On a recent visit to the National Gallery of Art, I made a pit stop at the mezzanine bathroom. Only two people stood ahead of me in line, but I still had a long wait: there were just two bathrooms and both were occupied. By the time I finished, the other bathroom was still occupied. My fellow waiters confirmed that no one had come in or out for a long time, at least fifteen minutes. I knocked on the door and got a grunt in response. A man made some noise about being fine, but his slurred sing-song voice sounded far from “OK” and more like really high or really sick. I was concerned enough to mention the matter to a guard, who told me checking on sick folks in the bathroom was “not in my job description.” I mentioned it to another member of the museum staff, who, horrified, sent someone to check in on the situation right away. I never noticed EMTs running through the galleries, so I was probably just being a worry-wort. But still. The museum guards must be pretty disgruntled to refuse to see if the back up in the bathroom line is caused by a dying grandpa.

I am moving this weekend. To honor the occasion, I opened up my top desk drawer. I haven’t opened this drawer in months. I haven’t looked deep inside it in at least a year. I treated it as a museum for my very important papers and receipts and reporter stuff. I don’t think I’ve cleaned it out in eight years. Two days ago, I decided to clean it out.

Here’s a small fraction of what I found (most of which I decided to keep):

• One business card bearing the name of David Catania. Not sure how vintage this card is since he still practices law on the side. But it was his business card for his work as an attorney. I’m gonna date this card from 2000 or so.
• One reporter’s notebook containing pencil on white paper notes from an artifact (remember those?) profiling the Black Cat Guy—Bill Turner. Notebook dates to 1997-1998.
• One D.C. Police Department-issue press pass (yellow with small one-inch-by-one-inch black and white photo taken by Darrow Montgomery). Photo reveals reporter thought big sideburns were cool. Photo and press pass from 2003.
• One tape, the last known recordings of John Thomas Cade Jr. aka “Junior.” Junior was killed in a drive-by shooting on December 27, 1994. His murder remains unsolved. You can read about him here. Tape placed in desk in December 2000.
• Ticket stubs to Cal Ripken Jr.’s second-to-last game ever, a Mekons show at the Black Cat, and Ornette Coleman at Carnegie Hall.
• Receipt for Kay-brand semi-hollow body electric guitar purchased soon after Clinton’s impeachment proceedings for $500-something dollars. Not one complete song ever played on guitar. Receipt and guitar will look awesome in my new apartment’s walk-in closet.

What do you have in your desks?

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival seeks volunteers: It announced today that it is still looking for a few brave souls to work the popular event:

It “needs capable and enthusiastic volunteers before, during and after its annual Folklife Festival, which will be held on the National Mall Wednesday, June 25 through Sunday, June 29 and Wednesday, July 2 through Sunday, July 6.”

The festival is known to be a great time. And it is also infamous for huge crowds and sweltering heat. Read the rest of the press release after the jump.

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Tyler Green’s excellent Modern Art Notes points to an interesting post at daddytypes.com, in which Greg Allen describes a recent visit to the National Gallery of Art with his three-year-old daughter. There, they collide with a docent attempting to explain Clyfford Still’s painting 1951-N to a group of middle-schoolers:

“Who wonders why this is here? Who wonders why it’s even art?” She waits and waits for sheepish hands to keep rising.

“Well, there are curators–do you know what that is? art experts who study and know what art is important enough to be in a museum–curators and art historians and other experts who say this is art, and even if it doesn’t look like it’s about anything and it doesn’t make any sense, you just have to bear with it sometimes.

Allen blows a gasket about all this, finding this attitude destructive to inquisitive minds. But though the docent’s shut-up-and-take-it condescension is clear, this attitude routinely gets dispensed to adults too, even by Smart People. Over the weekend, NPR’s All Things Considered featured a brief story on James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in which poet Paul Muldoon argued, in essence, that you may as well give up trying to understand the damn thing and just try to appreciate it as a sort of music. Why it’s OK to just bear with it with Finnegan’s Wake but not with Still isn’t quite clear to me, but then I haven’t pondered either very closely.

Maybe this is just the tyranny of the middlebrow, but Muldoon and that docent were at least engaging with the art in question. Howard Stern, however, recently reacted to avant-jazz as if he’d just touched a hot stove. And then called in his buddies to make wisecracks about how fuckin’ stupid the fuckin’ stove is.

In April, I reported that the future of the Smithsonian Jazz Cafe, housed at the National Museum of Natural History, was uncertain. At the time, Leslie Whipkey, a marketing volunteer for the program, said she heard the cafe was “operating deeply in the red,” and worried that Smithsonian Business Ventures, which oversees revenue-generating elements of the Smithsonian, was “looking to pull the program.”

Well, according to Business Adventures spokesperson Linda St. Thomas, the jazz cafe is safe—at least for a few more months. “The jazz cafe will continue to the end of the fiscal year, which is Oct. 1,” she said. “After that the museum will seek funding to continue it and it will be continued as a public program rather than a business operation…if they can find funding.”

St. Thomas says the jazz cafe, which was packed with paying customers the night I attended, “is much more expensive than it appears” due to labor costs and the amount of time the area must be closed for set up. “It’s not profit-making,” she says. “But it’s a great public program. The museum loves it and the jazz aficionados love it.”

OK, I admit it. The Posties and their incessant coverage of Tai Shan fascinated me. While a freelancer, I went to the zoo just about every day to check on the hysteria. I took my camera. The gift store has been consistently rich feeding grounds. I mean, do people really buy this wacky shit? A “When You’re a Jet” satin panda jacket??

Both the fever and sales of panda crap died down, of course, as Butterstick the Cute became Dirty Butt the Toddler, still entertaining at times. (Recently I caught him nearly falling out of a tree. This was hilarity itself.)

But now, ta-da, the Post is back, everybody, to drum up panda pride. Only the gift store could be more excited…

Has Knut, the polar bear babe rejected by its mother at the Berlin Zoo and who is 4 months old today, usurped Butterstick’s title as international bear of choice?

The “ice bear,” as the zoo’s translated Web site calls him, gets the May Vanity Fair cover shot by Annie Liebovitz! Sure, he’s included because of the implications of global warming, but my loyalty to Tai Shan tells me that it’s ageist. And Knut is lacking technologically—he may have a blog (only in German), but it’s no Panda Cam.

The National Zoo is, after all, really interested in giving us total access, and, as it happens, TMI. (Fortunately, they have a sense of humor.) For example, their Web site reports on Butterstick’s mom Mei Xiang’s cycle:

Analysis of hormones in her urine as well as vaginal cytology studies confirmed that Mei is in early estrus (also called “periestrus”). On Monday afternoon, we became aware that Mei’s estrus was imminent, based on Tian’s increased intensity and persistence in interacting with Mei. Tian was very interested in approaching Mei’s rear, as well as in standing on her back in some rather haphazard mounts. Mei was not at all pleased with this special attention! She swatted him several times and ran away from him.

Even if Butterstick will grow up not knowing how to have sex, at least, as a friend pointed out to me, he won’t maul baby seals.

It was Friday night at the Smithsonian Jazz Cafe and Frederic Yonnet was warming up the crowd. He cupped his hands over his mouth and broke into a lively harmonica solo. Then, removing the silver rectangle from his lips, he smiled widely. “Is there anybody in the room?” he teased. “Do you want some more? Do you want some more?”

In fact, there were plenty of people in the room that night. The place was packed (it can seat 300) and the audience—a mix of toddlers, teens, tourists and gray-haired Washingtonians—clapped and cheered. Wait-times for tables reached upwards of 15 minutes, and at one point, the line snaked out to the museum gift shop nearby.

And yet, despite its popularity, the cafe’s days may be numbered. “The [Smithsonian] Business Ventures office has told us that it will be continuing until the end of June, but its future after that is uncertain,” says Randall Kremer, spokesperson for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “They have called it a financial issue.”

Smithsonian Business Ventures spokesperson Linda St. Thomas admits that the jazz cafe’s fate “is under discussion.” A decision about the program’s future will be made in June and any conclusions on the subject are “premature,” she cautions.

But that hasn’t stopped D.C.’s jazz fans from rallying around the cafe. Harry Schnipper, owner of Blues Alley in Georgetown, says losing the Smithsonian Jazz Cafe would be a blow for D.C.’s entire jazz scene. “It would be a tragedy if they closed. All jazz boats rise in the same water. Jazz competition is good,” he says.

“It’s one of the few places around town where tourists from the museum can bump elbows with federal workers, local hipsters, and musicians,” Larry Appelbaum, a jazz radio show host at WPFW, writes in an e-mail. “It’s also important that they only charge $10 with no minimum. You can easily spend three or four times more than that at the better jazz clubs around town.”

Ali Ryerson, a Connecticut-based flautist who played at the cafe March 16, says the program is highly regarded among jazz musicians. “I think the Smithsonian Jazz Cafe has a really good name in D.C., but its reputation goes well beyond just D.C.” she says. The cafe is especially renowned for its jazz guitar performances, but she says the “casual atmosphere” makes it appealing to a wide variety of artists. “I’ve been hearing about it for many years,” she says.

Appelbaum says he doesn’t understand why Smithsonian Business Ventures is considering pulling the plug on the program. “I realize that every organization needs to balance artistic vision with the bottom line. But every time I’ve been to the jazz cafe, I’ve seen good audience turnout, so I really don’t know what the problem is. Are they really experiencing a loss or do they just want to maximize a profit for that space? In other words, is the problem financial, cultural or political?” he asks.

Schnipper wonders whether the jazz cafe’s problems are reflective of larger troubles at the Smithsonian. “I just think it’s endemic of the Smithsonian Institution in general. I think they’re undergoing a lot of change with the resignation of their director,” he says.

Actually, financial concerns have been brewing for some time, Kremer says. “I can’t speak to why this is not successful financially, but I can speak to why it’s successful at bringing jazz to the people of Washington, D.C….What our goal is [is] to figure out what we need to do to make the jazz cafe continue.”

Yoko Ono embraces peace, health, prosperity, and wishes, but she can do without sunlight. Descending to the Hirshhorn’s sculpture garden for a press event this afternoon, the petite conceptual artist and rock-star-by-proxy was protected by an umbrella, carried by a factotum of her “Imagine Peace” and “Wish Tree” projects.

Ono’s wish trees arrived in Washington for the Cherry Blossom Festival, which has designated 10 blossoming cherry trees around the Tidal Basin as places for people to attach small pieces of paper containing their written wishes. An 11th wish tree, a white Japanese dogwood in the sculpture garden, is a permanent addition to the Hirshhorn collection. According to Hirshhorn curator Kerry Brougher, who spoke at a press conference following the event, “It’s a major piece.”

Before today, it was a tree, but Ono made it a “piece” by writing a wish and attaching it to a branch. (What did she write? At the press conference, she invoked a “don’t tell” policy.) Others will be encouraged to add their wishes, which will “harvested” by Hirshhorn staff. Ultimately, the hopes and pleas from all of Ono’s designated trees will be stored at the library of the Imagine Peace Tower in—where else?—Reykjavik.

Dressed all in black save for a shiny silver jacket, Ono looked like an art star but acted more like a schoolgirl. As Hirshhorn Director Olga Viso explained the wish tree concept, the artist giggled, shrugged, and nodded. Her own comments in front of the tree were largely inaudible and over in about a minute.

At the press conference in the museum’s auditorium, Ono had the benefit of a microphone, and discoursed at more length on war, peace, and the wish trees. “I never thought this was going to be my ‘hit record,’ ” she said of the project.

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If you’re looking for a soundtrack while you read the various articles and blog posts about Lawrence Small’s resignation from his post as head of the Smithsonian Institution, try If You Ain’t Got the Do-Re-Mi: Songs of Rags and Riches. It’s a compilation of folk songs about money troubles that came out two weeks ago—on Smithsonian Folkways.

The disc is worth a listen if only for Speckled Red’s 1961 track “If I Had a Million Dollars,” which sounds like the ur-text for every raspy-voiced 3 a.m. rumination that Tom Waits ever sang. (The excerpt on the Folkways site only has the piano intro; this page links to a handful of RealAudio files.)

National Museum of Women in the Arts: Not to be outdone by Smithsonian venues that recently have hosted DJ-centric evening events, the private museum is offering “VJ/DJ: After Hours at NMWA.” In addition to having some wine and noshing on tapas, you can check out offerings from Finnish “live cinema artist” Solu, DJ Samantha Waldram, VJ Tesia K, and D.C.’s own First Ladies DJ Collective. Event is tonight, Fri., 3/23, 6 to 10 p.m. $20.

Randall Scott Gallery: Think about furniture and household wares a little differently after seeing the 10-day Josh Urso Design show. The only material used is resin-treated fabric, meaning that a chair that looks like it has a blanket draped over it is, in fact, a chair made of blanket. Apparently they’re still functional. Reception is tonight, Fri., 3/23, 6 to 9 p.m.

Honfleur Gallery: Take the trip to check out the opening reception for the Anacostia gallery’s third show, “Around the World in a Day.” The paintings by Alison Spain are influenced largely by her travels, most recently to Mexico on a Fulbright fellowship. Reception is Sat., 3/24, 7 to 9 p.m.

Transformer: Now that we’ve passed the vernal equinox and the sun’s actually shining, the idea of an exhibit about the “human connection to the natural world” seems just swell. “Natural (dis)Order” features works by recent Corcoran grads Jessica Cebra, Señor Tangcito, and Chad Yencer and Charm City resident Christine Buckton Tillman. Reception with the artists is Sat., 3/24, 7 to 9 p.m.

Slipping a Roger Miller LP off a turntable and replacing it with an Alan Vega disc, Ian Svenonius took a moment to explain how he ended up spinning at the latest edition of Hirshhorn After Hours last Friday. “We wanted to create disjunction,” he said, adding that his set list was created in collaboration with artists exhibiting at the museum. Were there any specific requests? He said that the Adolescents’ “Amoeba” was definitely on tap. If he somehow made the classic punk track work with the Grace Jones disc he pulled out while we spoke, or with the stack of Francine Gall singles stacked by the decks, we didn’t catch it.

Svenonius also noted that his 2006 book, The Psychic Soviet, which promised to “clear up much of the confusion regarding events of the last millennium—artistic, geo-political, philosophical, et al,” has gone into another pressing on Drag City Books. And, in honor of spinning in a building full of sculptures, he struck this pose a la The Thinker:

When it comes to underground dance music, no institution has its finger on the throbbing pulse of D.C.’s dance night scene quite like…the Smithsonian? And when those hip folks at the Smithsonian say “underground,” they mean it—tonight’s “Montreal Underground” will take place at the Smithsonian’s underground Ripley Center.

[E]xplore the sounds and images of the city’s bustling nightlife in Montréal Underground, presented by the Young Benefactors of the Smithsonian. The program spotlights MUTEK DJ Vincent Lemieux and live acts Pheek and Mossa, established ambassadors of the underground minimalist house and techno scene in Montreal. Included in the evening is Washington’s own DJ Menan of Music1DC, completing an awe-inspiring night of creativity and talent, awesome musical creations, and a private viewing of the exhibition “Clash of Empires: The British, French, and Indian Wars for North America, 1754-1763,” in the Ripley Center. There is also an open bar and Young Benefactors Members’ lounge.

Open bar? We’re there. But the Smithsonian as a dance club? It might be slightly stodgy, but it’s decidedly less stabby.