Songs of the Moment (An Occasional Feature)

> Soul Coughing - Blue-Eyed Devil
> Warpaint - Warpaint
> Neko Case - People Got a Lotta Nerve
> Broken Social Scene - Fire Eye'd Boy
> Spoon - I Could See the Dude
> Fujiya & Miyagi - Yoyo
> The Weakerthans - Anchorless

The Warpaint video, which I like a lot, somehow seems very 1990s to me, even though it's recent.

CaBi

My Capital Bikeshare key fob stopped working a couple weeks ago. This was perhaps not too surprising following a grueling 18 months on my keyring. After calling to request a new one, I identified the problem -- the two halves of the plastic shell had become slightly separated at one end, and the little RFID chip had come loose and was sliding around inside. Here's what the little guy looks like:

I don't actually know anything about RFID, but it looks like the chip itself is the encased in that little bubble; there are wires running around the perimeter of the square that probably serve as the antenna.

CaBi continues to be awesome, as I've written previously. This seems like a good time to mention some stats available from my account, which shows that I've taken 245 trips since becoming a member in October 2010 -- about one every other day. The system tracks data on your 200 most recent trips (for me, that's trips since January 18, 2011). Here are some summary stats on those:

• 240.34 miles traveled. However, they measure this using as-the-crow-flies distances between the stations, so the actual distance will almost certainly be longer -- for instance, my route from the station nearest home to the station nearest the office is 3.3 miles, but CaBi counts this as 2.5 miles. If we assume this ratio holds true across all trips, I've probably covered about 320 miles on the CaBi bikes in the past 13 months. (That's similar to the distance covered in my bike trip to Pittsburgh.)
• 10,334 estimated calories burned. That's based on CaBi's assumption of 43 calories per mile.
• 1 day, 12 hours, 47 minutes and 48 seconds of riding.
• If you take the time elapsed and my estimated distance above, it indicates an average speed of about 8.7 mph. Given traffic lights and the conservative gearing of the bikes, that sounds about right.

There's lots of really interesting analysis to be done with data that CaBi recently released, which anonymously show all individual trips taken on the system during certain periods.

Sound happenings

Two audio-related items to note:

A couple weeks ago I got an opportunity, as part of the DC Listening Lounge, to visit a cool and mysterious place -- the abandoned trolley station underneath DC's Dupont Circle.

A little background: Dupont Circle is one of the city's most vibrant neighborhoods, with many restaurants, bars, stores, the city's biggest weekly farmer's market, etc. Most people don't even realize that beneath the eponymous circle, there's a station from the days when streetcars were the primary mass transit in DC. (Metro's present-day Dupont Circle station is significantly deeper below.) The station and accompanying underground track tunnels were built in the 1940s, in an effort to ease congestion in the circle. An automobile underpass to allow Connecticut Ave to bypass the circle was also built at the same time. The streetcars were abandoned in favor of buses (sigh) in 1962, exactly 50 years ago. The station (actually two stations, wrapping around both sides of the circle) was reserved as a fallout shelter for a time, but fully abandoned in the 1970s. A small part of the facility was turned into a food court in the 1990s, but an unscrupulous developer and claustrophobic design doomed it in short order.

Jumping to the present, a group calling itself Dupont Underground is trying to develop the entire underground area -- the stations plus adjoining tunnels -- as a retail and arts space. They've been at it for a few years now, and have recently secured an exclusive agreement with the city to negotiate for a lease on the space. They are working to build support for this effort, and are giving various interested parties tours of the space. We met two reps from the group on a street corner near the circle, walked down the narrow curb alongside the vehicle underpass, and went through a metal door in the side of the underpass, and entered the dark tunnel. Here's a sound recording I made as we went in:


It was pretty cool being in a totally abandoned (and mostly forgotten) space underneath one of the busiest places in the city. I took a few pictures with my phone in the station portion where there was lights, but you'd probably be better off looking at some more professional pics of the space posted by this guy on Flickr. We brought a few noisemaking implements (including a violin) with us to explore the acoustics, which were echoey in an unusual way, with all the bare concrete and connecting tunnels. In any case, the group has a lot of work ahead of them to realize their vision, but if they can make it work, the space has the potential to be a very cool addition to Dupont Circle.

- - -

Also in the sounds-in-striking-settings department, a band that my friend Jocelyn is in, The Torches, played a gig this afternoon at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It was in the Luce Center, which is a gorgeous three-tier atrium on the top floor of the museum. The band got to select a piece of art from the collection (a painting entitled "Life Mask"), and a staff member gave a short talk about it before they started their performance. Seeing a band I've seen several times in small clubs play an "unplugged" set in such a stately setting was neat, and definitely changed how I perceived the music. This is part of a monthly series the Luce Center is putting on, so I may try and check out some future shows.

Here's the Luce Center, with the band setting up at the far end.

Omnibus update

Haven't been blogging much recently, mostly because I've been busy. Here are a few things worth mentioning:

• Davin came to visit last weekend, prior to his move to South America. I failed to take any proper pictures, but did snap one on my phone when we hiked Old Rag.
• After great disappointment at not getting tickets for LCD Soundsystem's farewell show at Madison Square Garden last spring, I have to say I'm pretty pumped to see the film that was made about it, Shut Up and Play the Hits.
• I've restarted my Potluck Initiative this winter, and have been reminded how nice it is to have people over for dinner.
• I was proud of installing this lamp in my apartment on my own. (To be clear, there was a different lamp there before, so it's not like I did any real electrical work.) I also fixed the leaky shower, but I'm debating whether replacing the leaky kitchen faucet is within my ability.
• Relatedly, after complaining bitterly for years about my mother's unwillingness to turn on the heat, I have said to myself more than once this winter that "52 degrees isn't so bad if you put on a hat." (But much of the winter has felt more like spring.)
• I got to go in an abandoned underground trolley station here in DC yesterday. I'll do a separate post about it later, but it was pretty awesome.

Heading to Greensboro this weekend (via train!) to visit Matt and Risa (and the local Mountain Goat population), which should be great.

Songs of the Moment (An Occasional Feature)

> Peter Wolf Crier - Settling it Off
> TV on the Radio - No Future Shock
> Broken Social Scene - 7/4 Shoreline
> Moonface - Loose Heart = Loose Plan
> Wilco - Dawned on Me
> Battles - Sweetie & Shag
> Wye Oak - Holy Holy

That Wye Oak video is quite well done, I think. Being a sucker for synchronization of visual elements with the music, I particularly loved the sequence of cuts at about 2:05.

Happy New Year from Nyan Cat

To ring in the new year, I would like to point your attention to a video meme from 2011 that I have belatedly run across, known as "Nyan Cat."

Yes, it's a cartoon cat with a Pop Tart body flying through space accompanied by an over-caffeinated repetitive soundtrack. (According to the Nyan Cat Wikipedia entry, "The Japanese word for the sound cats make, 'nyā' [にゃあ?], is the equivalent of the English language word 'meow'.")

It's not bearable for more than a minute or so, but somehow, I find it hilarious. I think the fact that it has had tens of millions of views is part of what makes it funny, because viewing it makes you think of all the tens of millions of other people who have taken the time to watch such a willfully pointless (and annoying!) video. Pulling on that same thread of humor, the website Non-Stop Nyan Cat allows you to tweet how long you've spent watching their Nyan Cat knockoff.

Also, I must add that the Smooth Jazz Version of the meme is amazing.

Postcard from the past

I was poking around in my parents' basement while home for Christmas, and found this postcard:

It caught my eye because it looked familiar. Not the postcard itself, but the view, from Glacier National Park. In fact, I took almost the exact same picture on my own trip to Glacier this past September:

The postcard was from my paternal grandparents, sent in September 1984 -- almost exactly 27 years before I inadvertently took the same picture.

I must admit that Doug is right -- there's something special about physical postcards, compared to all the different flavors of instantaneous electronic communication. If I had run across an old email, it wouldn't have been quite the same, never mind that emails won't just hang out in a box for a few decades to be stumbled upon later.

Warmth of home

I've enjoyed being at home for Christmas. I didn't take any pictures of the family get-togethers, but here's a picture of the ash basin underneath my parents' wood furnace. It does actually feel a bit like winter here, although still unseasonably warm. Heading back to DC tomorrow...

The DC I know

I thought it'd be interesting to map out the parts of DC that I'm familiar with. It would be cool to see many different people's version of this map, as the shape of their DC would probably have a strong correlation with their demographics and lifestyle. For instance, I bet my friends who live in the District (nearly all of whom, naturally, live in areas I'm familiar with) and use their bikes to get around would have a very similar shape. Someone in their 40s, however, might be familiar with a different set of neighborhoods.

Songs of the Moment (An Occasional Feature)

> Wilco - Born Alone
> Dismemberment Plan - The City
> TV on the Radio - Caffeinated Consciousness
> Modest Mouse - Guilty Cocker Spaniels
> Broken Social Scene - Ibi Dreams of Pavement
> Gorillaz - DARE (DFA remix)

That Wilco track is from their new record, which I like a lot.

My interest in "The City" was rekindled by listening to the remix on "A People's History of the Dismemberment Plan," but the original remains the best. I think the synth line makes the song. (Okay, probably the drums, too.)