now. So what are the ways that I can help them?”

Before the workshop, Mahsa worried that asking attendees to paint their feelings might be triggering for them, but looking around at participants during and after the painting session told her it was worth it: “I realized that although it was a very emotional process, it brought us together and it was a safe space,” she says.

Mahsa asks that anyone able and willing to help her cousin seek refuge connect with her through City Paper.

CITY LIGHTS of the 1619 Project, as this year’s headliner. Hannah-Jones will discuss her new books, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story and The 1619 Project: Born on the Water (the latter was cowritten with Renée Watson); both should be released in November. “This event is needed now more than ever, as communities like ours across the country are having important conversations about equality, justice, and race,” Dodge writes in the release. Other authors to appear at this year’s event include Jake Tapper, Laura Lippman, Stacey Vanek Smith, Ram Devineni, and Amy Argetsinger.

Books in Bloom takes place Oct. 10 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., at Color Burst Park, 6000 Merriweather Dr., Columbia, MD. booksinbloommd.com. Free.

—Hannah Grieco

City Lights James Estrin / The New York Times

Books in Bloom

City Lights

an end to sleep Forget Nightmare on Elm Street. This year the nightmare has come to Cady’s Alley. Hidden in plain sight from most Georgetowngoers and residents, von ammon co has transformed from a stark art gallery into a terrifying—and terrifyingly campy—mini-golf course inspired by the Freddy franchise. While this is not the Detroit-based multimedia artist Tony Hope’s first showing at von ammon co, it is his first solo exhibit. Combining Hope’s classical training (he holds an MFA from Yale) and professional work (he was a scenographic artist for the Insane Clown Posse), an end to sleep follows the artist’s trajectory of drawing inspiration from sites of suburban family gatherings while simultaneously exploring the trauma, melancholy, and longing of the ’burbs. It plays on the campiness of the franchise as well as Nightmare’s dark subject matter—a murdered child-killer who hunts basically parentless teens in their dreams—but Hope also uses the exhibit to examine American youth, capitalism, and the concept of “reawakening.” The six-hole Putt-Putt course is playable, with golf balls and clubs available at the door. Each hole is a hyperrealist structure depicting a defining scene from the first five films (there are seven total, counting 1994’s New Nightmare and ignoring the 2010 remake), as well as a true-to-“life” depiction of the dream-stalking, teen-killing, burned boogeyman, Krueger himself. Lit entirely by blacklight with darkwave playing over the speakers, Hope’s exhibition feels like an off-kilter mini-golf course, one you might find in an old-school shopping mall, and the perfect setting for a ’80s-inspired scary movie. This exhibit would win over horror lovers at any time of the year, but it’s especially alluring during the month when we gleefully embrace all things frightening.

If you haven’t revisited the franchise recently, trust me, you’ll want to after this. As Taryn says, “Okay asshole, let’s dance.” an end to sleep runs through Oct. 31 at von ammon co, 3330 Cady’s Alley NW. Open until midnight on Halloween. vonammon.co. Free.

—Sarah Marloff Are you ready for an inspiring day of free author readings and literary fun? Then you’re in luck, because Books in Bloom is back on Oct. 10 with an in-person (and masked) festival, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones as the headliner. Returning to Columbia, Maryland, for its fifth year, this outdoor festival offers readings, panels, a pop-up bookstore from Busboys and Poets, and a wide variety of literary activities for children. Books in Bloom aims to be a progressive community event and, according to a press release, the 2021 festival will continue its activism through literature efforts by “encouraging open dialogue on themes of diversity, racism, inequality, and culture.” Executive Director of the Downtown Columbia Partnership Phillip Dodge says they’re “honored to welcome Dr. Nikole Hannah-Jones,” creator

City Lights

JusticeAid’s 2021 Fall Concert JusticeAid sees Mavis Staples and Amy Helm as natural coheadliners for the nonprofit’s latest initiative: reimagining public safety. In the aftermath of the racial reckoning and nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, JusticeAid is helping raise funds for

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the Neighborhood Defender Service’s Police Accountability/Community Empowerment Program, which advocates for Black and Brown communities facing over-policing.

PACE will receive 100 percent of proceeds from the Oct. 19 concert. Longtime human rights advocate, Staples is a musical legend. She also has a personal connection to her costar: She worked closely with Helm’s father, Levon Helm of the Band, in the 1970s and knew Amy growing up. With classics such as “Respect Yourself ” and “We Get By,” Staples will do what she does best: connect with an intergenerational audience. Helm, an Americana staple in her own right, will share more than a taste of her new album, What the Flood Leaves Behind. Both artists are also committed to change and police accountability. What’s been happening to people of color is not okay, explains Danny Melnick, a consultant for JusticeAid. “We know that it takes a lot of work and a lot of effort and a lot of energy from all sorts of different people to make this change.” He says JusticeAid is “shining a spotlight on these best-practice organizations” by saying, “We see you, we hear you and we’re going to help you.”

JusticeAid’s Fall Concert starts at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 19 at Lincoln Theatre, 1215 U St. NW. justiceaid.org. $35–$150.

—Ambar Castillo

City Lights

The Day After Though we’re nearing the two-year mark since the COVID-19 pandemic began, artists continue to address the dramatic effects of a changed world. Three such projects are viewable at the Korean Cultural Center Washington D.C.’s The Day After exhibit at Culture House gallery through Nov. 20.

Artists Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, Su Hyun Nam, and Jayoung Yoon deal with different responses to the pandemic, creating works that reflect on what has been lost and remembered during social distancing and lockdowns. In keeping with the remote experiences that have typified the past 18 months, all three artists exhibit digital media through single-channel videos. Kang focuses on the new ramifications of touch, the loss of physical contact, and our ability to retain connection in “Tenderhands” and “Proposition 1: Hands.” Similarly, Yoon’s work focuses on the strain the pandemic has placed on bodies. Her “Reflections in Mindfulness” features Yoon lying naked in the center of a dock on a placid pond, while “Dreaming of life” contains a skull sculpture knotted with her own hair.

Both suggest simultaneously grappling with fear and inner peace—through Yoon’s work, we get the feeling neither emotion is mutually exclusive. Nam’s digital landscapes also examine this tension. In “Metamorphosis” and “Woven Milieu,” the artist melds various urban images into distorted but beautiful representations of cities transformed by lockdowns. Though the works evoke a changed world, it’s the mixture of what is recognizable and what is not that gives it a dueling sense of comfort and discomfort. The Day After runs through Nov. 20 at Culture House, 700 Delaware Ave. SW. washingtondc.koreanculture.org. Free.

—Tristan Jung

DIVERSIONS SAVAGE LOVE I’m a cis woman. I had a quasi relationship with a man last year that only lasted a couple of months.

The sex was great, and sexting was always a big part of our connection. Since the breakup, we’ve fluctuated between staying in touch and radio silence, sometimes going months without speaking. During our periods of contact, though, sexting always makes a comeback. It’s hot until the frustration of not actually being able to have sex with him sets in. (We live in different countries now.) My issue is, if it weren’t for the sexting (which he really pushes), I don’t think he would talk with me about life in general. And there are other ways I feel this dynamic is detrimental to my post-breakup life. For example, he is really into cuckolding. He wants to hear about the dates I go on, the other men I have sex with, how they fucked me, etc. It’s fun to tease him and make him jealous by texting him, especially while I’m out with other men, but I wind up feeling like my attention is divided between him and whoever I’m with, sometimes to a point where I can’t come with others because of how distracted I am (by him) and how disconnected I feel (from them). —My Ex’s Sexy Sexts Are Getting Exhausting, Sorta

ers/debauchees—this perv thinks you should embrace the term “perv,” PERV, instead of trying to come up with something new. —DS

If you feel like your ex is just using you for sexts and you don’t enjoy being used like that, MESSAGES, stop sexting with your ex. Maybe you’ll hear from him again after the sexting stops—maybe he’ll reach out now and then just to catch up—but even if you never hear from him again, that could be for the best. I mean, if you have a hard time resisting his sext requests and sexting with him leaves you feeling frustrated (because you can’t fuck him) and prevents you from being in the moment (with the guys you are fucking), you should probably block his number.

But if you enjoy sexting with your ex—you did say it’s fun for you too—and you can reset your expectations to avoid disappointment (if you stop expecting more from him than just sexts), go ahead and sext with him. But don’t do it when you’re with someone else. Go out on dates, enjoy your dates, fuck your dates. And the next time you’re home alone and bored, MESSAGES, text your ex and tell him you’re out on a date. You’ll get all the same enjoyment out of making him jealous—and he’ll get all the same enjoyment of his cuckold fantasies—without you being distracted during your actual dates. —Dan Savage

If masturbating about your arrogant, unfunny, and perhaps incompetent surgeon (three followup surgeries?!?) hasn’t done the trick, maybe it’s time to try masturbating about something and/ or someone else? (Or, even better, maybe talk with a therapist about this?)

—DS

After many years of a fulfilling sex life, I’ve begun to embrace the perv side of my sexuality and couldn’t be happier! But I’m looking for a better term than “perv.” While accurate, that term seems to carry negative connotations. I’m looking for something that communicates the same thing while being sex positive. Any suggestions?

—Positively Exploring Rhetorical Variety

You recently told a healthy and active 72-yearold man practicing orgasm denial that “multiple studies have shown a link between frequent ejaculation and a lower incidence of prostate cancer.”

I’m a healthy and active 78-year-old man who began masturbating at age 10. I continue to masturbate as frequently as my body will allow, which is about every other day. Yet, I was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent a procedure that reamed out most of my prostate tissue. I am now back to masturbating, but not ejaculating. Still, a dry orgasm is better than no orgasm at all. So, studies may show one thing, but life can show you something completely different.

—Totally Wrong About That

I’ve always liked “perv,” an affectionate diminutive for “pervert,” and I consider it sex positive in the same spirit that “slut,” having been reclaimed, is considered sex positive by people who cheerfully and defiantly self-identify as sluts. And since pretty much any word that communicates the same thing “perv” does in one catchy/percussive syllable has similarly negative connotations—“deev” for deviant, “dej” for degenerate, “debbies” for debauch-

18 october 8, 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com

Where can I buy e-stim devices and urethral electrode sounds in the Detroit area?

—Sounding You Out You’ll find a nice selection of e-stim devices and urethral sounds—electrode and otherwise—at all Crowley’s Department Store locations in the greater Detroit area.

—DS You’ve said that one way to get over a crush is to masturbate about it until it passes. I’m going on 2.5 years. I had surgery in 2019, and I’m still obsessed with my surgeon. I think it’s trauma bonding, as I had complications and had to have three followup surgeries, plus a ton of office visits. I know logically that he’s arrogant, overly impressed with his own sense of humor, and just generally not my type. I haven’t seen him in a year, but I still think about him all the time. Can you help?

—Can’t Understand This

If you feel like your ex is just using you for sexts and you don’t enjoy being used like that, MESSAGES, stop sexting with your ex.

I’m sorry to hear about your prostate issues, TWAT, and I’m glad to hear you’re able to enjoy the orgasms you’re still capable of having. But

I gotta say—for the record—that I didn’t claim frequent ejaculation prevents prostate cancer.

I cited studies showing a lower incidence of prostate cancer in men who masturbate regularly. “Lower incidence” ≠ “zero incidence.”

You drew the short straw here, TWAT, and I’m sorry about that. But I can’t imagine you spent all those years masturbating solely for your prostate’s sake, TWAT, which means you still got something out of all those wet orgasms.

It’s the same thing you’re getting out of the dry orgasms you’re enjoying now: pleasure. —DS After reading the question asked by “The System Called Reciprocity,” the lesbian who wanted a man to do chores around the house in exchange for hand jobs or blow jobs, I had to write in. I’m not sure where she’s located, but if she’s on the South Side of Chicago, I would be down for some light housework! Feel free to connect me to any of your readers for a deal like this!

—Helping Out The Dykes And Making Nice I don’t know where TSCR lives either, HOTDAMN, but even if I knew where she was, I’m not allowed to put my readers in touch with each other. (My lawyer has forbidden me to play matchmaker.) That said, HOTDAMN, there’s nothing I can do to prevent my readers from reaching out to each other in the comments.

—DS So long as ALPHA—the straight guy who likes to demean and degrade thicc gay boys he finds on Grindr—is upfront with these guys and tells them he’s straight and tells them he has no intention of ever hooking up with them IRL, then what he’s doing is okay, I guess. But if he’s not disclosing all those facts about himself, Dan, then he’s pretending to be something he’s not and that is not okay! Straight guys leading gay guys on for attention is repulsive.

We’ve got enough problems out there without you giving straight guys permission to fuck with our heads!

—Too Pissed For Acronyms Grindr and other hookup apps are full of guys leading each other on—sometimes intentionally (not interested in hooking up IRL), sometimes unintentionally (circumstances and/or guy trouble can derail a wanted hookup). Everyone who gets on Grindr knows or soon realizes that not every chat or exchange of pics leads to sex. Like author and Grindr user Alexander Cheves said in that column: “We all enter Grindr chats willingly, and we should do so knowing that anyone we talk to may have no plans of following through with their promises to meet.”

And in ALPHA’s case, I don’t think he’s leading anyone on. He seeks out gay guys who fantasize about masculine, domineering, and unavailable straight jocks. He may be fucking with some guys’ heads, TPFA, but he’s only fucking with the heads of guys who get off on having their heads fucked with in exactly this way and by exactly his type. I mean, who better to fulfill the hot unavailable straight jock fantasy than the hot unavailable straight jock? —DS Email your Savage Love questions to mail@ savagelove.net.

CLASSIFIEDS Legal NOTICE OF INTENT TO ENTER A SOLE SOURCE CONTRACT: Kingsman Academy Public Charter School intends to enter into a sole source contract with RubiRides for Student Door-to-Door Transportation Services for approximately $75,000 the upcoming school year. For further information regarding this notice contact rfp@kingsmanacademy.org no later than October 20, 2021.

MUNDO VERDE PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS Knowledge Management System MVPCS is seeking proposals for a Robust content management system with architected taxonomy and nomenclature to ensure content retrieval, translation, distribution, and integration with existing IT and communications platforms. For RFP details, please contact Jonathan J Halperin jhalperin@ mundoverdepcs.org.

Note that the contract may not be effective until reviewed and approved by the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board.

SUPERIOR COURT OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA PROBATE DIVISION 2021 ADM 000710 Name of Decedent, Carol Elizabeth Geisler. Name and Adress of Attorney, James F. Warren, Esq., 3331 Resevoir Road NW, Washington, DC 20007.

Notice of Appointment, Notice to Creditors and Notice to Unknown Heirs, Sarah Adrian Geisler, whose address is 1651 34th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20007, was appointed Personal Representative of the estate of Carol Elizabeth Geisler who died on September 15, 2020, without a Will and will serve without Court Supervision. All unknown heirs and heirs whose whereabouts are unknown shall enter their appearance in this proceeding. Objections to such appointment shall be filed with the Register of Wills, D.C., 515 5th Street, N.W., Building A, 3rd Floor, Washington, D.C. 20001, on or before 2/19/2022. Claims against the decedent shall be presented to the undersigned with a copy to the Register of Wills or to the Register of Wills with a copy to the undersigned, on or before 2/19/2022, or be forever barred. Persons believed to be heirs or legatees of the decedent who do not receive a copy of this notice by mail within 25

days of its publication shall so inform the Register of Wills, including name, address and relationship.

Date of first publication: 8/19/2021 Name of Newspaper and/or periodical: Washington City Paper/ Daily Washington Law Reporter. Name of Personal Representative: Sarah Adrian Geisler TRUE TEST copy Nicole Stevens Acting Register of Wills Pub Dates: August 19, September 16, October 7.

Housing

GOLDEN RULE PLAZA SENIOR HOUSING 62 & OVER 1050 New Jersey Ave, NW Washington DC 20001 Phone: 202-962-0055 Affordable Housing, 50% and 60% Set-Aside All Vouchers Accepted Free Application Fee with this AD

Employment SUBCONTRACTING OPPORTUNITY FOR CERTIFIED DBES/WBES: FORT MYER CONSTRUCTION, is submitting their bid for DC Water & Sewer Authority (DC Water) Solicitation Small Diameter Water Main Replacement – 15B and is interested in receiving pricing from subcontractors (specifically DBE/WBEs).

This project consists of the installation of approx. 60’ of 3” DIP, 68’ of 6” DIP, 4057’ of 8” DIP, and 16’ of 12” DIP, valve casings & thrust restraints, water service lines, gate valves, fire hydrants, flexible pavement, PCC pavement, site concrete work and landscaping. Requesting Quotes By: 11/4/21. To request additional information, email estimating@fortmyer.com or call 202-636-9535 ext. 2823.

LEGAL ADVISOR, TRADE & INVESTMENT LAW AT CAMPAIGN FOR TOBACCO FREE KIDS (CTFK).

Provide tech assist. to low+mid-income countries in drafting & enacting strong tobacco control laws to reduce exposure to claims of int’l trade & investment rule violations & defending those laws against int’l & dom legal challenges. Monitor & report on trade devt’s relevant to pub health & tobacco control. Track dev’t & implement’n of int’l trade agreements & make recs to CTFK’s dom. & int’l partners re their impact on tobacco control policy & legislation. ID & support a cohort of in-country trade lawyers facing trade-

related threats to their tobacco control policies or laws. Review & make recs re: applications for legal & financial assistance submitted by low+midincome countries. Req’d: JD (or for equiv) + 3 yrs exp as a public health lawyer & 3 yrs exp advising on int’ trade & investment law & drafting tobacco control legislation +/or regulations. All exp may be concurrent. Job is based in DC w/ occasional int’l travel req’d. Email resume & cov ltr to driddick@ tobaccofreekids.org with Subject: LA-TIL Job. MCDOOGALS NIGHTCLUB seeking female dancers Want to have fun while earning Big $$$ Text 443-540-6119

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DONATE YOUR CAR TO KIDS. Your donation helps fund the search for missing children. Accepting Trucks, Motorcycles & RV’s , too! Fast Free Pickup – Running or Not 24 Hour Response - Maximum Tax Donation – Call 877-266-0681 CASH FOR CARS! We buy all cars! Junk, high-end, totaled – it doesn’t matter! Get free towing and same day cash! NEWER MODELS too! Call 866535-9689

Community MARCH FOR THE ARTS! Who Let the Villains out?

To support marchfordesa. flipcause.com ellingtonschool.com Join us for a frightfully fun day of petrifying performances, terrifying treats, ghoulish games, and a manic march through Georgetown haunted by... I mean hosted by your favorite movie villains! Play croquet with the Queen of Hearts, jump on a moonbounce with Starro or eat delectable treats with Hannibal. Experience the shock of your life....or show of your life at 10:30 or 11:30. All proceeds support the Duke Ellington School of the Arts Theatre Department. Come play with us on October 23 at 10-1. We can’t wait to eat you ... I mean greet you!

LOOKING FOR INDIVIDUALS to discuss Fritz Lang and other classic black and white films and TV series.

Contact Stevenstvn9@ aol.com LOOKING FOR INDIVIDUALS to discuss American foreign policy. Contact Stevenstvn9@aol.com.

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What’s your What’s #City your Paper #City Story?

Paper Story?

Visit washington citypaper.com/ wcp40 or use the #CityPaperStory Visit washington hashtag on social citypaper.com/ media wcp40 to orsubmit use the your story! #CityPaperStory hashtag on social media to submit your story!

ISCHYRA SOMA FITNESS Comes to Mazza Galleria, Sept. 2021! Fitness for YOU!!

RESULTS WILL BE REVEALED ON OCTOBER 21ST! washingtoncitypaper.com october 8, 2021 19

DIVERSIONS CROSSWORD

JUST STOP Brendan Emmett Quigley

Across 1. Moog knobs 6. Christie’s opening 9. Reese’s Pieces Pancakes franchise 13. Thanksgiving dinner guest, maybe 14. Programmer’s job 15. Shin-hiding skirt 16. 2014 Ava DuVernay historical drama 17. It’s got all the answers 18. Like a mystery man 19. Device that lets you safely shrink pictures?

22. What a dump!

23. “My bad,” in texts 24. Singer Yearwood with a cooking show 27. Org. with an Air Quality Report 28. “Hungry Like the ___” 30. Element #50 31. Program for women in labor?

35. Department 36. Bird with an S-curved neck

37. Go wrong 38. Wistia rival 39. Things eschewed for casual Friday 40. Young smoked herring?

42. ___ Marie (WWE Raw star) 43. Raging anger 44. See 31 down 45. Aegean island 47. Final moment 48. Shaking problem 51. Periodical for hillbilly dads?

55. Forest deity 57. Iowa State city 58. China name 59. “Talk L8R” 60. Loch Ness fisherman 61. Speechify 62. Fail to follow 63. It sometimes goes against the grain 64. Exclaimed surprise and delight

Down 1. Othello pieces 2. Doing nothing 3. Bronze or steel 4. Genie’s home

a new employee badge 26. Qualifying phrase with a “/” 27. Squeezes (out) 28. ___ Parker (glasses company) 29. Grand Ole stage 31. With 44 across, big name in vodka 32. “You got me” 33. Outmatched opponent 34. Settings symbol 35. Erase, as a drive 38. Fiery curry choice 40. Card that’ll get you around town 41. Gorilla in video games 43. Dandy dude 46. Live-in help 47. Polo goal?

48. Black Canary’s alter ego, ___ Lance 49. Government bond 50. Class that covers congress 52. Song accompanied with popular hand gestures 53. “Buddy! I want some Fancy Feast!”

54. One in 100 55. Company that does arrangements 56. Polished off

5. Kiss passionately 6. Sci-fi villains that live in a cube 7. “Dat’s cool” 8. Drake’s “Thank Me Later,” e.g.

9. China name 10. Evidence of paying at the door 11. Can opener brand 12. Lock screen number 14. Manhattan sch.

20. Supreme Leader’s land 21. Shepherd’s cry 25. One getting

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Dear Readers of Washington City Paper : Now, more than ever, we care how you feel. Really, we do.

We asked for your favorite haunts, your favorite handyman, your favorite vegetarian joint, your favorite bike shop, and, of course, the things that got you through the pandemic. Let’s celebrate D.C. Let’s define what we love most about living here, in good times and bad. Thank you for voting.

We hope that you will join us in celebrating these favorite neighborhood businesses, places, and people that make our city feel like home. And we hope that you continue reading us as we celebrate 40 years of local stories in our 40th anniversary year!

WINNERS ANNOUNCED Thursday, October 21