“The Confederate Sketches of Adalbert Volck” looks at the work of a rebel dentist who became one of the Confederacy’s leading political cartoonists. Unlike most German immigrants, who sided with the Union, Volck was an active rebel who not only fought the Union with his pen, but also smuggled much-needed medical supplies to the South. The exhibit runs until January 21, 2013.
More famous is photographer Mathew Brady, whose portable photographic studio is shown above. “Mathew Brady’s Photographs of Union Generals” make up the second exhibition. Numerous high-quality images of the Union’s leading and lesser-known generals will be on display. The exhibit runs until May 31, 2015.
The exhibitions are part of a continuing series at the National Portrait Gallery marking the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War.
Washington, D.C. is a city of posers. Especially during the annual National Cherry Blossom Festival when camera-toting tourists and locals descend like locusts to D.C.’s Tidal Basin to bask in the ethereal beauty of these Japanese trees in bloom. 100 years ago Monday, 3,020 cherry blossom trees arrived in Washington as a gift from Japan, largely thanks to the efforts of a journalist and traveler named Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, who was also the first female member of the National Geographic Society.
Aside from an incident in 1941 when four of the trees were chopped down in retaliation for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it’s been a century-long love affair ever since. If you visit the Tidal Basin on a warm sunny day, as I did on Thursday, good luck trying to find a place to stand, let alone somewhere to park. Everywhere you walk, you’re intruding on someone’s photo opportunity.
According to the April 2012 issue of National Geographic, Americans took 80 billion digital photos in 2011. By my own calculation, approximately 43 billion of those were taken at the Cherry Blossom Festival. If you think the commuter trains in Mumbai are snug at rush hour, you haven’t tried to see the cherry blossoms in bloom on a sunny day.
Every year, I vow that next year I’ll go see the cherry blossoms on a rainy day, in the middle of the night or, even better, during a lightning storm to avoid the crowds, but somehow that never happens. Still, there’s a magnetic pull that keeps me coming back. When the trees are in bloom, you’ve got to go take a look. It’s kind of like a nude beach — you know it’s just going to be fat guys from Dusseldorf, but you need to see it for yourself.
The Japanese have a special bond to the trees, which they call sakura. The Canadian writer Will Ferguson once hitchhiked through the length of the country, south to north, following the trail of the sakuras blooming and his book, “Hokkaido Highway Blues,”is a hilarious account of his attempt to penetrate the soul of the country.
%Gallery-151319%For me, the best part of the festival is watching people pose for their cherry blossom glamour shots. You see women trying to look seductive, stoic Asian men who pose solemnly, as though they were being booked into a state penitentiary, guys in suits holding their tablets awkwardly to frame photos, and me, taking about 300 photos of my sons for no good reason. Imagine how much that would’ve cost in 1912.
The Internet has brought us many ways to research and book hotels at prices much lower than the hotels’ published rate. Aggregate sites like Kayak and Orbitz give you the best available rate (BAR) without pre-payment on a specific hotel, while “opaque” sites like Priceline and Hotwire allow you to bid for a room below BAR but the actual property remains hidden until after you book and the purchase is non-refundable. Now a new booking site offers you hotel deals well below BAR while ensuring consumers flexibility and a standard of quality.
Guestmob differs from other hotel booking sites by combining high-tech algorithmic pricing and expertly curated properties hand-picked for their high user ratings. The site works by grouping hotels into collections of four to eight properties in a given category and neighborhood. You enter your travel dates and can immediately see a room rate of up to 50% below BAR for each hotel collection. The Thursday before you check in, the exact hotel is revealed but you are guaranteed one of the specific hotels in the collection. Best of all, unlike other opaque booking sites, you can cancel your reservation up to three days before check-in.Previously, some savvy travelers have tried to “game the system” with sites like Bidding for Travel, a forum that tries to guess winning bids and participating hotels on opaque sites by sharing successful bookings. Guestmob removes the need for this research by specifying hotels in each collection and immediately offering a deeply discounted price. While room upgrades, frequent guest points and other requests are still at the discretion of the hotel upon check-in, it’s still a great option for travelers with flexibility.
A Guestmob search for a hotel in Chicago on a weekend in mid-May yielded a price of $164 for a 3.5 star hotel on Magnificent Mile (such as a Courtyard or Embassy Suites), or $203 to bump up to a 4 star in the same area such as a W or Westin Hotel. The same properties ranged from $221 to $279 on other sites. Most Guestmob hotels are part of well-known chains such as Marriott or Starwood, or smaller chains like Kimpton and JDV.
Dupont Circle has never looked quite so moody as it does here, in Flickr user Guillermo Esteves‘ beautiful interpretation of the DC social hub. The black and white starkness of the image contributes to this impression, though it’s really the clouds and the bare trees that nail the late winter atmospherics of this corner of DC.
It isn’t often you get invited to a party with a purpose. But that’s exactly what the Sweetlife Food & Music Festival at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, will be: an all-day extravaganza celebrating the values of “sustainability, community and fun.” Scheduled for April 28, the festival will feature a stellar lineup of musicians, including: Avicii, Kid Cudi, The Shins, Explosions in the Sky, Fitz and the Tantrums, A$AP Rocky, and Fun. In addition, the event will offer healthy, sustainably sourced food options.
The third annual Sweetlife Festival is organized by the founders of Sweetgreen, a northeast chain of eco-friendly eateries known for dishing up fresh, local ingredients and changing the way the country thinks of fast food. This year’s festival will feature twice as many music acts as well as a second stage, called The Treehouse, which will host a roster of emerging artists. Festival-goers will be able to participate in environmentally-focused interactive activities between sets and nosh on munchies from the likes of Jose Andres’s Pepe Truck, Shake Shack, Roberta’s Pizza and Smucker Farms in the Food Forest, presented in cooperation with Serious Eats.
“Our vision is to extend Sweetgreen’s hip and eco-conscious ethos from the table to all facets of the Sweetlife – including the festival fare,” said the press release.
General admission tickets went on sale today and are available for $75 on ticketfly.com.