For the Rest of Us

Feeling cynical this holiday season? You’re not alone. And there’s no better way to join up with your fellow DC anti-revelers and release your holiday tension than with a celebration of Festivus, the most famous made-up December holiday. This Saturday and Sunday in Adams Morgan, there’s a street-corner kiosk open where you can write down your gripes, whether they be about the holidays, the city, or the universe and all its occupants, and pin them to a bulletin board along with hundreds of others.

Then a guy with a megaphone comes out and, following the tradition founded by that one episode of Seinfeld, reads aloud the collective “List of Grievances.” The kiosk is on the corner of Adams Mill Road NW and Columbia Road, and it’s just a short walk from the Red line’s Woodley Park-Zoo metro stop. Leave your fuzzy Santa hat at home.

And All That Jazz

If last week’s choral Christmas performance wasn’t your particular cup of cider, you might want to make another trip to the Kogod Courtyard outside the Smithsonian American Art Museum this week. This Thursday, December 17, they’ll be serving up a different brand of seasonal tunes with “Take 5! A Krewe’tet Christmas.” The show features the musical stylings of Krewe’tet, a five-piece jazz ensemble, as they put their own syncopated spin on the Christmas carols and holiday songs we’re all so accustomed to.  Get there via the Smithsonian metro station, on either the Blue or Orange line.

Picture This

Generally, asking some stranger you meet on a street corner if you can take a picture of him makes you either an overzealous tourist or a creep. But for photographer Robert Bergman, it makes him an artist. As a “street photographer”, Bergman has spent his career traveling to different cities across the country, and taking photos of people he meets using no special lighting or equipment other than his camera. Now through January 10, the National Gallery of Art will be displaying thirty-three of these portraits, the collection of which makes a statement about Bergman’s view of America and the people that inhabit it. The Gallery is on the National Mall, between 3^rd and 7^th Streets on Constitution Avenue.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Leisure, Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.