The Washington Post burns through its share of paper. Its Sunday edition alone, bulked up by a sheath of advertising inserts and classified ads, can tip the scales at around 2½ pounds. That, of course, is just for the people who want it.

The Post Co. also distributes its brand to people who don’t request it. Logan Circle resident Michael Sirvet says he’s been getting something called the Washington Post Shopping Guide “forever.” When he finds the weekly promotional piece in his mailbox, he follows a simple routine that involves throwing it away.

The guide, however, became something more than an annoyance when Sirvet came back from a vacation. “I had 10 days of mail with these two papers smashed up,” says the 41-year-old Sirvet. “It was getting in the way of my other mail.”

The Post, for Sirvet at least, has turned into the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. He claims that since the beginning of this year, he’s called the paper more than 10 times in a futile effort to get himself removed from the mailing list. “The first couple of times, they were nice. After the third or fourth time, I asked to talk to a supervisor,” he says.

“”It just boggles my mind. It’s now kind of humorous in a Kafka–esque way.…It’s a waste of paper,” says Sirvet, a self-described “tree hugger.” After repeated pleas to the Post, Sirvet even called the U.S. Postal Service to ask whether it could stop a particular piece of mail from ending up in his box. The answer was no.

Rima Calderon, vice president for communications and external relations at the Post Co., declined to answer most questions about Sirvet and the shopping guide, including basic ones about who gets the guide and how many editions are mailed out each week. Calderon did say, however, that Sirvet is the only opt-out problem the guide’s staff is aware of.

Last week, Sirvet received the Sept. 18 shopping guide, which contained pullouts from Shoppers and Rite Aid.

“I’m just not a big shopper,” says Sirvet. “I’m not a heavy-duty consumer. There are people who use coupons—I just don’t use them that often.”

(City Paper photograph by Darrow Montgomery)

Borderstan, an in-between hood described here, is inching toward legitimacy here, with its own website.

Dinaw Mengestu reads tonight from his new-in-paperback debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, which recently won the Guardian’s First Book Award. The novel is set against the shifting backdrop of D.C.’s Logan Circle in full-swing gentrification and follows the life of a young Ethiopian immigrant as he struggles to reconcile his new existence with the one he left behind. Like his narrator, Mengestu immigrated to the states from Ethiopia. He was just two when he arrived in Peoria, Ill., and went on to earn degrees from Georgetown and a graduate writing program at Columbia. A critic in the Times described the novel as “a great African novel, a great Washington novel and a great American novel.” It makes sense that a non-native would have a good take on a city where short-timers rule. Tonight’s reading is free. His next reading, on Feb. 29 with Edward P. Jones at the Folger, is $15.

Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. Fri., 2/8, at 7 p.m. Free. (202) 364-1919.

ACKC may sound like a kennel club, but it’s really a cocoa bar, chocolate shop, and art gallery run by business partners Rob Kingsbury and Eric Nelson, who opened the operation last year on 14th Street NW, just up the way from the now-defunct Viridian. ACKC is an acronym for Artfully Chocolate (Nelson’s business in Del Ray) and Kingsbury Chocolates (Kingsbury’s in Old Town), which combined their talents for this first foray into the D.C. market.

Now just months into its existence, ACKC plans to open a second store in the former Sundae Times space in Alexandria, says Kingsbury. The new store, located at 2003A Mount Vernon Ave., is scheduled to open in early March. Unfortunately in this law of confectionary equilibrium, one door opening means another one closing. Nelson plans to close Artfully Chocolate around the time the new ACKC opens.

At 900 square feet, the second ACKC will be less than half the size of the original off Logan Circle. As a result, it won’t have a cocoa bar where you can sit on a stool and yak with the person making your hot chocolate, but it will offer the same chocolate-based drinks named after Hollywood starlets such as Lucy, Joan, Judy, and the rest of those one-name wonders. It will also feature Nelson’s artwork as well as Kingsbury’s chocolates and a small kitchen so patrons can see how chocolatiers go about their work.

Kingsbury says he and Nelson have been approached about opening more ACKCs, but have resisted the calls so far. First starters, neither one has the “time and money right now,” and secondly, neither wants to take on investors just for the sake of expanding. “We’re not looking at [the business] in that corporate sense,” Kingsbury says. “It’s just our business that we’re putting our heart and soul into.”

Via the Dupont Current, perhaps the city’s most web-unfriendly paper, comes a nice tidbit on the popular P Street Whole Foods Market. For the past eight months, reports the community paper, this grocery has sold brewski singles “without major conflict.” And so the Logan Circle advisory neighborhood commission has voted to allow this often-scandalous practice to continue. Even though the Barrel House, right around the corner, isn’t allow to do the same thing–this 14th Street institution can’t sell singles of beer or ale up to 40 ounces, says the Current.

Never before have I seen such yuppie favoritism. Barrel House, you guys should flood the next ANC meeting, as well as the next ABC meeting, and hit up the D.C. Council while you’re at it. Get on the phone with Jack. If that doesn’t work, block Fenty’s SUV with a bunch of kegs. Preferably Heineken kegs.

Novelist Dinaw Mengestu’s debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, has been nominated for the Guardian First Book Award, which was established in 1999 to “reward the finest new literary talent with a £10,000 prize for an author’s first book.” The novel (retitled Children of the Revolution in the U.K.) is set in pre-gentrification Logan Circle; more info on the prize is here, and an interview with Mengestu is here. In February this blog featured a photo essay related to the book.

We have a simple rule for keeping the household shopping bill down: Avoid Whole Foods. To be sure, not every item on the WF shelves is overpriced. In fact, some cereals, pastas, and other staples can be had cheaper at WF than at Safeway or perhaps other, lower-scale grocers. But the problem is that whenever you go to WF, you end up throwing stuff in your cart that you really don’t need.

Like all of those cheaply priced wines spread strategically across the store. For if there is one paragraph that I know is written somewhere in the WF biz plan, it’s this one:

“Despite their high average income, the Whole Foods shopper appreciates a reasonably priced bottle of wine. Whole Foods must use its leverage with distributors and its cachet as a tastemaker to get the best low-priced wines from around the world. Once procured, store managers must place the wines adjacent to foods and delicacies with which they pair well. A store manager shall NEVER create a special wine display for a bottle that costs in excess of $9.99.”

Wasn’t it the late Peter Jennings who said that his great indulgence in life was having a bottle of wine above $10?

Read last week’s cover story, Franklin Schneider’s “Buzz Kill,” and wondering what you can do to remember the millions of bees that have disappeared from the mid-Atlantic states in recent months?

Blogger Herb of DC’s found someone who’s way ahead of the curve in the bee-memorial department. Behind the Garden District nursery on S Street NW just east of 14th, there’s an odd street memorial somewhat reminiscent of the impromptu sidewalk encomiums following a resident’s untimely death, complete with votive candles and “dead soldier” beer bottles.

Chances are this is part of that SiteProjects DC thing—probably the work of Carolina Mayorga, though we haven’t been able to confirm— This is actually part of that SiteProjects DC thing—the work of artists Matthew McGuinness and Eliza Newman Saul—but remember this is about more than art: It’s about the bees.

Earlier this week the Workingman Collective—local artists Janis Goodman, Tom Ashcraft, and Peter Winant—installed 30 bird habitats on 14th Street NW between P and U Streets. The project, titled Site, Cite, Sight, was commissioned by WPA/Corcoran as part of SiteProjects DC, which places a variety of art projects onto that stretch of 14th. You can see the collective’s members in that picture on the right. What’s with the orange jumpsuits? It’s about “interaction with the community,” says Goodman. “When we’re out there in our coveralls, people can come to us and ask us what we’re doing.” Adds Winant: “We’re recognized as doing something that’s an art piece, rather than graffiti artists.”

Site, Cite, Sight, Ashcraft says, is meant to draw city dwellers’ attention to the distinctions between “the environment and the built environment”: the habitats are designed for the Eastern Bluebird, the Black-capped Chickadee, and the Downy Woodpecker, three of the hardest-hit species from the West Nile Virus. (Specific habitat designs are “mainly a matter of the size of the openings,” says Goodman.) The Workingman Collective specializes in work that deals in this sort of urban-natural intersection. In April 2006 the group went to Butte, Mont., to draw a five-mile chalk line that “represents commitment, delineates territory and marks what’s cut and what’s kept.” Earlier this year Ashcraft and Winant headed to the campus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., to install Pine, a wooden ping-pong table intended in part to revitalize a little-used campus quad.

Read the rest of this entry »

Logan Circle then: Hookers and crack. Logan Circle now: Yuppies and Whole Foods. Even a recent D.C. transplant like myself learns that quickly enough. Still, I was happy to come across Dinaw Mengestu’s fine first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, which at least clarifies the point.

The novel is (roughly) set during the late ’80s and early ’90s in Logan Circle, where an Ethiopian refugee named Sepha Sephanos runs a small market at the (nonexistent) address of 1150 P St. NW. It tracks Sepha’s relationship with Judith, a white woman refurbishing a home there, and her mixed-race daughter, Sophia Naomi. A few relevant passages from the book, with images attached, are below.

Mengestu, an Ethiopian native who used to live in Logan Circle and now lives in New York, reads March 2 at the Lansburgh Olsson’s.

“The house Judith was moving into was a beautiful, tragic wreck of a building and had been for years. A four-story brick mansion, it could have played the role of haunted house in any one of a hundred movies or books….The brick was almost obnoxious in its bright shade of red….The house had been abandoned for more than a decade, occupied briefly over the years by homeless men, crack addicts, and a small band of anarchists from Portland.”

Read the rest of this entry »