A carnival of technology

Mr. Shea’s my daddy, but I couldn’t pass up that title.

I should first note that I find reading travelogues to be, in general, very boring. I doubt that this will be an exception. It’s also kind of long.

On Saturday, my 25th birthday, I decided to pack my bags and visit my nation’s capital. I’ve been to DC once before as part of a high school band thing, but I refuse to recognize the reality of any events from that time period, so this was my first time. There’s a lot of stuff to see there, so I thought I’d play the tourist for a few days and enjoy the fruits of my tax dollars as they’re spent on historical preservation and other neat stuff. I didn’t participate in any governmental processes or get a chance to tell W that I didn’t vote for him, but I thought it was a pretty cool trip.

I decided to take the train. Amtrak costs about the same as flying, but the trains are much roomier than planes, and they don’t give you any shit about what you bring. You could pack a case of coke and a set of Ginsu knives if you can get it to fit in the overhead rack. It has its own unique flaws, of course, but Amtrak seems to me like a better choice for anyone not in a hurry. The train from Atlanta arrived six hours late.

I decided to walk to the Amtrak station, in part because I was too lazy to figure out the Saturday schedule for the buses that travel up and down Peachtree, and on the way I was finally able to figure out the deal with that sculpture of the naked guys at Buford Highway. I’ve driven by that spot for seven years, and I never knew it was anything but a bunch of naked guys holding up a big sphere overlooking the highway. Apparently it’s the World Athletes Monument and has something to do with Prince Chuck. This information doesn’t clear anything up, but at least now it has a name. I suspect it’s some kind of leftover from the Olympics. I took some pictures.

Amtrak runs a route between New Orleans and New York, the Crescent, and the tracks in the southern section are owned by Norfolk Southern. Freight trains take priority over passenger trains, so waiting for freight to pass is the main source of delays. On Saturday a freight train broke down on the tracks, turning an 8pm departure time into 2am. A lot of people started to get mighty pissed as the hours marched on and the stated arrival time kept creeping forward, but I couldn’t help but find the whole situation hilarious. Maybe I’m just a bad person. I didn’t have anything better to do, so I just hung around Atlantic Station for a while and read a book in the train station once I exhausted my opportunities outside. The Amtrak station seems strangely designed to me. I know that Atlanta started as a rail hub, but I don’t know how long passenger rail or this particular station have been around. It looks old. Seating is a series of big wooden benches, lights are big round bulbs on top of poles, the walls are rough marble, and the ceiling is high and curved. It looks like a tiny parody of the way Grand Central Station is portrayed in old movies.

The armrests on the train all had little square rectangles welded onto the ends where ashtrays had obviously once been. I would think that Amtrak could get more business if they had kept smoking cars and advertised themselves as the smokers’ way to travel, but I guess that would be politically unpopular. Too bad for them. The seats were ok, roomy but not super comfortable. I could sit in them and sleep in them, but I envied the people in the sleeper cars. It was especially nice to be able to recline the seat without worrying about crushing the person behind me.

I arrived in DC around 2 pm and met up with Chris Schrimsher for second lunch. We originally planned to eat at a Texas-style barbecue place in Chinatown, but they’re closed Sundays, so we ate at some burger joint instead. He gave me some tips with regards to restaurants and museums, and I left to check in to my hotel. All of the hotels in DC that I could find online are hella expensive, so I ended up instead at an Econolodge just across the southern Maryland border that’s near a Metro station and has two-digit nightly rates. I had been advised to stick to more touristy areas, but I didn’t really care. I’ve seen poor people before. Getting off the green line near its terminus put me in the middle of a busy road with a view of a highway, a decaying strip mall and a restaurant that advertised fried fish and chitlin’s. It felt almost like home. The hotel is kind of a dump, and the bulletproof glass in the lobby probably isn’t a good sign, but the rooms are spacious, and my only real complaint was that they didn’t provide those little bottles of shampoo. A visit to CVS solved that problem.

I didn’t do much on the first night except drink. While in Chinatown with Chris I noticed a bar with fancy-looking ads for beer, so I stopped in there. The bartender didn’t ask me for ID, which made me feel kind of old. I don’t know if I’m finally starting to show my age, if he just didn’t care, or if he just figured that underage kids don’t generally come in and order a Belgian triple IPA. The guy who sold me a Harp at the Smithsonian festival on Wednesday asked for my “fake ID,” so I suspect it’s one of the latter two. Chinatown didn’t strike me as particularly Chinese. There were some chain stores with Mandarin under their names, but in all it seemed like it was only a few blocks and not very dense. Maybe I was missing something, but, from what I could see, I can get a more authentic Chinese experience on parts of Buford Highway. The bar I was mostly white guys in suits, but they had some nice beers, a couple dozen on tap and a hundred or so in bottles, sort of like a more reasonable realization of the Taco Mac idea that also wasn’t a chain. I had two beers: a Houblon Chouffe triple IPA and a Dogfish Head Indian brown. The Houblon, a Belgian, was a lot different from any other Belgian I’ve had. Whereas most Belgians use very little hops, if any, favoring a sweet, yeasty taste with some spicy overtones, this beer, though it had some of those overtones beneath the bitterness, had the living hell hopped out of it, making it something that tasted more like a dry IPA. It was pretty neat. The Dogfish was ok. It was basically like any other brown ale but with more hops. I was tempted to try some of the Dogfish beers on tap that I can’t legally buy in Georgia, the 120 minute IPA (21% ABV) or the Raison d’Extra (20% ABV), but the bartender said that these were basically high gravity novelties and suggested other things. The Houblon was served in a tulip glass, which is the first time I’ve actually seen one of those used in a bar. The head was fascinating. It refused to die, and it created concentric rings on the glass as the beer was drunk, leaving a malty glass tiger behind when it was finished.

I didn’t plan a single thing on this trip, and one of the more harrowing results of that was that I didn’t know how to feed my addiction in the morning. There are street vendors everywhere in downtown DC, but by the time I woke up and got moving, they had no coffee. After shambling through the streets and past endless government buildings, searching the walls and heartless skies for a fix, I ended up having some Starbucks. It was awful. I found a better place on Tuesday in the basement of the International Trade Center. I had to show my ID to enter, which seemed odd. They didn’t record it, and a Georgia driver’s license is a lot different from a building pass. Maybe they wanted to check that I’m a legal resident? Why would an International Trade Center care where I’m from? I’m going to be very upset if they wrote down my address when I wasn’t looking and i start getting international trade junk mail.

My first museum stop was the National Museum of the American Indian where, outside its doors, crews had set up to film Fat March. I guess that’s some kind of reality show? I don’t care. The museum wasn’t quite what I had expected. I anticipated a display of history, a retelling of the trials and injustices faced by this land’s native peoples as they were overrun by pale-skinned invaders, displaced, fought for a place in this new government or at least a chance to live their lives unmolested by it, but it was more about the trials they face retaining their culture in modern life, and that’s cool, too. The museum cafeteria served a variety of “native” dishes, the origins of which spanned the continent from beans and tacos to salmon and buffalo. I’ve had tacos, so I ended up eating at what I think was the Northwest section which, besides some grilled fish that didn’t catch my fancy, was serving a hominy and new potato salad and another cold dish made with eel and watercress. The potatoes were a bit too crunchy for my taste, but the meal was nice overall. I thought it was funny that they marked the eel as “vegetarian.”

My next stop found me at the National Postal Museum, located in the basement of a huge post office outside of Union Station. I’m not sure what this says about me, but I found this perhaps the most fascinating museum on the entire trip. It explored the various means of transporting the mail, the difficulties and solutions in rural free delivery routes, and some of the things faced by postal inspectors where the text on the walls assured me that, of the 200 billion pieces of mail processed every year, only a handful are bombs, so here’s what happens with the ones that are. I didn’t spend a lot of time in the philatelist’s wing, but I was there long enough to get the sense that it’s an incredibly tedious hobby. I think I’ll stick with unpopular comic books.

I really like the DC Metro. One thing they do that I wish MARTA would do is provide signs that give the line, number of cars, destination and timing of the next three trains to arrive on a particular track. Some of the trains didn’t look the greatest, but none of them smelled like urine. The only time a prerecorded voice was used was for the doors opening or closing, and that lady sounds a lot more mean than the MARTA voice lady.

My next museum was the National Museum of Natural History, at which I remembered how much I dislike tourists, even while being one. I don’t mind people traveling, but I don’t like obnoxiously loud children or people who don’t know how to act in crowds. Do they not have crowds where these people are from? Sure, it’s a new and alien place, but that’s not an excuse to stand around slack-jawed and cow-eyed while blocking everyone’s way. Most people were courteous, but a handful were just dumb, and some jabbering kid made me give up about halfway through the Natural History museum. I did see a pretty neat exhibit on the Sikh people, and I saw the Hope Diamond, which was smaller than I expected. I thought it would be the size of a softball. I don’t know where I got that idea. Maybe Duck Tales? I don’t know. It sure was a big pretty rock; I’ll give it that.

My last museum of the day was the west half of the National Gallery of Art, which, though still government run, is separate from the Smithsonian pantheon. The west is the half where they keep the older stuff, but I didn’t know there were two halves when I went in. I just saw “Art” and maybe “National” on a sign somewhere and barged eagerly into the quiet, air conditioned, free space. It was kind of boring. Saying this may make me some kind of postmodern liberal pretentious hippie jerk, but I like modern art. The older stuff just doesn’t resonate with me. I think I lack the background to appreciate or care about it, whereas the point of much of contemporary art is to to destroy that base and create entirely new experiences. Maybe I’m just a soulless Philistine. I spent a little bit wandering through the endless portraits and handful of Manets, got bored, and, since I still had some daylight left, headed over to the monuments and memorials.

I did not go up inside the Washington Monument. There’s some kind of ticket procedure involved, and they sell out pretty early, and I’ve been inside tall things before. Thanks to Google Earth, I can even imagine being inside a tall thing in DC without leaving home. The monument is very tall. Internet says that there’s an inscription in Welsh halfway up for some weird reason, which seems terrible. What an awful language. Anyway, the monument is very tall and kind of phallic and caused me to remember the hell out of Washington. I’m sure he was a great guy.

My next stop was the WWII memorial. This one’s only a couple years old or so, and I think it’s really well done. It’s not super depressing like the walls of casualties for Korea and Vietnam, but it still effectively conveys the message that hey guys we oughtta knock off this whole war thing while creating a beautiful, cool (yay fountains) space between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.

My last memorial stop for the day was Lincoln. I don’t have much to say about this. It’s a powerful place. It didn’t occur to me that I could slide down the railings until I saw the signs forbidding it.

For supper I decided to try that barbecue place Chris and I failed to eat at on Sunday. It’s Capital Q, located on H Street near 7th, and they weren’t half bad. They were out of pork when I got there, but the beef was pretty good. They do Texas-style barbecue, which to me means that the sauce goes too heavy on tomato, but it didn’t taste like ketchup like some I’ve had. Most importantly, they had sweet tea. DC is strange with regards to sweet tea in that they’re far enough south that no one looks at you funny if you ask for it but too far north for anyone to actually have it. I was on my third day with no tea at this point, and I was afraid that by the end of the trip I might end up looking for a Chick-fil-a and begging for asylum. Capital Q makes some nice tea. I wish their sauce was less tomatoey and more vinegary, but nobody’s perfect. They serve their meat platters over rice, which was the only sign of China I saw there excepting the employees.

On the second night at the hotel, no longer exhausted from the train ride, I was able to better examine my surroundings, and one of the things I found especially odd was the series of commercials accompanying an episode of Law & Order on TNT. There were a lot of commercials for hotels. I didn’t notice any of the sloppy cuts that usually occur when a cable company injects its own local ads into the stream provided by the station, so I assume these were chosen by TNT. My freshman English professor taught me to watch for the message in commercials, and this set confused me. Were these ads provided specifically for people in hotels, or does TNT think that anyone watching their channel around midnight is desperate for travel, suffering from the nausea of existence, in need of the novelty and freedom of a trip to somewhere else? There was also a commercial for ilovealpacas.com. If I were asked before then what an alpaca is, I probably would have guessed some kind of bird. They actually look more like llamas. Investing in an alpaca farm is good enough of an idea for it to be advertised on late night television. I think I’ll stick with booze and tobacco for my money.

I spent much of Tuesday in the other half of the National Gallery of Art where they keep the abstract, modern stuff. I loved it, though nothing stood out in my memory except that one artist who used straight lines and primary colors on a tilted canvas, some other guy who depicted the stations of the cross in sparse vertical lines, and one Pollock painting they had in the basement.

That afternoon I took a MARC train to Baltimore to visit Kate and Molly. After deciding that watching Live Free or Die Hard at midnight would be an excellent idea, we rented the first one at some pretentious video store (they had the first and third movies, but not the second, which I thought was funny. I also couldn’t find any Santo movies, which makes me wonder if they’re the right kind of pretentious, and I discovered that Duck You Sucker, the movie I bought a new DVD player for, has now seen a region 1 release.) and we then went to see number four in some theater near a mall. Things exploded and it was pretty good. There were a couple spots where it was pretty obvious that dialog was looped for a PG-13 rating (I think they should have gone with R since they shot it for R, but PG-13 means more money. I hope there’ll be an uncut DVD version), and some of the segments seemed a bit too Hackersesque, but in all I enjoyed it.

I started my final day with a visit to the Hirshhorn gallery, which is where the tour guide whose group I snuck behind in the National Gallery of Art suggested for the more unusual pieces. She described her museum’s collection as more “conservative.” There were certainly some interesting things there, and a lot of them tried to impart not just a visual experience. There was one piece, entitled “Levitz,” that was a series of metal chairs painted white accompanied by a sign informing the viewer that the artist encourages you to have a seat. My legs were pretty tired from days of walking and more recent hours of hiking up and down the streets of Washington and these new white-walled stairs and hallways, so I accepted the invitation. It was unsettling. The chairs were comfortable, but I had trouble getting past the fact that I was sitting on something that someone had labeled as art. I was inside the white tape square, a part of the work. Would someone challenge me? Would the guard kick me out? There was a nice view of the capitol. No one else sat down that I saw.

I thought some of the works with light were also impressive. One that stuck out was “Milk Run,” a series of colored gels and lights inside a very dim room that was pretty trippy. There was also some first rate crap, like one room with a projected loop and music that felt like a shitty rave, and the Takeshi Murata exhibit was like a bad Eyedrum performance coupled with a video that appeared to be a guy thrashing around in a gorilla suit with some stupid color filters and some severe MPEG compression. It sucked.

I enjoyed my time in DC. I didn’t try to see everything, and a lot of what I did see was pretty neat. There’s a lot of history, art and culture packed into a fairly small area. I thought it was pretty neat. The train back was only delayed by half an hour.

I took some photographs of Washington if you’re in to in that kind of thing.