Voila! Le Boulot!

BREAKING NEWS

Washington D.C----1-28-2010----4.33 p.m

Our intern, Benjamin Grinspan, has found a job! No word yet if it will lead to fame and fortune. What's that? It won't? See that people? Instant updates. That's how the news business should work!

Benjamin got a job at P&C Market, a gourmet food store on Capitol Hill's Lincoln Park. The neighborhood is an interesting one, with it's beautiful post-Civil War houses and its deeply deeply Bo-Bo residents. Hey honey! Now that the kids have moved out, let's fill the void in our souls with $4.39 half gallons of milk and $33 worth of serrano ham.

Of course, while Ben has only worked there twice, and the job is only part time, it appears that one major DC institution has worked its way into the heart of the store's business model: talking politics with random people. Now in Seattle or Boston or Atlanta you may expect your upscale grocer to have political views- heck, with all that local produce it's kind of what you're paying the 65% mark up for- but thanks to D.C's mix of chutzpah and nerdiness your grocer here feels free to ask you what you think the next step is in enacting Cap and Trade. 

Indeed, at one point this girl, who was kind of dressed as an astronaut's wife (who knew "Bump-its" had their own congressional lobby), came in and chatted with everyone about her boss, Nevada Senator John Ensign. No word yet if they banged, but the whole interaction was an exercise in the D.C "oh you know this person on the Hill? Well I know this person..." game.

So come visit Ben, people. He's on the corner of 10th and East Capitol. Want a deal on eggs and Spanish cheese? Let Ben "Bottles In The Club" Grinspan hook you up...

Random Districtions #4: Our intern on FUNemployment

I have just finished reading Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell’s account of nauseating poverty in post WWI Europe. Obviously I don’t have too much in common with the life of a 1920’s tramp (Were I a hobo, for instance, I would never be caught dead in a necktie and bowler hat), but I was definitely moved by Orwell’s writing. Sure 1920’s English tramp slang is about as comprehensible to me as that click language in Southern Africa, but it led me to question the way in which I describe my own joblessness.

After much thought I have decided I am not “unemployed”. The prefix “un” means “not” and, according to Dictionary.com, is “freely used as an English formative, giving negative or opposite force in adjectives and their derivative adverbs and nouns”. When it comes to describing my own situation, I think the negative and opposite aspect of “un” is particularly illuminating.

Unless you some how have found an internship with real responsibilities (and are a big enough sucker to do that without finding some way to get paid), an internship may give good experience but isn’t really “employment”. Being helpful my doing minor tasks and adding a little youth to the office may build some professional skills but I certainly wouldn’t call it “employment”.

Because most of my professional experience comes from internships I have never really been employed, and thus how can I be the opposite of “employed” when I’ve never been in that state before? Good-bye the social stigma of unemployment, hello lazy privilege.

Indeed, for all the bourgeois coddled brothers out there, I want to posit a new term: non-employed. The prefix “non” means an “absence or negation of something”, so since I have had an absence of employment in my life, I am thus “nonemployed” and not “unemployed”.

There, don’t you feel better about your existence on this planet now? Thanks, semantics! 

Is D.C 1970's Nostalgia Cool?

Ask almost anyone and they will tell you that the 1970’s were not kind to our nation’s capital. In the aftermath of Martin Luther King assassination riots in 1968, a lot of Washington D.C became a really really scary ghetto. The legacy of that ghetto scared the crap out of me when I moved to my nieghborhood of Columbia Heights earlier this year- you see, everyone who my parents talked to who had any vague association with Washington D.C in the 1970’s and 1980’s pegged Columbia Heights as mix between present day Mogadishu, Baghdad circa 2005, and post-laser beam of destruction Alderaan. “How could you let your child move into Murder City USA?” people kept asking my parents. How I was gonna live in a place with a 40 year old reputation of being en embarrassingly dangerous and poor neighborhood in the capital of the world's wealthiest and most power was the more important question.

            Well a lot has changed in this part of Northwest D.C since then. There's a Chipotle, the surest sign that things have turned around. Sure, one sees expensive skate board shops and organic markets mingling with soup kitchens and bullet proofed liquor stores, but for the most part the horrors of 1970’s are gone: with one gigantic exception.

You see, Columbia Heights LOVES its 1970’s pop-culture. Maybe it has to do with the mix of upwardly mobile Black residents and white bourgeois guilt, but the soundtrack of this area isn’t so much nauseating club jams like “Tik Tok” as it is straight up “Soul Train”.

The Florida Avenue Grill, a great diner right near my house that my brother endearingly called “The Blackest Place in America” is decorated with photos of prominent black celebrities-that is of course only those up until the Cosby Show Era. Although we have a fucking black president it’s easier to find a photo of Candi Staton or Bootsy Collins than it is B-Rack. Another neighborhood institution, Ben’s Chili Bowl, has been serving outstanding chili since 1958 and feels like an amazing time warp. Late one evening there I was privy to an wonderful spectacle: over the restaurants stereo came “Ain’t Nobody Love Me Better” by Chaka Khan and I got to watch every person in the restaurant, Black, White or Indonesian, GET DOWN. There was not a dry eye in the house.

So maybe, just maybe, this whole idea of post-racial America is bullshit. Gentrification has reshaped the character of my neighborhood (I'm obviously guilty as charged), but I think the thing that attracts people like me to this neighborhood is rough-and-tumble Good Times quality that a lot of places around here still have. In a city with so much soulless corporate culture and architecture, a neighborhood that wears its history on its sleeve, even if that was a painful history, can be very refreshing.

It’s certainly problematic. But if living in a bizarre contradiction means I get more Stevie Wonder in my daily life then I think that’s pretty cool.

Je retourne!

Like Napoleon from Elba or Britney Spears from the Los Angeles County Psychiatric Ward I am making my triumphant return to blogging about Washington, D.C!

And since our intern Ben is current without a job we should be free to give many pleasantly hilarious updates about life in the nation's capitol.

2010 is gonna be big baby.