I’ll start with the good news: These are the best years of your life. That’s right. You are currently at your overall happiest, most attractive, and most employable. (You were better looking in your twenties, but you were also a total nutcase.) This brings us to the bad news: Seriously, these are the best years of your life.
Go ahead. Take a long, hard look at your thirtysomething face in the mirror while you consider all that you have—but mostly have not—accomplished up until this point. Not exactly what you had in mind for your so-called prime, was it?
You thought by now you would have figured all your shit out and evolved into a superior version of yourself. A more financially and emotionally stable You. (You 2.0, if you will.) Someone who lives their passion every single day, has resolved all their childhood trauma, and is at least on their way to becoming debt- and mortgage-free.
Yeah, not quite. Instead, you’ll have to settle for working a job you barely remember applying for while being only slightly wiser and less neurotic than you were as a young adult, mostly because you no longer have the energy to give a shit about half the stuff you stressed over in your twenties. Also, switching from alcohol to edibles has helped.
Another way of looking at it is that your thirties are the least worst years of your life. Sure, you finally have some financial independence, just not the type where you can do things like travel out of state or fix your Camry’s leaky radiator. (Also, you still drive a Camry.) Most importantly, your thirties are when you start to figure out who you truly are as a person, even if you’re not exactly thrilled with what you find.
Your personal relationships are never going to be better than they are right now either. Which is a tough pill to swallow, considering you’re an absolute mess in that department. Just not as big a mess as you were when you first ventured into the confusing world of post-college dating, or will be once the mounting demands of middle age make it increasingly difficult to maintain friendships and devote quality time to your partner.
Yep, this right here is as good as it gets, sadly. Not that you don’t enjoy yourself from time to time. After all, you have your little hobbies, like hiking and napping. Nothing screams “I’m living my best life!” like staying in on a Friday night to watch YouTube videos of a guy eating expired military rations. Still, it must be disappointing to find out that the dials on your excitement meter barely make it past mild mirth, even at your zenith as a human being.
As underwhelming as it may seem, you better savor every mediocre moment of it because it could—and soon will—be worse. Think about what you have to look forward to next: your forties. The age at which all your bad habits become cemented as character traits. You’ll spend the entire decade trying to convince yourself and everyone else that you’re still “young of mind” while your rapidly declining body makes it abundantly clear that you’re on the back nine of your life. More like the back six if you factor in your family health history and poor lifestyle choices.
After that, it’s all downhill. Unless you make enough money—or, more realistically, inherit your parents’ money—to retire early to some beachfront location and turn back your biological clock by getting stem cell injections and testosterone replacement therapy. In which case, your fifties will be the best years of your life.
Despite some last-minute chaos, a late-night December 2024 Congressional deal finally authorized transfer of management of the RFK campus to the District. And President Biden’s signature on it this week officially cleared the way for the DC government to repurpose the largely vacant 174 acres into something more valuable and appealing. Read Martin Austermuhle’s explainer here.
The initial flurry of news stories were mostly about how the District can now usher the return of the Washington Commanders by facilitating the construction of a new football stadium on the site. But a stadium has never been a guarantee, nor is one the only option.
A good number of locals are concerned with the impacts of a stadium and with the fact that building one will likely preclude the construction of new housing and additional neighborhood resources and amenities. Polling from the DC Fiscal Policy Institute and Data for Progress in 2023 found that 55% of residents believe the site “should be used mostly for housing and neighborhood amenities,” versus 39% who supported a football stadium.
When asked directly about this by residents at the outset of this process, Mayor Muriel Bowser suggested such tradeoffs don’t really exist: “I listened to some of the things that community members said they wanted, and I agree with all of them. And I know that on 174 acres, they are all possible.”
The math, however, does not find that all things are possible.
What’s in the law?
This transfer is just that: a transfer of who controls the RFK site. The federal government will continue to own the land, but the law gives DC “administrative jurisdiction” so that “the District may use the Campus for purposes including residential and commercial development, and for other purposes.”
Those other purposes could include a stadium, as well as recreational, educational, and cultural facilities. The law does not initiate a contract with the Washington Commanders, or fund the construction of a stadium.
RFK is sometimes described as a 190-acre campus, but that older figure includes the DC Armory, which was not addressed in the federal transfer bill. The bill specifies that 174 acres are changing hands, and outlines two prominent restrictions for the site.
A 32-acre “riparian” area along the bank of the Anacostia River is cordoned off, to protect the river from polluting runoff. That area is shown in the map below with hashed shading.
Map of the RFK site, with reserved riparian area shown in hashmarks. Image by Congressional Research Service.
That an additional 30% of the site, not including the riparian area, be dedicated to parks and open space. That’s another 42.6 acres on which nothing—not a stadium, not housing—can be built. If retained, the 15-ish acres of the popular Fields at RFK would presumably count towards this goal.
The Fields at RFK Campus in the shadow of the old stadium. Image by EventsDC.
Together, those two restrictions mean that only about 100 of the 174 acres of the RFK site can actually be developed.
100 acres would…
Option 1: Fit a new neighborhood
Our dynamic, diverse neighborhoods make living in DC really great. We are lucky to have lots of places where people are a short walk from jobs, small businesses, schools, parks, and their neighbors. The RFK site could be transformed into another such neighborhood.
As DC’s population continues to grow, a shortage of homes keeps rents high and leads to bidding wars and all-cash offers that price most families out. A 2024 analysis from Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments found that the region was already short 40,000 units, and that that deficit is growing by hundreds of units every week. RFK presents one of the last remaining opportunities in the District to make a serious dent in that number in a single stroke, taking pressure off of other neighborhoods feeling the crunch and generating tax revenue to support public services.
One hundred acres is compact, but still a relative ton of space, and could be home to a meaningful number of people without requiring the specter of “Manhattanization” that is often lobbed at large redevelopments. For example, at a density of around 75,000 people per square mile, an average 100-acre section of Paris—a city commonly described as low-slung and charming—houses almost 12,000 people in about 8,000 units.
Paris’ 10th Arrondissement overlaid on the RFK site. Image by Hector Arbuckle.
If international inspiration is too ill-fitting for the District, there’s plenty close to home. The northwest portion of the Dupont Circle neighborhood, census tracts 55.02 and 42.02—one of the most popular areas of the city—is itself about 100 acres.
Dupont Circle’s northwest half is just about 100 acres of neighborhood. Image by DC Office of Planning.
About 5,700 Washingtonians live in these 20-something blocks, in about 3,600 homes. There’s enough room for a Metro station, a world-class art museum, galleries, offices, embassies, churches, retail, and restaurants, all of which serve residents and visitors alike.
That, but at RFK, with its waterfront views, would be an incredible boon for the District, and a more sustainable and reliable source of tax revenue than a stadium.
Option 2: Fit a stadium complex, and basically only a stadium complex
A stadium could fit comfortably in the 100 acres; 15–40 acres is a common football-stadium footprint. The parking the Commanders are likely to demand, however, will gobble up almost all of the rest. The average NFL stadium includes about 20,000–25,000 parking spots, a target of one spot for every three seats for stadiums with a capacity of about 60,000–80,000 seats.
And, NFL owners are increasingly demanding high-capacity facilities that can win bids for the big-money, prestige events like the Super Bowl and the World Cup. The NFL, in fact, requires a Super Bowl host have at minimum 35,000 parking spaces nearby, which means that any new stadium is likely going to aim for the high end of the range.
SoFi stadium in Inglewood, California, the most recently constructed NFL stadium, sits on 298 acres devoted almost exclusively to surface parking. Image by Doc Searles licensed under Creative Commons.
At 125 to 175 spots per acre of surface parking, that’s about 100 to 350 acres necessary for parking alone!
There are some stadiums built into existing street grids, such as Minnesota, Detroit, and Seattle, but their ostensibly smaller footprints are mirages. There’s just as much parking around them, but it’s dispersed in dozens of lots in the surrounding area. The total parking acreage is still about 100 to 350 acres.
There’s relatively limited parking within the footprint of U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, but over 20,000 spaces within a 20-minute walk.
But the RFK site is bordered by residential neighborhoods, not commercial districts with existing parking that can be repurposed on nights and weekends. The closest existing parking garages are on H Street NE or in Eastern Market, about a 35-minute walk away. All the parking the Commanders might want to build will need to be at RFK.
Given that 100 acres would only cover the lowest end of that parking estimate, surface parking lots are a non-starter, leaving parking garages as the only option. At about 100–150 spaces per acre per floor, 25,000 spots would require up to 50 acres of five-story garages, covering half of RFK’s developable land in parking structures. Pairing the NFL-standard parking with even the very smallest stadium, about 15 acres, leaves 35 acres. Roughly accounting for the roads necessary to move 25,000 cars around reduces the total remaining space to about 20 acres.
Twenty acres is not going to make true Bowser’s assertion that all things are possible at RFK.
Pittsburgh, which sacrificed almost the entirety of its available waterfront land to provide parking for Acrisure Stadium (née Heinz Field), is a cautionary tale for the District. Image by PSL Source.
Option 3: Fit a truly urban stadium
Bowser has said that her vision is “not to have a stadium surrounded by asphalt, but to have a mix of uses that serve the District of Columbia.” If she and the DC Council are serious about that, there’s a path to achieving it: Buck the NFL’s pattern and just build less parking.
The District is never going to be able to compete with Maryland or Virginia on parking or acreage, anyway. Rather than try to contort the District into a suburb or an exurb, the mayor, if she must have a stadium, should lean into RFK’s primary advantage: Its central location and connection to one of the country’s best public transit systems—so that most people won’t need to drive to a game in the first place.
We’ve already done this at Nats Park and Capital One Arena, which are directly served by Metrorail and Metrobus and have relatively less parking than peer facilities. Significant percentages of their fans arrive by Metro, which keeps thousands of cars off the street and thereby mitigates a chief complaint—traffic—of those who live near sports facilities.
The Navy Yard-Ballpark Metrorail station transports thousands of Nationals fans to and from games. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ by dbking licensed under Creative Commons.
To keep RFK from being a wasteland of asphalt, and to keep with the District’s strong precedent of urban stadiums, Bowser will have to insist on no more than 10,000 parking spaces and on keeping the entire complex—stadium and parking—to less than 50 acres. That’s the only possible way for her to create a world in which new housing and amenities can be built at RFK alongside a stadium. (To really knock it out of the park, the Commanders should be made to underground as much of that parking as possible, so more useful things can be built on top of it.)
Any stadium at RFK, compact or not, will come at the expense of something better. NFL stadiums are only used, on average, 12.5 times a year. And DC residents already have easy access to the existing Commanders stadium in Landover, Maryland. Prince George’s County leaders want to build the team their new stadium there, and the District should support its peers in this endeavor! Landover’s proximity means that the District benefits from the marginal amount of economic activity a stadium generates—a good number of visiting fans traveling to games are almost certainly staying in DC and spending money here. There’s almost nothing to gain by cannibalizing the stadium from Maryland other than pride.
The District does not need, and will be better off without, a football stadium. But if Bowser and the council must have the Commanders, we can’t afford to let them saddle the city with the traffic, environmental, and economic disaster of NFL-sized parking, too.
The District does not need, and will be better off without, a football stadium. But if Bowser and the council must have the Commanders, we can’t afford to let them saddle the city with the traffic, environmental, and economic disaster of NFL-sized parking, too.
Jane Austen is to me the greatest wonder amongst novel writers. I do not mean that she is the greatest novel writer, but she seems to me the greatest wonder. Imagine, if you were to instruct an author or an authoress to write a novel under the limitations within which Jane Austen writes! Supposing you were to say, ‘Now, you must write a novel, but you must have no heroes or heroines in the accepted sense of the word. You may have naval officers, but they must always be on leave or on land, never on active service. You must have no striking villains; you may have a mild rake, but keep him well in the background, and if you are really going to produce something detestable, it must be so because of its small meannesses, as, for instance, the detestable Aunt Norris in ‘Mansfield Park’; you must have no very exciting plot; you must have no thrilling adventures; a sprained ankle on a country walk is allowable, but you must not go much beyond this. You must have no moving descriptions of scenery; you must work without the help of all these; and as to passion, there must be none of it. You may, of course, have love, but it must be so carefully handled that very often it seems to get little above the temperature of liking. With all those limitations you are to write, not only one novel, but several, which, not merely by popular appreciation, but by the common consent of the greatest critics, the greatest literary minds of the generations which succeed you, shall be classed among the first rank of the novels written in your language in your country.’ Of course, it is possible to say that Jane Austen achieves this, though her materials are so slight because her art is so great. Perhaps, however, so long as the materials are those of human nature, they are not slight.
After watching Inuit drag a heavy boat out of the water on “rollers” of inflated seal hides, California inventor William Albee devised a baglike tire 5 to 9 feet long and 2.5 feet in diameter. Tires that size can gain traction on almost any terrain, and when inflated to a low pressure they’ll envelop large obstacles without suffering damage.
Strikingly, Life noted, “They will also envelop a man without damaging him, spreading the 3,000 pounds of weight over such an area that the running over gives him about the same sensation as a vigorous massage.”
The Navy and Army experimented with the tires in 1951; eventually they were adopted by the oil industry, which uses them to traverse the tundra of Canada and Alaska without getting stuck or damaging vulnerable plants.
For even older recipes, check out Gode Cookery. They list medieval and Renaissance cooking instructions and translate the recipes for you into measurable amounts and all.
I have have have to mention Miss Leslie. I learned so much about cooking from that book, even if a lot of it is outdated.
Also, Forme of Cury is great fun, if you can muddle through the Middle English (Gode Cookery has translations and adaptions of some of the recipes from this).
Feast Afrique had pulled from a range of digital repositories to create a library of historic books on the food and cultural history of West Africa and the African Diaspora. This includes lots of historic and specialized cookbooks.
I don’t often read scholarly music books, but I just finished B. Brian Foster’s, 2020 book, I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life. Foster is a sociologist and storyteller who lived in Clarksdale, Mississippi for a few years to learn about what all the blues tourism and the blues legacy meant to Black folks who actually live there. The short answer is that they hate it. They see themselves as actually living what the blues really mean–poverty much more than just being low over a relationship or something–and they see the tourism and the festival and the whites who come as having nothing to do with them. In fact, most avoid the blues clubs and the museums and the festivals entirely because nearly all of them have stories about going to something and having a white say something racist to them. They see what has happened in Clarksdale as a way for the wealthy to get more money while not investing in their community at all. Clarksdale is a place where whites got out after the decline of segregation and it is poor, with bad schools and bad roads, and the residents don’t see any of the money coming into town from this tourism go into what they want or need. They don’t mind the music, even if they find it old-fashioned, and the understand the past, but the blues tourism is totally hostile to them.
Foster’s book is quite accessible (also short) and worth reading for those interested in the issues around musical heritage. And let’s face, any blues show I’ve ever been to in my entire life, the audience has been vast majority white. The literature on tourism and how it impacts local communities is long and fertile and Foster’s book reflects these findings and the great ambivalence of locals over what happens to their homes, even if for many, the economic gains are worth it. But what about when the economic gains are absolutely not worth it because they aren’t seeing any of those? Given how Clarksdale is revered as a mecca by aging whites, this is probably an issue a lot of people should think about when they approach the music they love.
I loved this story about old roadies still on the road. It’s really amazing, like who are these guys? My favorite part of roadies–and this never seems to change no matter the age or era–is that they continue to look like the scuzziest guys on the face on the Earth! It’s like there’s a certifying board and if you don’t look the right way, you can’t set up any gear. My favorite part of this story is the guy who is the long-time roadie for Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony. Despite working with him for decades, Anthony is such a clueless prick that he has no idea what work his man does:
Knee and hip issues seem especially endemic in the tech industry, because of the constant need to lift heavy equipment and climb up and down endless stairs. And road workers also have to deal with a schedule that occupies them from midmorning until after midnight. Recently, Dugan, who has been working with Anthony since the early days of Van Halen, informed his boss (who now tours regularly with Sammy Hagar and Joe Satriani) that he was thinking of slowing down.
“When I first told Michael that I wanted to get off the road, he said, ‘I’m not going to do that, why should you? I’m still going to be out there,’” Dugan said. “And I said, ‘Michael, are you trying to compare your day to my day?’” He explained how his work begins at 8:30 a.m. and wraps at 2 a.m. “‘You come out and do the show,’” he recalled saying. “‘You leave in a limo, go back to the five-star hotel, or go back to a private jet way and fly home. Your day and my day are worlds apart.’”
The Gil Evans Orchestra, Little Wing: Live in Germany
Big Thief, U.F.O.F.
Waylon Jennings, Waylon Live, disc 1
Medeski, Martin, & Wood, It’s a Jungle in Here
Bob Wills, The Tiffany Transcriptions, Vol. 8
Lee Bains + The Glory Fires, Old Time Folks
The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour
Don Byron, Nu Blaxploitation
Stevie Wonder, Innervisions
The Paranoid Style, Underworld, USA
Kevin Morby, This is a Photograph
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming Sessions
Miles Davis, Sorcerer
Drive By Truckers, Live at Plan 9: July 13, 2006
Matthew Shipp/William Parker/Susie Ibarra, The Multiplication Table
Margo Cliker, Valley of Heart’s Delight
Waxahatchee, Cerulean Salt
Joey Purp, iiiDrops
Riddy Arman, self-titled
The Hold Steady, The Price of Progress
Jerry Joseph, Tick
Marissa Nadler, For My Crimes
Guy Clark, Cold Dog Soup
Torres, Thirstier
Album Reviews. Now that I rushed through as many 2024 albums as I could, back to the backlog.
Porridge Radio, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky
Despite an album title that might make one think it is some arch modernist composition, in fact Porridge Radio is a British indie band and this album was released in 2022. This is plaintively delivered punk-influence music from a singer with an impressive accent and an emotionally powerful voice. This band is very much a wear it all on the sleeve, no metaphor kind of band lyrically. I enjoy this band more than I think they are great. The vocal delivery is the best part of the band, the music is pretty good, the lyrics are kind of whatever except that you know she means it so damn much. And that does matter for something, especially when you are that good at the delivery.
B+
Callum Pitt, In the Balance
Acceptable enough singer-songwriter rock, but there’s not much here to grab the listener. High production values I guess. A bit catchy. But pretty rote. Nothing really wrong with it except being a bit overwrought in the singing. But not that much that right with it either.
B-
Silver Synthetic, Silver Synthetic
Imagine you know a bunch of dudes who can play well and sound good together and they mostly play in your backyard by the campfire, drinking some beers and hanging out. Well, that’s basically Silver Synthetic, where you had a couple of guys from the New Orleans punk scene realize they really liked Laurel Canyon music too and they know some guys and they just got together and jammed. It’s a little better than that obviously–these are guys who can play. But that’s basically what it is–guys who have listened to a lot of Jackson Browne.
B
Durand Jones & The Indications, Private Space
I figured this Jones album from 2021 would sound pretty sweet and it sure does. He’s got such a great Curtis Mayfield-esque falsetto. There are a couple of dud songs here, maybe taking a bit longer and writing a bit more could have led to a more solid 10 songs, but overall, this is a pretty fair modern soul album. Especially for a band from Indiana.
B
Mikaela Davis, And Southern Star
Davis is part of the revival of the harp in pop music. Or maybe revival isn’t the right word, arrival perhaps. I really liked this. I was a bit skeptical, given her work with jam musicians. Thought it might be bullshit, but it really isn’t. It’s not just that the band is good–in fact, the band and the Silver Synthetic band could probably trade off and both be fine, minus the harp of course–but that she can really belt it out and is a pretty good songwriter. Moreover, her singing isn’t the kind of tossed off blues rock that makes lots of whites into the jam world get all excited. No, she actually has her own character in the voice.
A-
Boris Kozlov, First Things First
I was unfamilar with Kozlov’s work. He’s a Russian bassist who has been in the U.S. for some time. In fact, outside of Rudy Royston on drums and percussion, I didn’t know anyone in this band, which also includes Donny McCaslin on sax and flute, Art Hirahara on piano and keys, and Behn Gillice on vibes. It’s a pretty straight-ahead post-bop type of session, but one with a ton of character and really first rate playing. Nice cover of Mingus’ “Eclipse” too. Sometimes, the mid-60s feel of a lot of modern jazz frustrates me; the music didn’t stop there and I will argue that the best jazz ever made is being made right now. Even as the mid-60s was an astoundingly great time in the genre, it isn’t better than the best music being made today and some of that is fresher and more interesting than this. But, in terms of those bands really mining the mid-60s vibe, I don’t think you are going to do much better than what you have right here. And for a lot of you, this is very much the kind of jazz you want.
A-
Myra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet, Hear the Light Singing
I saw this wonderful band at Big Ears last year and what a treat it was. Could this be the greatest all-women band in jazz history? With Melford on piano, Mary Halvorson on guitar, Tomeka Reid on cello, Leslie Mok on drums, and Ingrid Laubrock on sax, it has quite the case. As it was live, this is just a fantastic album, especially when they really get going on the longer pieces. All of these musicians are masters, even as most of them are youngish, and in fact, both Halvorson and Reid are official MacArthur Genius Grant winners. But this is very much Melford’s band. She has always deserved more credit and publicity as one of the finest pianists of her generation, but so often hasn’t. And yet just about every Melford-led album I’ve ever heard, I’ve really thought was first rate. Probably none surpass this brilliance though.
A
As always, this is an open thread on all things music and art and none things politics.
I lived near Clarksdale for a while as a small kid, and the rich part of my (very very white) family lived there. Yeah... that place has been fucked hard by the wytes.
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