Yummy food

One of the things I got from Trim last week, besides a haircut, was a restaurant recommendation: New Orleans Cafe, 2400 block of 18th. Tonight I met J up there to check it out. The dish I chose was the chicken jambalaya, spicy and delicious. For desert we had beignets (tasting not unlike the funnel cakes that are a mandatory part of any visit to the Delmarva shore).

Besides the food being delicious, the place is comfortable and totally devoid of pretense. The guy taking your order and bringing you the food is, I believe, the owner. And a Sunday night was the perfect time to go, just a handful of hungry locals trickling through as the evening wound on.

I leave you with this mashup, a horrifying mix of the Scissor Sisters, Beatles, Aretha Franklin, and George Michael. Some things were just not meant to be! No One Takes Your Freedom

Saturday

Went outside my usual orbit yesterday to an excellent party up in Silver Spring, in one of those huge apartment complexes up by East-West where everybody in this city has lived or knows someone who has lived at one time or another. The theme was German, and somebody went all-out and brought a Berlin Wall, made of rice krispies, with Gummy Bears representing people on both sides (but the Gummy Bears on the east side were all red.) The wall even had food-colored graffiti on it. I'm glad I got there in time to see it before it was torn down, I mean, eaten.

Then I headed in completely the opposite direction, to the Rock & Roll Hotel for Strangeways, a Smiths/Morrissey night put on by DJs Medusa an Strange. It was excellent, with a good crowd, and (of course) great music. I'm very much looking forward to their all-Bowie night at the same venue in January.

On the topic of R&R Hotel, I'm not used to the H Street NE Corridor being a destination, and the geography of that area is confusing. I think it's more so because Florida Avenue, which meanders through the city like a snake, is one of the main arteries down there, and if you're trying to orient yourself by a winding street like that, you're automatically in trouble. So to get there, I kind of felt my way across town, rather than knowing exactly where I was going -- down 16th, left on Irving, which I took all the way over to Park Place NW, where I took a right down to Michigan Avenue, which I followed past McMillan Reservoir and Children's Hospital over to North Capitol St. It's always been striking to see the Capitol all lit at night from way uptown in an area which is still a ghost town late at night. North Cap led me right to Florida, which took me over past Gallaudet to 11th and down to H NE. Worked out pretty well.

The Wal-Mart of Nightclubs

So I learned today that House of Blues, a national chain of clubs owned by Clear Channel, wants to build a huge club in DC. It would compete directly with home-grown venues like the 930 and the Black Cat, which, while not perfect, are our own. This is not good.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/29/AR2006112901532.html

One Tale From Urban Bohemia

So around 9pm tonight, I felt a gnawing hunger and suddenly regretted not taking my aunt up on her offer to load me down with leftovers after the Thanksgiving lunch. I decided to go out, out into the cool city night, out onto DC's rain-slicked, empty streets. I marveled at the lack of traffic and the ample parking spaces, the lack of all but a few shadowy figures moving between the street lamps, and wondered if that is what DC was like before there were so many people.

My objective was simple: find a place that was open, and get a quick bite to eat, and then come home and watch "The Great Escape." I walked to Chipotle first. A chain restaurant. Gotta be open on Thanksgiving, right? No such luck... Connecticut Avenue was as empty as the back streets I'd just walked through, and Chipotle was dark. I turned around, and tripped over a pair of empty shoes that were just sitting on the sidewalk, and wondered if this was an omen. On the other side of the otherwise empty street, a procession of 6 or 7 people in long coats were walking. Where were they going?

I decided to try Alberto's, which I'd been thinking about since last night. A slice would do me some good. Walked over to 20th and P. Dark. The Subway, upstairs, dark. Everything dark.

At this point I knew I had no other choice. I walked back up 20th, back toward the Childe Harold. The Childe wouldn't let me down. Sure enough, it was open and advertising a "Thanskgiving special." Last thing I wanted was Thanksgiving food, but I figured I'd have a pint and something off the regular menu.

As I walked in, the Redskins were on the TV above the bar, and somebody had played a bunch of Grateful Dead songs on the jukebox. I'm not going to lie, I'm not a fan of either football or the Grateful Dead, but it seemed right for this place. There was something reassuring in the familiarity and timelessness of it all. As I sat down, the barmaid, a friendly Russian girl named Susha, began chatting like a long-lost friend, and let me know exactly what it felt like to be working on a holiday, and how I should have my burger cooked. I took her advice, and sure enough the burger came back perfect.

Meanwhile, the music had moved on to Wilson Pickett's "In The Midnight Hour." It brought back memories of the funnest gig I ever played, a New Year's Eve party up on Columbia Road, Michelle's place. Although everyone in the band knew each other, we had never played together in that configuration before, we'd never rehearsed. Al, who had put the whole thing together, called out the songs as we went along, and called out the chord changes, and we all either went along or improvised, and when we messed up, everyone was having too much fun to notice. At the stroke of midnight, the champagne flowed and we launched into that Pickett song. By the time we finished playing around two, we were all sweaty and exhausted and the pristine white guitar I'd borrowed from Kumar was splattered with blood because without even knowing it I'd torn apart my fingers on the steel strings. As a suitably sloppy ending to this chaotic evening, as people were starting to head home, or onto wherever, and the room was clearing out, we started to notice there was this drunk guy there that nobody seemed to know, and we all became certain we didn't know him when he peed in the corner of the living room in front of all of us. He was ejected after that.

Back to the Childe Harold, the Rolling Stones were on now -- Jumpin' Jack Flash followed by Sympathy for the Devil -- and Keith Richards' snarky guitar made me miss playing electric in a band. I noticed that a couple of guys had bought Susha a shot, which I hoped took the edge off having to work on Thanksgiving. It was hard to say no to another drink, but I decided it was time to go home, paid the tab, and walked out, into the cool misty evening.

WSC at Rock N Roll Hotel

Hallway Flyer
Originally uploaded by alex.DC.

So this weekend I decided to finally make my way down to H Street NE to check out Rock n Roll Hotel, and with it, Washington Social Club. I hadn't been there yet because the only sensible way to get there is by car, and who lives in DC to travel to clubs by car?

But anyway, the club turned out to be cool. Two floors, with bands and a dance floor on the first level, and on the second level a more chill space with couches, and separate rooms that initially appear to be like rooms off a hotel corner (thus the name). As I was watching the bands, it came over me that the place reminded me of the old 930 Club. Not sure whether it was the black-painted minimalist interior downstairs, the colored lights over a smallish stage, or just the spirit of an energetic club in an ancient building in a decayed neighborhood (as 930 F Street, NW used to be).

That feeling came over me even before I went upstairs and saw the corridor lined with flyers to old DC punk shows from the 1980s -- Grey Matter, Marginal Man, and many, many more. It reminded me of a similar corridor that ran behind the stage at d.c. space (rest in peace). So the Hotel, although being very much of the present time, also feels solidly as part of a continuum back to DC's rock-n-roll/punk past.

Anyway, on to the bands. I caught Stock Market Crash (funny name) opening for WSC. With Halloween nearing, the frontman told the crowd "we're in disguise -- as snotty British rockers." And actually, they did remind me of Oasis.

Washington Social Club put on a great show. They were all in costume, and the wackiness that is Halloween in DC (costumes in the audience included a Krispy Kreme girl with a knife through her head, and a bloodied tennis star, and the band was in costume as well) seemed to further energise an already energetic show. That energy showed no signs of dissipating when Liberation Dance Party kicked in right after their set, but I was getting hungry so I pointed my car up Florida Avenue, past the protesters at Gallaudet and back to the more familiar environs of Northwest.

On the way home, a dumpster hit my car, as if to punish me for breaking my never-drive-when-going-out rule. But it was only a scratch, and I'd have to say that for an infusion of good environment, music, and Halloween spirit, it was worth it.