Call me

Around one o'clock today I'll be on the Kojo Nnamdi Show discussing the Greater Washington area visual arts and artists and art stories as I usually do once or twice a year. Tune in to WAMU 88.5 FM around one. I'll be there together with my good friends Jeffry Cudlin from the Washington City Paper and Dr. Claudia Rousseau from the Gazette newspapers.

You can call us during the show at (800) 433-8850 or you can email us questions to kojo@wamu.org.

Pool woes

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, our neighbors on Sackman Street (Paula and Augie) had one of those above ground pools. Because our backyard and theirs was only separated by a chain link fence, it was easy for me to climb it and use their pool at will, which was OK with Augie, but not OK with Paula, which was a weird thing, because she was always feeding me alongside her kids, as she was a stay-at-home-mom, while my Mom had a job as a seamstress at one of the nearby factories that used to exist in Brooklyn where people like my Mom would work and get paid by what was then called "piece work."

But Augie was the one always working and doing stuff all year round to keep the pool working for those really hot NY summers, although he really hated me dive-bombing into the pool from the second floor fire escape ladder... you had to be good, and sort of belly-flop the water entry (the pool was only around five feet deep), otherwise you'd break your legs or seriously pop your knee caps. But Augie loved kids enjoying his pool!

Anyway, when I was house-hunting last year, I quickly discovered that houses in Media, PA are a lot more affordable than Potomac, MD, so I ended up in a cool house. And yet I was reticent to sign up, because the house came with a pool.

Pools are money pits.

And we quickly discovered that this pool, like many other pools, an hour after the warranties expire, leak. It's hard to hold water in a concrete bubble.

First estimates to fix the pool came in around a ton of money... as time went by, and more and more crap was removed from the pool (apparently built somewhere in the 60s) the "this-is-what's-wrong" stuff kept piling up and now we're up to around two tons of money and I am one good drunk away from filling the fucking thing with soil and planting pachysandras in the hole.

Wanna go to a DC opening tomorrow?

Carolina Mayorga will be having her opening event at Transformer tomorrow at 6:30PM. And then Robert Parrish's opening will be a week from tomorrow at the same time, same place.

The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities is on the move

On July 17, 2007, The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities will be moving uptown to a new location at 2901 14th Street NW, First Floor, Washington, DC 20010 and their phone is 202-724-5613.

Another Artomatic this year?

Blake Gopnik may have a fit, but I am told (as I mentioned before) that there's a pretty good chance of another AOM this year - this time in DC as usual.

Stay tuned!

PS - Sorry Blake... slammajamma two posts in a row; my bad.

Blake Gopnik got lost in Europe

If you think that DC area artsy writers, and DC area museum staffers, and DC area artists, and DC area gallerists, and Washingtonian magazinists, and DC area art collectors, and WaPo readers are the only ones almost always rolling their eyes over what and how Blake Gopnik writes about art, then you should read what Floridian Glenn Weiss, over at Aesthetic Grounds writes about the Gopnikmeister's recent European dispatches.

Wanna go to a Virginia opening this afternoon?

I know it's hot out there, so why not slip into the League of Reston Artists' opening this afternoon?

The opening is Wednesday, July 11 from 4:30 – 6:30 pm in the main hallway of the National Center Gallery of the U. S. Geological Survey in Reston, VA - details and directions here.