A glaring omission from this warning is what may be done to minimize the air pollution itself. The injustice of that should upset us all. That the onus of action should be placed on the victim of the air pollution, who is asked to merely “deal with it” by cloistering itself and waiting it out, and nothing should be asked of a perpetrator of that pollution, motorists, is inexcusably inequitable, and indicative of the Washington, DC government’s depressing irresponsibility and obscene cow-towing to the gleefully nodding Metropolitan Washington governments in Maryland and Virginia.

Why are Metropolitan Washington’s drivers quite comfortable with DC’s punish-the-victim approach? Because they like their cars, and they like driving them in this city whose roads they’ve trashed while DC’s resident pedestrians and cyclists, who produce no such damage or pollution, have run for cover, have reconsidered going out for a jog because its health benefits are less evident in light of the particulate matter to be inhaled, have reconsidered bicycling to work, the shop, or the café, because those steel boxes seem all too often all too keen to run us over.

It’s time to bring congestion charging to Washington, DC. In fact, it has been for a terribly long time. But instead, in its infinite wisdom, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) is going to unveil some squeaky clean new posters in its metro stations this June 27. These posters will be affixed to its ticket dispensers. They will not be advertisements. They will not be poetry. They will not be happy faces. They will be fare schedules, bearing the remarkable difference from the outgoing posters of remarkably higher prices, 18 percent higher, actually, on average. This price hike will affect all hours, including peak hours.

While I don’t object to a price increase, per se, when it’s combined with no measure to discourage driving it effectively and counter-productively (relative to WMATA’s goal of reducing its horrendous budget shortfall) discourages the use of public transportation, and encourages driving, making the take-away message clear (unlike DC’s air which grows more opaque by the day): the status quo is here to stay, and we’ll be breathing in a vehicle-source noxious cocktail of particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and other pollutants for the foreseeable future, which will probably be farther than we can see in front of our faces, unless we take it upon ourselves to do what’s good for us and our 5-million-plus neighbors: drive less, walk or cycle more, and swallow WMATA’s bitter pill, congestion charge or no congestion charge. And if you think of it, do demand that congestion charge, since nothing motivates people to change their behavior quite like a lighter wallet, and we’ll adjust, and adjust well. People still love London, don’t they?

(The most perverse thing about this is the status quo is probably better for the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (what an apt title, no?) than a transport infrastructure that emphasizes public transportation, walking, and cycling, when you consider the cost of the automobile, its upkeep, insurance, fuel, roadwork, and… the cost to our health (obesity, asthma, heart disease, lung disease… I wish the list didn’t go on but it does)… On second thought, that’s not right. If we weren’t spending our money on automobiles and all their associated costs, we’d probably commit those same economic resources to other things, like public schools, clean water, parks, urban (re)development, civic events, our homes, etc., and conclude the day with the same GDP. Or if not that, we could simply work less and spend more time with family and friends, rediscovering the pleasure of community.)

What?! Place for people?! And what kind of noise does that make? People – adults, teens, children – chatting, laughing, meeting and greeting, their feet going crunch crunch crunch on the packed snow in this diamond of a winter, birds chirping, dogs playfully barking and yipping at each other, and all this at last made audible, perceptible, enjoyable by the blissful absence of that antisocial menace, the automobile, to which we’ve given in my opinion vastly too much of what we’d do well to consider giving back to ourselves, the streets.

That, I think, is the sound of our lives.

For those of you dear snow ballers who are beginning to say to yourselves in a state of advancing burnout, “enough is enough,” I’d like to admit yes, it was awesome to be part of the Official Dupont Circle Snowball Fight on February 6, and I bet it’d be great to join in the romp tomorrow, February 10, for those who can get off work (sorry, that’s not me), but if you’re feeling over-hyped, something more low-key might be in order for you, and I invite you to go create that. Dupont Circle is only so big. Not everyone needs to be there. If you want to participate in a more community-wide event, go to Dupont, but I’m a firm believer in splitting off to start one’s own thing if you’re feeling crowded. Social mitosis. And nothing would be more in keeping with the spirit embodied by the February 6 fight: Entrepreneurially empowering oneself to build its community instead of waiting for some corporation or incorporated body (i.e., government) to do it in an act of official sponsorship.

The latter isn’t inherently undesirable, but the larger the corporate or political bureaucracy, the more slowly it tends to create and execute its plans. Independently, we can get that igloo raised in a day, and in so doing contribute to a sense of community through a shared cultural experience.

That’s what this is. Community building by the community, neighbor meeting neighbor, memory making, root staking. That is our longer-term goal.

When HBO cut funding of Screen on the Green, like many others I was despondent since I cherish those events that bring a city’s inhabitants together to celebrate (especially outdoors). I hope the cold turkey is only the temporary effect of a severe economic downturn, and the company will wisen up and realize they score big goodwill points in DC by putting SotG on here, and those points add up to customers. However, I question corporate sponsorship. True, budgets are tight. I don’t even want to get into why that is as I’ll just wind up on a tangent about government pork and misspending. Suffice it to say, last summer, DC didn’t step in to save SotG. Apparently, it couldn’t make the case to fund it. I’m sure Jesse Rauch could tell us more about that, considering his valiant efforts to ensure SotG 2009 was a resounding success. Most noteworthy about Jesse’s initiative was the remarkable extent to which it demonstrated that our voices mattered and helped rescue SotG.

So what does that teach us? That it’s us, that we’re the people who can make it happen.

On that note, I’m going to leave you to go to raise some igloos, or at least some walls of snow to defend yourselves against the North or the South.

And as Alice Cooper would say (after adjusting his brilliant ballad for seasonal variations):

Well we got a choice
All the girls and boys
Makin’ all that noise
‘Cause we’ve found new toys.
School’s out for winter.

Now shutdown your computer and go play!

(And do please check out the Official Dupont Circle Snowball Fight tees designed by my friend and local artist, Ambica. To see more of her artistry at work, check out www.Eighty2Degrees.com)

Check it out on, gulp, facebook.

(Am I going to get in trouble over that “gulp,” or does facebook not control everything yet? I heard it’s headquartered in some building called the Ministry of Truth…)

*Update (day of the fight, 5:10pm): Awesome. Balls flying everywhere. Yours truly took one on the chin, another in the ear, and yet another in the nose. Balls all over my face. Journalists were not spared. The melée, the fracas, the interminable din of munitions bursting forth from all sides and whizzing by overhead. Keep an eye out for the videos, coming soon.

how many of you have nibbled its streaked black stellar ways tonight?
how many of you have flown on them tonight?

how many of you have mirrored the moon tonight?
how many of you have blown with the breezes tonight?
blown with the sky tonight?

and how many of you
have winked at the moon
succumbed to the sky?
how many of you?

am i alone in my joy tonight?

january 31, 1999

But I’m tired of caring
about that.
I don’t want to be bothered, to be annoyed
but the corporate entity/mindset is so obviously behind it
the same predator that stands behind so many acts of cruelty and oppression
that that’s the way I react.

January 30, 1999

January 21, 1999

I dove for them at sea
While you
Lay out like a salt marsh
On a rattan mat
On the cottage floor.
I traipse up
Bearing sand and more sand
Stand in the doorway
Where no door has ever hung
The sun lighting my back
Leaving streaks of salt

Would you like to taste me?
It’s the only way to breathe
When you stay down for so long
Exploring the insides of an oyster.

Oh look.
You’ve found one.

If we keep on swimming
We’ll never go poor.

January 17, 1999

Under the bridge, dark and hollow sounds like corridors in a natural history museum with the dioramas that absorb me into their settings. As we look across the river again, to the locust trees, 20 some-odd snowy egrets are settling in to roost for the night. And it’s not a diorama at all.

I have aspirations for this city, how I would like it to appear and function, so I would prefer the latter, to be self-determinant. I live in a neighborhood, and I know my neighbors, and would rather we decide the future of this neighborhood than that such decisions be left to someone who can’t tell Euclid from Champlain, or who doesn’t know when it’s safe to enter Malcolm X Park (or know that locally, it’s called Malcolm X, not Meridian Hill). For the parts of the city to function, there must be a dedication to remaining connected to the rest of the city, but there’s room for any neighborhood to express itself how it sees fit, to make of itself a work of art that inspires and delights and motivates its inhabitants to continuously improve their surroundings, improve their dwellings, and improve themselves.

When I look at my neighborhood, I see canvases, places that could be grand if there were paintings, sculptures, buskers, benches, superimposed upon the art of the everyday, what we would create if we put deeper thought and broader intention into the ordinary surfaces and objects that surround us. I see grand places, public squares that host a vibrant array of spontaneous and at times planned activities that afford us the opportunity to establish and build our culture through interaction…

Grandes Places?

When I recall the French term, “Grandes Places,” before I think of the terms we use in America, such as, “public square,” or, “plaza,” I must preemptively declare it is not an affectation. It was when I was living in France that I first encountered urban spaces that to me seemed like public squares; they were called straightforwardly enough, “places,” or, “grandes places” (of course, specific squares had specific names, like Place de la Comédie or Place de la République); consequently, this is the term that comes to mind when I think of public squares. It is this language that has stuck, and though I could try to revise my mind, to do so would erase the kind of mental anomaly that leads to change, and be revisionist, denying a notion I hold to be true, that Europeans set a standard for public squares millennia before they colonized the land that came to be called the United States, and failed to endow it with their time-tested, human-scale planning traditions. Another reason is I think I subconsciously mistranslate grande as grand, instead of translating it correctly as large. For me, grand implies the sorts of qualities I want in a public square: grace, sumptuousness, style. Humans are not simply animals that take up space that they therefore must provide for themselves with no consideration for any factor besides surface area. This approach – to provide so many square feet of space for every human to move comfortably from point A to point B and have that be the end of the discussion as far as design is concerned – some might call utilitarian, but I don’t find it useful at all to provide a space people regret having to occupy.

It is a matter of opinion, but insofar as mine goes, “Grandes Places” are an integral part of the world’s outstanding cities, distinguishing them from great cities. Furthermore, DC hasn’t any. Why it hasn’t any is though there are wide-open spaces in DC, they are typically not where people live and move about and meet and mix; and, if they are, their management is aggravatingly flawed. Dupont Circle is a suitable example. It fails to be a “Grande Place” because visiting it presents too many obstacles and offers too few rewards to attract crowds in all but the most limited seasonal frequency. We are not there, we do not populate the space. Not there is the activity of us being us, an obligatory emblem of an urban space that is an urban social place; we are a sine qua non of the public fields of congregation.

An aside is necessary here, but an important one that cannot be relegated to a footnote. Where we are not, an urban space is not just a space, vacant, lonely, and undesired, but may, if we are to measure it against some yardstick of success despite its not promoting aggregation, be filled with touches of a creativity that creates an identity, and provides just that formula which invites the passerby to halt for a moment to absorb its immediate surroundings. These are all the more successful if they hypnotize, or if that is too strong a notion, mesmerize. One place that matches this description is the flower bed in front of the Freer Gallery of Art, between it and Jefferson Drive) and the benches around it. I emphasize the inclusion of the benches because without somewhere to pause comfortably, there is little way to stop long enough to realize the art is outside as well as inside the building. Thus, the benches, neither the most nor least elegant, are critical to the success of the place. Sit here, look at the blooms, and be in the present. You may find there is no longer a past or a future distracting you, rendering the present anything but. Other people enjoying this sculpture could be part of its harmony, but without them it may be just as well. It may not want an orchestra’s accompaniment. Not every place does, but there are spaces we may wish to be nuclei of our social lives…

Half-a-block from the Freer Gallery, across Jefferson Drive from the Smithsonian Institute’s Arts and Industries building, is a carousel and a café serving its clientele at a counter where they pick up their drinks and snacks to take to a nearby table. This is an underutilization of real estate. In many other countries this would also be a café, but it would have more tables, and a reason for them to be there: a much wider selection of nourishment, and of far better quality (do fries really do justice to the National Mall?); table service; shade trees; and as I encountered in Montpellier, France, a farmers market on the same grounds as the outdoor café so that one could hop easily from one to the other. And all this to better attract locals to the Mall.

If not in terms of galleries, then at least in terms of museums DC is an art city. Reconsidering and then reworking this small part of the Mall would be an extension of that art. With proper management, diversity of activity and use conjures diversity of participants; I would be happy to play in this oeuvre, and to bring others to play in it with me. But I would not be content to disregard the rest. There are touches of art in too few of our nooks, and such a great need. The murals along 18th Street NW in Adams Morgan, or around the corner on U Street NW, like Joel Bergner’s, “The Afro-Colombian Mural: Currulao y Desplazamiento, are masterpieces that announce to all who pass by slowly enough, You Are SomewHere. Turn 180 degrees, and you will find another mural, this one painted under the auspices of MuralsDC, a program the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities, Mayor Fenty’s office, and the Department of Public Works created to offer local teenagers the opportunity to make a social statement artistically and accessibly. “Evolution” is beautiful, and an exemplary demonstration of the value of public-private partnership. I am not against such partnership, but only argue that we must not wait for those who hold the purse strings to generate all the ideas, nor let the strings of that purse remain tightened despite our will, the people’s will, to loosen them for magnanimous purposes, of which I hold the recreation of this city to facilitate the movement from one inspiring place to another inspiring place through myriad inspiring places to be one.