JULY 19, 2020

Midland spins
its own brand
of vintage
country music
Q&A:
Madeleine
Albright

Has the
pandemic
shown us what
the future of
architecture
should be?
BY PHILIP KENNICOTT
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 Art With a Point
Title: “Dismantle. Rebuild.”
Artist: Tara Jacoby, Philadelphia
From the artist: After centuries of
inequity, violence and hate, we have a
renewed chance to rebuild America.
We all need to work to dismantle what has
been so deeply ingrained in our country
and our minds. It’s time to reevaluate and
re-create an America with stronger ideals
and a safer infrastructure for everyone.
The only way we can do this is by actively
working together — every day.
For more art from the magazine’s table of
contents, go to wapo.st/mag-art.
On the cover: Photo of one of the Bosco
Verticale buildings in Milan, courtesy of
Stefano Boeri Architetti
Designing to Survive
As we try to understand the role of architecture post-
pandemic, we have to first better understand the ways
we inhabit buildings and move through space. 10
The Return of Cheatin’ Songs
The country band Midland reclaims vintage styles
from the genre’s history and makes them sound new
again. 18
Opening Lines
Want a Black Lives Matter mural on your downtown
office building? Call this guy. 2
Just Asking
Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. 6
Inside
Date Lab 8 Dining 26 Second Glance 30
Crossword 31 Gene Weingarten 32
7.19.20
Editor: Richard Just Deputy editor: David
Rowell Projects editor: Alexa McMahon
Articles editors: Whitney Joiner, Annys Shin,
Zofia Smardz Dining editor: Joe Yonan Art
directors: Christian Font, Michael Johnson
Photo editor: Dudley M. Brooks Copy editors:
Jennifer Abella, Angie Wu Columnist: Gene
Weingarten Food critic: Tom Sietsema Staff
writer: David Montgomery Editorial aide:
Daniele Seiss Production coordinator: Mark
Giaimo Account manager: Trish Ward
Marketing manager: Travis T. Meyer
Production manager: LaShanda Swancy
Production coordinator: Tyesha Greenwood
Graphic designer: Jill Madsen
Web: wapo.st/magazine
Twitter: @wpmagazine
Instagram: @washingtonpostmag
Facebook: The Washington Post Magazine
Email: wpmagazine@washpost.com
Editorial: 202-334-7585
Advertising: 202-334-5224
Opening
Lines

Want a Black Lives Matter mural on your downtown office building? Call this guy.
BY JESSICA M. GOLDSTEIN

I
f, in early June, you marched or just moseyed by Washington’s newly minted Black Lives Matter
Plaza and its surrounding blocks, you probably saw that downtown office buildings, abandoned for
months as cubicle-dwellers became teleworkers, were boarded up. Plywood covered the few windows
that had been shattered amid protests or protected intact glass from meeting that same fate. It gave
these streets an unsettling feeling in an increasingly uneasy time.
Like the black metal fence that President Trump erected around the White House, the plywood
announced a presumption of hostility and violence. And like that fence, which was barely up a few days
before protesters plastered it with signs and memorial messages for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the
boards were swiftly repurposed into canvases for artistic supporters of Black Lives Matter.
Over the course of June, murals appeared on the plywood: Of two hands signing the “d” and “c” in
American Sign Language against a backdrop that reads, over and over, “Black Lives Matter”; of the stretch of
Swann Street NW where police blocked, pepper-sprayed and arrested protesters, of rowhouses with their
doors flung open, framing the words “We keep us safe”; of three human hearts, ventricles and all, labeled as
“white,” “brown” and “black,” with “human ...and justice for all” spray-painted above and below.
Many of the murals are the work of Radical Empathy, a start-up founded by Tarek Kouddous. Kouddous
grew up in Cairo and came to the District seven years ago to attend George Washington University and now
2 JULY 19, 2020
 A mural near 15th
and H streets NW in
downtown Washington
in early June.
Photograph by Evelyn
Hockstein

THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 3


lives in Logan Circle. He decided in November that he wanted to
do something community-oriented after leaving his job at a
consulting firm focused on federal emergency management. He
formed Radical Empathy as a for-profit company on April 1 to
organize open-air events and collaborate with workplaces on
creating a healthier office culture.
Through Radical Empathy, he has been working on various
“placemaking” projects — finding creative uses for underutilized
public spaces — and to, as he put it, “use beautification as a way
to bring the community together” by, for
instance, painting artwork on utility boxes.
He aims to “take spaces that you walk by every
day that are hiding in plain sight, and you
make them into places of belonging.”
Radical Empathy essentially matches
property owners who want to use their
buildings to make a statement and muralists.
As protests in Washington swelled, Ted
Brownfield of SJG Properties reached out to Kouddous.
Brownfield had boarded up windows on two SJG buildings near
the White House (including one at 15th and H streets, which
formerly housed the Woodward Table restaurant, soon to be a
Cheesecake Factory) and wanted to show support for the Black
Lives Matter movement.
On Thursday, June 4, Kouddous recalled, Brownstein asked
him: Do you know any artists? And can you get the murals up by
Saturday, when some of the biggest demonstrations were
expected to take place? Kouddous said sure, and the project took
off from there. (Brownfield didn’t respond to interview
requests.)
With the green light from SJG, the project, dubbed the “Radical
Plywood Initiative,” got off the ground. Artists submit sketches of
what they’d like to paint; Kouddous, along with partner Suren
Nannapaneni, connects those artists with available spots. Artists
are not paid for their work, but Brownfield — with help from
partners such as Transformer, a nonprofit visual arts organization;
the District Bridges Logan Circle Main Street program, which
provides technical support to businesses; and the Adams Morgan
Partnership Business Improvement District — offers the muralists
4 JULY 19, 2020
From top: Melissa
Carter, left, and Leila
Spolter paint a mural
on Church Street in
Washington in early
June. Tarek Kouddous,
founder of Radical
Empathy. Photographs
by Evelyn Hockstein
(“Radical Artists”) a $250 honorarium to cover supplies and their
time. When the plywood comes down (which could be any minute
and may have happened by the time you read this story), Radical
Empathy plans to auction the artwork, splitting the proceeds
between the artists and local charities.
As of late June, Radical Empathy had facilitated the creation
of 23 murals across D.C., including paintings along P Street NW
and a portrait of George Floyd in Adams Morgan by graphic
designer and illustrator Ragda Noah. When it comes to
supervising the artists, Kouddous takes a relatively hands-off
approach, though he weighs in on some aesthetic considerations
— like having a trio of blue murals side-by-side at 15th and H
streets NW and putting a lime green one around the corner.
Richshaad Ryan, whose renderings of the D.C. flag are a 14th
Street mainstay, was wrapping up his mural at 15th and H — the
D.C. flag inside a heart, surrounded by the words “UNITED WE
STAND” — when a little girl approached, and told her mom that
she also wanted to paint, so Ryan handed her a brush. “So she
got out of the stroller and got busy,” Ryan told me later by phone.
Wasn’t he worried she would mess it up? Nope, he insisted.
“It’s part of the art. … It was just a moment. It was the vibe. The
energy was so high.” All the artists signed their work on the walls
with their names and Instagram handles, and Ryan said he has
been getting tagged by people all over the country who’ve seen
his contribution on social media. “It’s a phenomenal, great
response,” he said. He’s grateful that his artwork can support
Black Lives Matter and uplift people who believe in the cause
but aren’t able to go out and protest. “We are all in different
situations,” he said. “But everybody can help this movement.”
On Radical Empathy’s Instagram account, there’s a link to a
live map that tracks the murals-in-progress, so curious residents
can check out the art as it happens. Knowing new murals are
going up all the time “will bring more attention to the
movement,” Ryan said. “Say you go down there tomorrow and
there’s five done, and your friend goes down on Thursday and
there’s 10 done. You’ll go back to see the ones you didn’t see.”
Jessica M. Goldstein is a contributing writer to The Washington Post’s Arts &
Style section and the Magazine.
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 Just Asking
“There will be disagreements
in every society. The point is to
have discussions with people
with whom you disagree.”
Madeleine
Albright
INTERVIEW BY KK OTTESEN / PHOTOGRAPH BY LAUREN BULBIN
Madeleine Albright, 83, served in the Clinton administration as the
country’s first female secretary of state. Her latest memoir, “Hell and
Other Destinations,” was published earlier this year.
As somebody who has served as a diplomat at the highest
level, how do you assess the state of civil discourse in our
country today?
I think, at the moment, we have proof that it’s been a
disaster. Having a leader pitting one group against another
instead of trying to get a common answer. By the way, the
book that I wrote just before this one was called “Fascism: A
Warning.” The reason I decided to write it was because I was
seeing the rise of authoritarian leaders in a variety of places in
the world and was trying to figure out why that had happened.
So I went back, and obviously looked at Mussolini and Hitler.
Interestingly enough, both came to power constitutionally.
Mussolini was an outsider who was a good speaker and a
mobilizer. He took advantage of that by identifying himself
with a group at the expense of another.
The best quote in the book was from Mussolini, who said,
“If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, nobody notices.”
I was noticing an awful lot of feather-plucking going on.
Obviously in some of the countries in Europe or Philippines or
Venezuela, but also in the United States in terms of groups
that were deliberately setting each other against each other.
That has had something to do with discourse, obviously.
If you were serving as secretary of state in this
administration today, what would you advise the president
to do? And what do you do when you disagree?
First of all, talk about a hypothetical! But I think we are in
a precarious position in terms of America’s image in the world.
I believe that what has happened at the moment is the
secretary of state is not voicing how the State Department
feels about things. He doesn’t seem to be disagreeing with the
6 JULY 19, 2020
president. I have no idea. But I think it’s [his] responsibility.
Seeing protests around the world in support of George
Floyd, it seems that the United States has lost its moral
standing in calling out the atrocities of other governments.
No question about it. And not that I, as a representative of
the United States at various times, thought we were perfect.
We weren’t. But we were talking about how we were dealing
with the immigration issue and definitely about how
minorities were treated with a recognition that we had work to
do. But at the moment, we are like the worst possible example
of things. And it is hurting us. One of the issues where this all
comes up is what’s going on with Beijing and Hong Kong, for
instance. Talking about human rights there, or how the
Chinese treat the Uighurs, there are those who say, “How can
you be telling us what to do given what you’re doing?”
There will be disagreements in every society. The point is to
have discussions with people with whom you disagree, trying
to respect what other people are talking about, why they
believe what they do — some way to find a common answer.
So how would we do that today?
Spend time with people with whom you disagree, and not
yell at each other. Set up groups to talk to each other, to try to
figure out the basis of the disagreement. But — and I think
this has been deliberate — Trump has decidedly taken on
identifying with one group at the expense of another. It has
exacerbated those differences and makes it harder to have
respectful conversations, especially if you act as if the others
are responsible for everything. So I think it’s harder. And with
the virus and the racism, it is essential for people to talk to
each other and to have an understanding of what others’ needs
are. Empathy. Or we’re going to wake up and the chicken is
going to be bald.
This interview has been edited and condensed. For a longer version of
this interview, visit wapo.st/magazine.
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 7
Date Lab WITH STEVE KOLOWICH
This time, she got
to pick her date
Editor’s note: Daters went out before coronavirus outbreak
was declared a pandemic.
J
ill Gonzalez was a contestant on Date Lab’s dating game
during a live event in February, which meant she had to
choose — sight unseen — one of the three men onstage to
take on a date.
Most of the crowd clamored for Bachelor No. 3, who had
won them over with a dead-on impression of Jigglypuff from
Pokémon. Funny guy! But maybe too funny. Jill, 29,
moonlights as a stand-up comic, and she’s not too keen on
competing for the punchline. “I need my guy to have a sense of
humor,” she said later, “but they also have to know that they’re
just not as funny as me.” Her friends would know this, and
signaled to her from the audience by holding up two fingers.
And that’s how she ended up on a date with Bachelor No. 2,
Rob Sale, the not-too-funny guy with the shaved head, neatly
trimmed beard and clear-frame glasses. He wasn’t her type —
none of the three bachelors were, if she’s being honest — but
then again Jill’s type is very specific, and in theory she’s trying
8 JULY 19, 2020
Jill Gonzalez
is 29 and a stand-up
comedian. She’s
seeking someone
“funny, athletic,
smart, humble, not in
sales.”
Rob Sale
is 32 and works in
cybersecurity. He
says: “I am a sucker
for really smart
women with a mean
sense of humor but
kindness underneath.
Also skinny
brunettes.”
Sign up for Date
Lab at washington
post.com/datelab.
to break the pattern. “My type looks like he just got done
skateboarding down his parents’ driveway,” she said. “So that’s
something that I’ll be working on in 2020.”
Rob, meanwhile, could scarcely believe his fortune when he
laid eyes on Jill. “I was just like, ‘Oh, wow,’ ” said the 32-year-
old cybersecurity analyst. “She is just incredibly good-looking. I
was stunned.” They chatted backstage over white wine. Jill was
easy to talk to. His parents who live in the area came over, and
he introduced her. “I was like, ‘You know I was hoping to save
that for much later,’ ” Rob told me later.
Suffice it to say Rob was looking forward to their date. We
sent them to Centrolina, an Italian restaurant downtown. Rob
figured if the evening went well, he’d take her to McClellan’s
Retreat, a cocktail bar where his buddy works. (And if it didn’t
go well, he’d go alone.) “My mind-set was just continually
reminding myself that I was playing with house money,
basically, and not getting too excited about what could
happen.”
Jill’s mind-set was that the date would be a good time,
which is her default approach. She could not remember having
been on a truly bad date. This was not, she assured me, because
she has excellent taste in men. Maybe it was force of will, or the
fact that she could redeem any awkward or crappy moments for
stand-up material. But for Jill to have a bad time, she said, the
guy would have to be spectacularly bland.
Not a problem in this case. Rob knew about wine (and
PHOTO: DANIELE SEISS
ordered a bottle of Barbera d’Asti in
an impressive Italian accent). He
knew about sports, and had a ton of
hobbies: He’s in two soccer leagues,
does competitive karaoke (!), is on a
pub trivia team. At one point he
somehow zagged from talking about
the Atlanta Hawks to talking about
William Faulkner, and she had to stop
him because she’d lost the thread.

design
(Rob doesn’t recall the connection
either — “Probably something about
how they’re both depressing and

trends
Southern,” he says.) Still, Jill says it
was “refreshing to not just talk about
the same things on a first date.”
For Rob, things picked up right
where they left off at the Date Lab
event, with Jill charming him with her
wit, confidence and good looks. “I
learned that she’s a very driven
person,” he said, and was left with no
doubt that she would succeed in
stand-up comedy. More than that, ISSUE DATE:
though, she was just fun to talk to. So
far, so good as far as Bachelor No. 2 August 30, 2020
could tell.
Except here’s something else that
Rob learned: Jill was moving to New
York in a matter of weeks. It came up
while he was asking her about her
comedy career. “It was deflating, I
guess,” he said later. “But not fully.”
After dinner, he coolly suggested they
go to McClellan’s, and off they went.
But before you start composing
poems to star-crossed love in the
comments section, this was not
destiny foiled by geography — or
epidemiology, for that matter. His
decision not to go in for a kiss when
they said goodbye, sometime after
2 a.m., she said, was the right one. He
was a “great hang,” Jill told me, but it
was “not a romantic connection.”
It was a date that led nowhere, but
it was, at least, a healthy exercise in
getting excited about what could
happen in a world where people look
forward to spending carefree hours in
the company of near-strangers. And
that’s something we’ll all be working
on in 2020, if we’re lucky.

RATE THE DATE

Jill: 3.5 [out of 5].
Rob: 4.5.

UPDATE
They texted a bit but didn’t go out
again before Jill moved to New York
City a few weeks later.

Steve Kolowich is a Post Style editor.

TO ADVERTISE, CONTACT YOUR MAGAZINE ACCOUNT MANAGER OR

TRISH WARD AT TRISH.WARD@WASHPOST.COM OR 202.334.5224.
 As we try to understand the role of architecture post-pandemic,
we have to first better understand the ways we inhabit buildings and move through space
STORY BY PHILIP KENNICOTT

D E S I G N I N G

10
D E S I G N I N G T O S U R V I V E
I
n the spring of 2002, a curious building took shape just off
the shore of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland. It looked like a
bare industrial platform surrounded by a mesh of tubes and
scaffolding. But the structure had an “on” switch, and when it was
flipped, the open-air decks were transformed. Water from the
lake was pumped at high pressure through 35,000 nozzles,
aerosolized into a fine mist that became a cloud of vapor
engulfing the whole thing. Visitors to the Swiss Expo, for which
the building was designed, could enter the cloud, move around in
it, ascend just above it and experience the curious effect of having
the world blurred away and dissolved in artificial fog.
The Blur Building, created by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo
Scofidio, was one of the iconic architectural events of the new
millennium. It was a temporary structure that served no purpose
other than to delight and perhaps provoke its visitors, to offer
them an experience apart from ordinary cares and concerns. But
that experience also made tangible dreams that have animated
architects for a century at least — to create spaces in which the
interior and the exterior flow into one another, to dematerialize
buildings from stone and steel to something more fluid, dynamic
and permeable.
“The public can drink the building,” the designers wrote. The
project also created space without enclosure, in which people
were invited to move with no set patterns of circulation, no
hallways or corridors or walls to guide or contain them. It was,
seemingly, an architecture of total freedom.
Imagine if that building were being proposed today, in the
middle of a pandemic, when the first association of the word
“aerosolize” isn’t fog, mist or clouds, but the product of a cough or
sneeze, laden with a dangerous virus, a vector for death. Now that
everyone on the planet must carefully weigh the benefits and
dangers of crossing the threshold between private and public
space, between indoors and outdoors, can we salvage anything of
the old fantasy of erasing these boundaries? When the best hope
for slowing and containing the coronavirus is the careful
regulation of movement and strict observance of social distanc-
ing, what happens to our desire for buildings that celebrate
wandering, promiscuous exploration and spontaneous social
interaction?
As covid-19 spread from China to the world, and became a
pandemic with devastating effects on national health-care sys-
tems and the world economy, architects found themselves in the
same position as everyone else: shut indoors, nervous about the
future and scrambling to remain relevant and necessary as clients
fled or postponed major projects. The shutdown hit the industry
hard, with the Architectural Billings Index, which is used to
project nonresidential building prospects, experiencing its larg-
est single-month decline since the American Institute of Archi-
tects developed the economic indicator 25 years ago. By April,
more than 8 in 10 architectural firms surveyed by the AIA had
applied for federal Paycheck Protection Program loans.
Suddenly, the profession was at a crossroads. Was this a time
for quick, targeted, pragmatic responses to a built environment
that no longer felt safe, or was this a revolutionary moment, a call
to rethink everything? In March, news from the architecture
world was all about postponed lectures, closed offices and
canceled conferences. On March 26, Michael Sorkin, one of the
country’s most outspoken voices on urban design and architec-
ture, died of complications from covid-19. He had been a revered
educator and an inspiration to some of the most progressive,
socially minded architects working today. His loss was a blow to
the field. By April, the architecture and design community was
flooded with webinars and online talks and cyber conferences,
addressing a range of issues as vast as the profession itself: How
12 JULY 19, 2020
to turn convention centers into hospitals and how to make
overcrowded hospitals safer. But also, how to “turn your home
into a sanctuary” and how to 3-D-print face shields at home.
Some thinkers were making big connections (one architect
offered “a new design model [that] can curb the environmental
destruction that contributes to pandemics”). Others were con-
necting the pandemic to familiar, favorite issues: “The coronavi-
rus has created an opportunity to improve the pedestrian
experience in our cities and towns. ...”
This was architecture being architecture. The purview of the
field is as specific as doorknobs and light switches, and as
far-reaching as global transportation infrastructure and commu-
nication networks. The profession is intensely practical, often
highly specialized and sometimes maddeningly theoretical, and
the sudden, seemingly chaotic burst of responses to the pandemic
is simply how it collectively thinks. But there was an urgency
driven by more than just the mounting death toll from the virus.
Enlightened designers know that our cities need to be dense
and connected if we are to avoid the environmental problems of
the mid-century suburb and a car-based culture. Tall buildings,
with elevator cores, help increase density. Urban life must also be
full of interaction and social energy if we are to live happily in
proximity. Social stability across the generations requires that we
live in fluid, multigenerational communities, integrating rather
than isolating or alienating the young, the working-aged and the
elderly. Yet covid-19 has threatened all of this, not just high-
minded ideas about dense, socially diverse, democratically en-
gaged cities, but also the way we inhabit buildings and move
through space.
In big cities around the world, people eyed each other warily
over face masks, moving to the edges of the sidewalk, hugging the
entryway to buildings, letting the elevator pass rather than join
other passengers in a confined space. Images emerged of ice rinks
turned into impromptu morgues. On television, Americans saw
family members gather outside the windows of senior living
facilities, where their parents and grandparents were dying in
record numbers. They stood unprotected from the elements,
among spindly ornamental bushes, putting their hands to
windows above them, seeking communication with people on the
other side of plywood walls clad with aluminum siding. This
wasn’t just a social tragedy; it was a mark of architectural failure
and a real-time example of how people will spontaneously
repurpose buildings if those buildings aren’t serving them well.
Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people, including many
architects, were confronting the inadequacies of their own
domestic spaces: small apartments, clustered around empty
event spaces and workout rooms that weren’t safe to use, with
laundry available only in the basement. Open-plan suburban
houses, with vast interiors, lacked sufficient partitions to keep
people with the virus apart from those without it. As weeks of
isolation turned into months, and as the fear of a rise in infections
grew with the approach of summer, these inadequacies seemed to
forge a new consensus, not fully articulated but widely felt:
Architecture is about rights, about air, about equal access to the
necessities of life.
As the pandemic continues, and as architects are emboldened
by the growing realization that this is a transformational moment
that could topple old hierarchies, and even capitalism as we know
it, they are thinking about the legacy of modernism and its
promise to remake the world. Is it possible that architecture
could be broadly political, as it once was, but more effective?
Could it undertake projects larger than walkable cities and
energy-efficient high-rises? Could it aim for something bigger
than the creation of buildings in which we live, work and die,

something more like an environment that surrounds us, protects
us and inspirits us? Could architecture, like the world the virus
was threatening, become organic?
I
n the spring, as the pandemic spread, Hashim Sarkis
published a book he had been working on for years, while
managing the details of the now postponed 2020 Venice
Biennale of Architecture, for which he was the curator. Sarkis, the
dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, had
written a survey of projects by architects who designed (though
rarely built) often fantastical structures on a global scale. Written
with Roi Salgueiro Barrio and Gabriel Kozlowski, “The World as
an Architectural Project” explores designs akin to the Blur
Building in their speculative and sometimes playful ambition,
but bigger, more utopian and sometimes dystopian.
It includes a short analysis of Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New
Babylon, described as “a camp for nomads” on a planetary scale, a
vision of a new world in constant flux, catering to the creative
whims, energies and shifting impulses of a society liberated from
the necessity of work. And critical commentary on a plan for a
Continuous City, by the British architects Alan Boutwell and
Michael Mitchell, which would encircle the Earth like a vast
elevated bridge, incorporating the social, domestic and infra-
structural necessities of a highly technical society into a single
megastructure.
“As architects, we are condemned to optimism,” Sarkis says in
an interview. “Our field is necessarily about proposing and
imaging new things, what the world could be through making a
part of it better.”
His book is more than a compendium of wild ideas from the
past, and these unrealized projects are part of an essential
tradition of “paper” architecture that keeps the field intellectually
lively and grounds actual buildings in a larger theoretical
discourse. Many of these ideas — often made in response to
discontent with the reigning dogmas of the era in which they were
PHOTO ON THIS PAGE: PASCAL ROSSIGNOL/REUTERS; PREVIOUS PAGES: BEAT WIDMER/COURTESY OF DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFRO
This page: A plastic
sheet separates
visitors from residents
inside a bubble room
at a retirement home
in Bourbourg, France,
in May. Previous
pages: The Blur
Building, featuring fog
made from water from
Lake Neuchâtel in
Switzerland.
conceived — also trace the contemporary fault lines of the
profession today as it grapples with an accelerating pace of chaos
and crisis: not just a pandemic, but social and economic
inequality, entrenched racism and environmental collapse. Some
of the projects Sarkis analyzes tended toward creating isolated,
self-sufficient architectural entities — giant safe zones — while
others sought to integrate the world into a seamless whole. Some
looked for redemption through technical or scientific solutions;
others posited anarchic, earthy new utopias. But none of the
architects thought small.
“We are entangled and exhausted by a procedural thinking,”
says Sarkis, who stresses what he calls “the imaginary,” the
inherent power of architecture to visualize and suggest new
possibilities. “Rather than say ... is it worth it or not? Can we get
there or not? Let’s imagine it, let’s figure out how to get there.”
“I don’t want to throw a technical solution at this,” architect
Michael Murphy says of the challenge architects confront with
covid-19. Murphy is founding principal and executive director of
MASS Design Group, a Boston-based firm that defines itself as a
catalyst “for economic growth, social change, and justice.” His
comment is interesting, given the particular attention and
practical expertise he and his firm have devoted to the health-
care industry. Murphy’s group was instrumental in designing the
National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala.,
which memorializes African Americans killed by lynching. It is
the most powerful and significant memorial created in this
country since Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but it is
Murphy’s earlier work, on health-care facilities in Africa, that has
established his reputation as an essential voice in the field.
His 2011 Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda was designed to
use sustainable and mostly low-tech means, including natural
ventilation, high ceilings, external corridors and low-speed fans
to minimize the transmission of airborne diseases. Critics have
praised how its natural stone walls and red roofs are fitted into a
hilly landscape, how its bright, open interiors seem to gather and
hold light in a quiet stasis. But the building was also conceptual-
From left: A worker outside Bosco Verticale in
Milan; the Johnson Wax headquarters, designed
by Frank Lloyd Wright.
ized to promote healing at a deeper level by using local labor for
construction, local building materials and techniques, making it
a collective project and an economic engine in a country still
suffering the social trauma of the 1994 genocide.
Murphy is in demand today to talk about how to rethink
hospitals and health-care facilities. But he doesn’t think that such
practical responses will be the legacy of the pandemic. The
architect is more interested in a broader paradigm shift in a field
that is grappling with a troubling thought: The buildings that
many of us live and work in offer little sense of comfort, safety or
sustenance.
“I think this is one of our great existential moments in the built
environment,” Murphy says. “We’ve lost touch with the public’s
understanding of what the built environment is supposed to do.
Those questions were kind of academic, but now they are present
in everyone’s daily life. The built environment is threatening us.”
The pandemic has made the theoretical and philosophical
immediate, not just to architects, but to everyone stuck indoors.
“That offers us some really unique opportunities and some true
questions of accountability and ethics about what we build, what
we have built and what we invest in in the future,” says Murphy. “I
think this intersects with questions of ethics and morality and
equity that are now present to everybody.”
Kulapat Yantrasast, founding partner and creative director of
the Los Angeles-based wHY Architecture, puts it another way:
He isn’t interested in your mudroom. By which he means that he
isn’t interested in addressing the immediate need for small-bore,
surgical interventions to keep the virus at bay. And he certainly
14 JULY 19, 2020 PHOTOS FROM LEFT: COURTESY OF STEFANO BOERI ARCHITETTI; COURTESY OF SC JOHNSON
isn’t interested in the “mudroom,” which stands for a whole nexus
of architectural jobs revolving around the needs and wants of
moneyed elites, like improving the sanitary cordon of a McMan-
sion’s entryway.
“The profession is focused on being hired to solve problems, to
sanitize spaces, to plan offices better, or shopping malls better, or
hotels,” Yantrasast says. “We can do all that very well. We
understand how to use UV light, density, materials. But we have
not really been deep in our mission.”
Scattered, targeted responses, such as antimicrobial surfaces
and touchless elevators, he says, “don’t constitute a philosophy or
a direction.” And architects who hang out a shingle that says, “We
can save you,” Yantrasast says, are just addressing “the low-hang-
ing fruit.” Architecture, he argues, needs to radically change
toward a service profession, working not in isolation, but across
disciplinary boundaries, approaching projects not just as prob-
lems to be solved with steel, concrete and glass, but as social
problems and needs that demand wider, more holistic solutions.
All of this can sound a bit vague, like the inspirational but
vaporous language one hears at professional symposiums and
TED Talks. We need architecture that is sustainable, flexible,
adaptive, responsive and local, but without being parochial. But
we also need architecture that is cosmopolitan and smart,
engaged and connected. It seems we want an architecture that
does everything. But what does that look like in real life?
P
andemics are a spatial problem,” says David Benjamin,
associate professor of architecture at Columbia University
and a founder and principal at the Living, a New
York-based research and design group that fuses biological
insight with design practice.
In September 2018, he and his colleagues opened an exhibi-
tion at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture called
“Subculture: Microbial Metrics and the Multi-Species City,”
which explored the microscopic biodiversity of city life. Using the
analogy of the microbiome — the idea that every human plays
host to a unique colony of microbes — the exhibition speculated
that cities and neighborhoods have characteristic biomes. The
exhibition had a larger argument, about how a “culture of
cleanliness” in our architecture and urban design was self-defeat-
ing. This fetish for sterile environments — and environments that
look sterile — included using materials, such as concrete
designed to repel bacteria and sanitized Sheetrock, that were
ultimately isolating us from the healthy multiplicity of the
biological world.
When the exhibition opened, it was meant to be thought-pro-
voking and suggestive, rather like the Blur Building and the paper
architecture of Sarkis’s book. Wooden tiles, cut in such a way as to
maximize their receptivity to microorganisms, were affixed to the
exterior of the building and periodically sampled to track the
accumulation of microbes and other visitors. Benjamin was
looking at how microorganisms move through space, how they
can be detected and tracked, how living entities might be used as
sensors — just as mussels can be used to track pollution in water.
He was speculating about how smart, networked buildings could
help trace and track the movement of microscopic life, and
potentially pathogens. And the larger architectural argument
Benjamin had been making — that the seemingly sanitary,
modernist glass-and-steel box, shut from the outside with its own
HVAC system, wasn’t serving us well — never seemed more
urgent.
On one level, “pandemics are a spatial problem” is simply a call
for architects to be directly engaged with the issue. They are
trained to deal with spatial problems: how one space relates to
another, how rooms flow into each other, how they are connected
by corridors and how their volumes interrelate. But at a deeper
level, Benjamin is saying that the pandemic touches on every-
thing; it transpires throughout the totality of the three-dimen-
sional world we inhabit, influencing and influenced by every
relation of one thing to another. The pandemic, and the problems
it has highlighted and exacerbated, is as inescapable as space, or
life.
“The crisis of the pandemic is highly related to the crisis of
climate change, and to the economic crisis,” he says. “We can’t
and shouldn’t address one alone, and we must address all three
together. That means designing with uncertainty and with
invisible forces in mind.”
That’s a very different formulation from how architects
considered design projects in much of the past century, and it
reveals how much the fundamental metaphor governing build-
ings is changing. Throughout much of the 20th century, build-
ings were conceived of as machines. There was a definite problem
to be solved, and the building was designed as a tool to solve that
problem. A house is a machine for living in, wrote the Swiss-
French architect Le Corbusier in a 1923 manifesto, a phrase that
has been distilled to an all-purpose slogan suggesting that all
buildings are somehow machines. But machines are good at
doing a very specific set of tasks, and they almost always become
obsolete, often quickly.
“I think we need to lose the machine,” says George Ranalli, a
New York-based architect and former head of the architecture
program at City College of New York.
“They’re not even machines,” says Ranalli’s wife and partner,
Anne Valentino, who is a psychologist. “They are designed like
consumer products: They have a case and a screen.” And they do
one or two things well, for a while, and quickly end up in the
dump, superseded by a new product. That sense of disposability is
an environmental problem, and it makes the built environment
seem alien, a part of the corporate landscape of consumerism, not
something we inhabit, tend, care for and love.
The machine as metaphor has been on the way out for a few
decades now, but its replacement — the building as a living
organism — has been slow to gain widespread acceptance.
References to the organic world exist throughout architecture,
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 15
from the forestlike interiors of Gothic architecture to Frank Lloyd
Wright’s lily-like columns of his Johnson Wax headquarters in
Wisconsin to green buildings. Green buildings, like a pair of
“vertical forests” built in Milan, also reference the idea in their
emphasis on sustainability, and biomimicry — the use of
biological forms as a basic inspiration for design — is a
fashionable subset of contemporary design. But the pandemic
may hasten a universal and pragmatic acceptance of these ideas
and other even more far-reaching ones. Not only has it made a
few billion people more intimately aware of the larger, organic
world, and our contingent place in it, but it has also demonstrated
in real time the interconnections between social, economic and
environmental problems. No single metaphor seems big enough
to encompass how we think about this array of crises, and the old
metaphors deployed at moments of crisis in the past — let’s
mount a War on Poverty or a crusade against hunger — seem
entirely ill-suited to a moment when everything wants healing,
nurturing, sustenance and connection.
The metaphor that equates a building or urban space to a
living thing takes different forms, from analogies to basic
biological processes to a wider sense that while buildings emerge
from mankind’s technical prowess, they also reflect a deeper
sense of humanism. They breathe, excrete and circulate air and
fluids, but they also think and perhaps feel. Buildings, neighbor-
hoods and cities, and the natural landscape into which we insert
them, have rights, and those rights must be negotiated.
“I’ve come to believe that breathing and the access to clean air
is a fundamental issue,” Murphy says. “Breathing is an architec-
tural and spatial problem.”
It is about things as basic as materials that inflame asthma, or
neighborhoods encased within highways that befoul the air. But
it’s also about access to open space, buildings with functioning
windows and domestic spaces that breathe. There is also a bigger,
metaphorical sense of existential comfort in the idea of breathing,
as in spaces, places and environments that allow us to “breathe
easy.”
“What is clean air?” Murphy asks. “Not just pathogens, or
toxins, off-gassing building materials, releasing carbon into the
atmosphere. Air, when it becomes spatialized, offers us this
window into these broader needs and questions.” We can survive
for a while without light, but we can’t survive without air, so air
makes old architectural questions more urgent: Whose office is
near the open window? Who gets a big, airy house that fronts
onto a park, and who gets a small apartment that faces a fetid
alley? These questions recur at a national and global scale when
we think not just about pollution, but how pollution travels, how
fires, man-made and naturally occurring, erase forests the entire
planet needs to breathe and send giant plumes of smoke over
cities inhabited by people who live hundreds of miles from the
flames. Modernism privileged light as an aesthetic commodity,
because it enabled us to see; organic architecture privileges air,
which enables us to live.
s the pandemic was shutting down the University of
A California at Los Angeles, architecture student Jacob
Sertich, 26, was finishing his senior project. Working with
the Japanese architect Hitoshi Abe, Sertich was studying an
interesting idea: Could senior housing be inserted into busy,
dynamic, mixed-use buildings, such that the elderly had access to
the full panoply of urban life? How might a high-rise with shops
and offices and transit connections be adapted so that people
dealing with the physical challenges of aging might live richer,
more connected lives?
16 JULY 19, 2020
Visitors head toward
the Blur Building in
Switzerland.
And then the pandemic made it painfully obvious that, to stay
safe and healthy, elderly people needed to be isolated from the
free flow of the virus. “I was caught up in this research when this
all still made sense, and it seemed like an inevitable architectural
trend,” Sertich says. “Now, having wrapped up my project, which
dealt with co-living for the elderly, which reduced social isolation,
there were basic questions of whether those models can work.”
Sertich submitted his work, and it took the top award for a
graduate research project in architecture at UCLA. But he’s been
rethinking all of it. And there are no easy answers. In Italy, where
the elderly often live closely integrated with their families, they
were susceptible to the virus brought into domestic spaces by
younger relatives. In the United States, where older people are
too often segregated in facilities staffed by underpaid workers
who live in inadequate housing, use crowded public transit and
sometimes work several jobs to make ends meet, seniors have
been dying at appalling rates. What is the answer?
Architecturally, there isn’t one. This is a social problem, an
economic problem, a moral problem. Sertich’s answer speaks to a
new humility in the profession: “You can’t find a solution if you
are the one mastermind behind the design.”
Yet the exciting thing today is that this sense of humility is now
joined to a resurgent sense of ambition. That makes the current
moment of social and political activism different from earlier
inflection points in the recent history of architecture. Unlike the
1980s and ’90s, when many architects turned inward into
theoretical discourses that grew increasingly detached from
practical building issues, and from the larger public, there is now
a feeling that architecture must be, and can be, both theoretical
and pragmatic. And unlike the 1960s, the era that saw many of
the megaprojects discussed in Sarkis’s book about global archi-
tecture, the ambition is tempered by the understanding that pure
imagination is insufficient, unless informed by things like
observation, listening, collaboration and practical insight.
Yantrasast goes so far as to say that architecture as we used to
know it will disappear. “I do not think that architecture will
continue to exist by itself,” he says. “It will integrate itself with
other things. The discipline has realized that the isolation from
life, from social knowledge and discourses, has harmed us.”
And how would he suggest young architects further that
evolution? Make friends. Read everything. Engage. “If you have
friends across the disciplines, you will understand what these
disciplines need from you.”
And what of projects like the Blur Building? Do they belong to
the pre-covid era when architects could shoot to stardom by
building something dazzling, buildings with no particular pur-
pose other than to make the mind dance and engage the senses?
Is the playfulness of the Blur Building, and the dark irony of many
of the world-encompassing projects surveyed by Sarkis, a relic?
“I am very proud of that project, but when we [think about] it
today, certainly atomized particles in the air are infectious,” says
the Blur Building’s co-designer, Liz Diller, now a principal at
Diller Scofidio + Renfro. “If the length of a sneeze can determine
safe distance to somebody else, then it does make us think about
this atmosphere as a potentially negative thing, that air could
carry a virus or contagion.”
She trails off, and then begins thinking aloud. The Blur
Building helped make her firm one of the most sought-after in the
world. Among its projects is the 2009 High Line, the elevated
railroad converted to a fashionable park in Manhattan. Closed
during the pandemic but scheduled to reopen on July 16, the
High Line is usually crowded, full of people flowing past one
another in tight but open-air spaces. Diller, speaking before the
reopening had been scheduled, wonders if it could be made
one-way to limit possible exchange of the virus (and that is now
the plan). Or perhaps, through careful entry and exit patterns,
people can be spread out so they aren’t bumping into each other.
“I have been thinking a lot about atmosphere,” Diller says. And
also about time, the “fourth dimension.” Time, she says, may be
the new critical element to architecture and urban space, just as it
is the critical thing that distinguishes a living thing from an
inanimate machine. She isn’t turning back from the old promise
of the Blur Building, the ideals of freedom and engagement and,
yes, delight. But maybe the High Line can be pulsed with people,
spread out through the day, which might be a model for the city at
large, just as dense and dynamic as it always was, but throbbing
with life around-the-clock so that streets and subways are a little
less crowded.
In retrospect, the Blur Building looks as prophetic of a
post-covid world as it is emblematic of the pre-pandemic one. It
had much of the old machine about it, with water nozzles and
pumps, and a sleek, machine-age aesthetic in its materials and
assemblage. But it also made people keenly aware of some of the
issues explored in Benjamin’s 2018 project at the Storefront for
Art and Architecture. How do small particles move? What kind of
miasmas surround us, and how do we relate to them?
“That building was for us really, really important because it
proved that buildings don’t have to have walls and they don’t have
to have a program,” Diller says. In 2002, that expressed an ideal
of pure freedom. Today, it might better express an ideal of pure
PHOTO: COURTESY OF DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFRO
adaptability.
The pandemic, she says, “is a problem that is going to be solved
by medicine and not cured by architecture. But notions of
flexibility are the way that our studio is going to go forward. It
isn’t just the virus; it is the change of the speed of society, where
[the old] architecture [was] too slow to react, and very geo-fixed
and heavy and expensive.
“The way to think about architecture to prevent its obsoles-
cence is to stress things like lightness, adaptability, suppleness,
the ability to think about program change, the ability to think
about sudden economic changes and population increases. This
kind of adaptability to economic, environmental, political change
is really, really critical for the discipline to become important,
vibrant and connected to what is happening.”
There’s a curious echo in these words, which express an
organic idea of lightness, adaptability and suppleness, of one of
the most famous statements ever made about the design of
buildings — that form must follow function. The words were
written by the great American pioneer of the high-rise, Louis
Sullivan, a generation before Le Corbusier defined buildings as
machines. They seem to encapsulate the machine-age of archi-
tecture, but Sullivan wrote them in a context that has been all but
forgotten: “Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the
open apple-blossom, the toiling workhorse, the blithe swan, the
branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds,
over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is
the law.”
The problem, it seems, wasn’t the modernist ambition to
remake the world. It was an image, a mistaken mental picture of
what a building should be, that led so many architects astray.
They looked to the world of machines, to automobiles and home
appliances, which were transforming the planet and daily life,
and that world seemed, for a time, full of infinite possibility. But if
they had looked to the living world — blithe, winding, sweeping
and drifting alongside us — they would have found something
better than a machine. If they had gotten out into the open air,
they would have realized that they needed something more
encompassing than a picture or a metaphor. They needed an idea
capacious enough to include not just buildings or cities. They
needed to think not about things but beings, and not in isolation.
A virus is giving our planet a remedial lesson about how we are all
connected, and architecture may be the science that consolidates
this terrible but liberating new wisdom.
Philip Kennicott is a Washington Post staff writer.
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 17
 The

18 STORY BY CARLO ROTELLA / PHOTOGRAPH BY HARPER SMITH

 Before the pandemic
the band Midland had arrived
on the verge of country stardom
by reclaiming vintage styles
from the genre’s history and making
them sound new again

hey’re Bringing Back Cheatin’ Songs

 O
n the highway out to Goliad, Tex., driving through open country past
chemical plants and horse-head oil derricks and the occasional
scatter of pastured cattle, Midland’s “Cheatin’ Songs” came on a
Houston country radio station. It was March 2, Texas Independence
Day. Midland would be playing a dance hall outside Goliad that
night, and on the following night would play the opening of the
Houston Rodeo at NRG Stadium. Other stars lined up for subse-
quent nights at the rodeo included Lizzo, Chance the Rapper, Willie
Nelson — big-time company. This would be Midland’s biggest
headlining gig to date, though the coming of covid-19 cast a shadow
over it. The pandemic still felt far away at the moment, a coastal crisis
that hadn’t really hit the heartland yet, but Nashville’s Cassandras
were already foretelling a long hiatus in live shows brought on by the
imminent national shutdown. (Midland’s Washington-area tour
stop in Bristow, Va., scheduled for July 18, has been canceled.) The
music industry’s touring-centered business model would crash, at
least temporarily interrupting Midland’s unlikely rise to the top.
To a traditionalist’s ear, “Cheatin’ Songs” sounds like just about
the countriest thing on country radio — a somebody-done-some-
body-wrong song of a sort that was all the rage 40 or 50 years ago,
with achingly tasteful pedal steel guitar setting off lyrics that manage
to be anguished and clever at the same time. Slipping her engage-
ment ring into the pocket of her tightfitting jeans, the unnamed
cheater is not only breaking the singer’s heart, she’s taking him and
the rest of us on a time-travel journey: “She’s bringin’ back cheatin’
songs / The kind of hurt that gets you singin’ along / Somethin’ circa
1973 / She’s lyin’ with him and she’s lyin’ to me.” Three-part harmo-
nies gild his tale of woe with a stylishness that suggests itself as a balm.
To a non-traditionalist’s ear, the song’s back-to-the-’70s feel
brings up other period associations that stray far from the honky-
tonk mainline running from Hank Williams through Merle Hag-
gard. Midland’s high harmonies and the studied unction of its sound
have prompted frequent comparison to the Laurel Canyon country-
rock of the Eagles, which Midland’s members admire to the point of
worship. But “Cheatin’ Songs” sounds less like the Eagles than it does
like what would happen if Player or Little River Band or some other
scrupulously coifed soft-rock outfit of the era teamed up with Conway
Twitty, and they recruited a bunch of high-end session players who
had worked with both Tammy Wynette and Steely Dan. Velvety-ele-
gant, wistful, louche, the song stands out amid the twanged-up arena
anthems, turbo-folkish club thumpers and singer-songwriter ear-
nestness that dominate country radio, which still plays an essential
20 JULY 19, 2020
role in deciding who gets to be a star.
Like a cutting-edge vintage shopper, Midland chooses the coolest
old stuff and repurposes it in a way that feels new and seems effortless.
The top-tier Nashville songwriter Josh Osborne, who along with
fellow hitmaker Shane McAnally works closely with the band on
many of its songs, told me, “With Midland, we write songs like it’s the
’70s and record them like it’s the ’90s” — with the crispness of
production that characterized the ’90s records of neo-traditionalists
like Dwight Yoakam and George Strait — “and hope they work in
2020.”
Bands that succeed and last are rare in country music, which for
generations has heavily favored a system that surrounds a star
personality with super-competent but anonymous sidemen drawn
from Nashville’s bottomless talent pool. But Midland is a genuine
trio: Mark Wystrach is the frontman, Jess Carson plays guitar,
Cameron Duddy plays bass, Jess and Cam sing harmonies, and all
three write songs. They formed the band in 2013 after discovering
their musical chemistry at jam sessions they held when they were all
together in Wyoming for Cam’s wedding. Mark and Jess were in their
30s by then, with Cam not far behind, all of them already veterans
who had knocked around the music business without notable suc-
cess. They had to convince themselves as well as their significant
others (all three are married, with kids) that moving to the same place
— Dripping Springs, outside Austin, where Jess lived — and putting
everything into one more shot would be worth it.
Scott Borchetta, head of Big Machine, their record label, told me,
“I signed them knowing it would be a big risk. In our industry you
have singular voices more than ever, some duos, but there’s only really
a handful of bands that figure out how to stay together. When you
start doing the math and figure out where a dollar goes, it’s a lot more
profitable being a solo artist.” Borchetta, who is most famous for his
role in the rise of Taylor Swift and their subsequent falling-out, also
played an important role in launching the Mavericks, a band that, like
Midland, employed a vintage shopper’s magpie aesthetic to make a
way in a single-artist-dominated industry. The Mavericks won
awards and had songs on the charts, and in the 1990s were one of the
coolest things out of Nashville, but breakups and personnel changes
hamstrung their progress, and they topped out as a well-respected
niche enthusiasm. Borchetta signed Midland, which is aiming a lot
higher than that, in 2016. He was well aware that the trio could come
apart, but he began to relax after they made it through the first six
months. “If they were going to break up, it would have been then,” he
says. He’s confident that they’re mature enough to tend to their group
dynamic and draw energy from it, because it’s the key to their success.
here’s a lot of cool stuff in the world,” said Jess. We were sitting
T on folding chairs in late-afternoon sun on the grass behind
Schroeder Hall, which proudly proclaims itself the second-
oldest dance hall in Texas. In a few hours, a couple thousand fans in
their best boots and hats would converge on this spot, 15 miles outside
Goliad on Farm-to-Market Road 622. “We were just in Odessa, and I
got in an Uber, and there was a young girl driving it,” he continued.
“She said all she does is drive or watch Dr. Phil and this court show on
YouTube.” It saddened him to think of being trapped in such a
tedious round. “But there’s so much stuff in this world to discover.
Like, I’ve been listening to Ry Cooder’s albums. ‘Married Man’s a
Fool’ on ‘Paradise and Lunch,’ that’s one of the best songs I’ve ever
heard.”
The Midland guys are all serial enthusiasts, completist nerds,
catholic in their tastes and evangelical in their urge to share them.
Music of all kinds, clothes, movies, food, drink, whatever it may be —
they dig deep into connoisseurial arcana, bringing the others their
latest finds like cats leaving meticulously beheaded birds on the
welcome mat. that I like the fact that Gary Stewart is obscure now, but he’s
As Jess sees it, this kind of cultural scrounging helps them to legitimately my favorite country artist ever,” he said. Not satisfied
continue evolving as artists. “It can’t be a costume,” he once said about with collecting every record and unreleased demo Stewart ever
wearing vintage clothes. “It has to exist in the modern landscape.” recorded, he got in touch with Stewart’s daughter, and she ended up
When I asked him to explain how that applied to music, he said, “You sending him all of her father’s notebooks, some containing songs he
can trap yourself in a certain moment” and get stuck in a fantasy of the never finished. She also sent one of his hats, which Jess wore to the
sort that produces tribute bands and Civil War reenactors. “I’m very Country Music Association’s awards ceremony. He said, “If you like
into classic cars, and you do see people on that scene who are Gary Stewart’s music, then you dress in a way that’s reminiscent of
pretending it’s 1957. We’re not pretending it’s 1974 — we’re influ- stuff he wore” — or actually is stuff he wore. “That’s not weird to me.”
enced by it. You gotta tweak. The harder you chase the moment, the Jess, a slight, pensive guy who grew up on a Christmas tree farm in
shorter the shelf life.” Digging things is fundamental, in other words, Oregon, used to own a vintage clothing shop. “Reality is always
but you dig a grave for your creativity when you latch on to one different than you think it will be,” he said. “I thought it would be cool
moment, one style, and settle for trying to reproduce it. to just find vintage pieces, but there was accounting and all that.” Now
“Between the three of us, we listen to all sorts of stuff,” Jess said. in pre-gig mufti — sweats, sneakers, flannel shirt over black T-shirt, a
“Me, I’m way into the American songbook, Broadway music. ‘Moon bandanna rolled into a headband — he was deciding what to wear
River,’ ‘Summertime,’ those are just about perfect songs. The three of that evening. On a hanger on his tour bus was a jacket he had
us are tireless in chasing a perfectly written song that lasts.” designed, which featured a yin-yang symbol and a smoke-blowing
But back to digging things. Having discovered that somehow I gator pointing at 4:20 on a clock face, but he wasn’t satisfied with how
had gotten through life to that point without knowing the fit had turned out. Maybe his electric rodeo jacket
much about Gary Stewart, the Nashville outlier of the Midland members, instead?
’70s whose impassioned vibrato lent spooky majesty to from left, Mark “We didn’t think we’d get here,” said Jess, meaning
songs like “Whiskey Trip” and “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Wystrach, Cameron that he and his bandmates hadn’t expected to arrive in
Drinkin’ Doubles),” Jess had been doing what he could Duddy and Jess the promised land that now opened out before them:
to mend this flaw in my character. “I’m willing to admit Carson. stadium gigs, radio airplay, brisk sales (“Let It Roll,”

PHOTO: HARPER SMITH THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 21

their second album, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s country album
chart last year), hit songs, country music awards, Grammy nomina-
tions, appearances on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and the “Today” show
and such, and the renown and serious money this might all generate.
“We thought at best maybe we’d be a writer’s-writer-type band, a
critical darling,” an esoteric pleasure handed from one discerning
enthusiast to another. But, against all odds, it appeared that the long
shot might pay off.

t was just about showtime. Somebody was onstage warming up

I the crowd, which sounded pretty warm already. In Schroeder

Hall’s cramped green room, the three members of Midland and
the four musicians touring with them — guitar player, drummer,
pianist, pedal steel guitar man — were putting in their earpieces and
checking themselves in the full-length mirror, adjusting their hats.
Jess had decided to dress down in old jeans and a blue shirt, but Cam
was resplendent in a blue mariachi suit he had found in a vintage store
in Santa Fe, N.M. Twin rivers of polished silver disks flowed down the
arms and legs of the suit, which he wore without a shirt and open
almost to the navel, Vegas heartthrob-style. Mark, in white pants and
a shirt of many colors, convened the seven of them, plus their road
manager and a couple of visitors, into a pre-show circle and made a
little motivational speech.
They owed the crowd an especially rousing show on Texas
Independence Day, Mark reminded them, and they were on the
next to last night of this leg of their tour, christened the Road to the
Rodeo. His main point was that the distance between tonight’s gig
and tomorrow’s symbolized the distance they had traveled togeth-
er. “You work hard your whole life, and then you wake up and all of
a sudden you’re on the verge,” he had told me that afternoon.
“You’ve done so much to get this far. You can taste it, touch it,
you’re working so hard onstage and you can feel it’s out there.
That’s once in a lifetime for an artist. It’s the rarest thing in the
world to have these opportunities. Even better to be able to do it
with people you respect and admire.”
A tall, muscular, telegenically unshaven, buoyantly confident and
cartoonishly handsome fellow, Mark seemed to tower above his
circled-up bandmates. Raised on a ranch in Arizona between Tucson
and Nogales, he has the easy-does-it, slightly goofy stoner Lothario
manner popularized by Texans Matthew McConaughey and Owen
Wilson. His résumé includes underwear modeling, shirtless bartend-
ing and roles on the soap opera “Passions” and the no-budget
CW4Kids series “Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight.” He had recently
taken some time off from the band to step up in class as an actor,
playing the part of Tammy Faye Bakker’s extramarital crush, the
country singer Gary Paxton, opposite Jessica Chastain in the forth-
coming film “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” As Midland’s frontman, it’s
Mark’s job to carry the show onstage, and he had his venue-dominat-
ing magnetism dialed up high in anticipation.
Schroeder Hall’s sound system was playing Ennio Morricone’s
theme music for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” and through the missus for going off to have immature fun with the boys. At a
the green room’s closed door the band could hear the crowd’s casual glance, Midland seems like yet another bunch of guys’ guys
excitement swelling. Mark was going around the circle addressing celebrating a life of boozing and womanizing, but there’s a post-bro
a few inspiring words to each man in turn, noting in particular that thread running through everything they do. Put-upon women op-
Luke Cutchen, on guitar, grew up an hour from Schroeder Hall pressed by male jerks get their day in court in Midland’s songs, and a
and so would have family and friends in the house to impress. It self-disarming gentleness takes the edge off their calculated cock-of-
was time for someone to intone the pre-show good-luck phrase the-walk manner.
“It’s mambo mojo time,” which Mark, having already obliged me to “They’re pre-bro,” Scott Borchetta told me, bundling their fussily
join the circle, obliged me to do. I wondered if he’d made it up on curated brand of masculinity with their throwback taste in music
the spot as a joke, a bit of gentle hazing. and clothes. Perhaps he was swayed by the luxuriant ’70s-style
The band took the stage and launched into “Playboys,” which, like mustaches they used to cultivate, especially Mark’s Yosemite Sam-
most Midland songs, has an ironic wrinkle in it. Despite its title, it’s at-the-Ramrod look. Whether they’re post- or pre-bro, the closer
not about being a ladies’ man; it’s about being in the doghouse with you examine them — from Mark’s green shoe company the People’s

22 JULY 19, 2020

Movement (“eco-hip footwear and accessories that stand for reduc- The set rolled on through various stylistic shades and textures: the
tion of single-use plastic”) to their gluten-free backstage fare to gorgeous despair of “Burn Out”; the Zeppelin-esque crunch of “21st
couplets like “Last call gets later and later / I come in here so I don’t Century Honky Tonk American Band”; the jaunty preening shuffle of
have to hate her” — the more they seem like evolved “Mr. Lonely,” the ironic wrinkle there again being the
hermit crabs occupying the shell of a far more con- implicit jerkiness of men, including the song’s narrat-
ventional and less sensitive manhood that most peo- Midland performing ing protagonist. He’s not lonely; the mistreated women
at the Palomino in
ple associate with hats and boots and barroom weep- who call him are lonely. “I ain’t Mister Right, I’m Mister
North Hollywood,
ers. The Midland men are always sort of kidding Right Now,” sang Mark. Framed by Jess’s and Cam’s
Calif., in October.
about themselves, even when they’re also deadly “Let It Roll,” the precise high harmonies, he exaggerates his drawl when
earnest about their stylistic influences or their rock- group’s second album, he sings so that he seems to be chewing on the lyrics to
star ambitions. The Twitter wag who wrote that all debuted at No. 1 on extract all the emotional juice from them. He soon shed
three of them look like Sacha Baron Cohen in various Billboard’s country his shirt of many colors, stripping down to a light blue
disguises nailed a deep truth about them. album chart last year. muscle shirt and taking a shot now and again from a

PHOTO: TIMOTHY NORRIS/GETTY IMAGES FOR BIG MACHINE RECORDS THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 23
bottle of Insólito, Midland’s proprietary brand of tequila from Jalisco.
After the final encore, the rest of the band headed back to the green
room while Mark remained alone onstage for a while, using a marker
to sign hats eagerly passed up to him from the pressing crowd.
Musicians and crew unwound with a few drinks outside in the cool
night air before loading onto three tour buses (Jess had his wife and
kids along, so they had a bus of their own) for the overnight trip to
Houston. Cam took a hefty dose of THC and climbed into his berth to
get some rest, but Mark and Luke, the guitar player, were up late
drinking Coors Light and watching Björk videos.

I
treat this — touring, music — like sports,” said Cam. A compact,
wiry guy with flowing dark hair who’s always ready to display
some chest onstage, he was wearing sweats and sitting on a
workout bench in the band’s portable exercise area, a green rug laid
out between two tour buses and strewn with free weights and mats.
The buses were parked in the VIP lot at NRG Stadium, having rolled
in early that morning, and the band was now into its all-day pre-show
routine of exercise, meals, sound check, meet-and-greets and inter-
views.
“Playing team sports growing up had a huge influence on me,” he
continued. “You have to take care of yourself, don’t get too high, get
your rest, eat properly, hit the weights, rally the troops but not act like
the boss. ‘To lead is to serve.’ ” Every once in a while, as we talked, he
took off his backward-worn ball cap and brushed his long dark hair,
which is shot with gray.
Cam, the son of a cinematographer, grew up in Northern Califor-
nia. When he went all-in on Midland with Jess and Mark, he put extremely competitive, but we’ve learned to channel it,” Cam said.
aside a career as a director of music videos for Bruno Mars, Mark “There was a time when we let it get on the stage. There was a lot of
Ronson and Fifth Harmony, among others (he earned an MTV fighting about you name it: someone’s guitar level, who drank the last
Video Music Award in 2013). A self-described “studio rat,” he may be sparkling water.” They had to get rid of their backgammon set
the trio’s most meticulous crafter of look and sound. He directed the because the games would put Cam and Mark at each other’s throats,
video of “Drinkin’ Problem” that helped make their name, and he has fists up. And Jess? “Jess isn’t competitive or confrontational. He
strong, nuanced opinions about the band’s merchandise, which flies doesn’t like to fight, so when he does, you know it matters.”
off the shelves. “Their merch numbers are ridiculous,” Borchetta told “They find the balance,” Borchetta told me. “They know how to
me. “They average around $10 a head at shows, and that’s superstar get each other through a tough day. Mark needs Cam, and Cam needs
numbers. They’re not playing for tens of thousands every night yet, Mark, and they both need Jess.”
but they will.”
There would certainly be tens of thousands in the house this

A
night. The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is the largest n SUV and a couple of electric carts arrived to take the trio
spectacle of its kind — 20 days and nights of bull rides and roping and and their entourage to an appearance in a nearby building,
cattle auctions and junior market lamb competitions and marquee where young farmers and ranchers were showing prize
music, drawing 2.5 million attendees. Tractors and golf carts and animals. In the SUV, “Cheatin’ Songs” was on the radio, KKBQ (92.9
black SUVs and pickups towing trailers went back and forth past the FM): “Steel guitars are back in style / Like tears fallin’ over her smile.”
parked buses, swinging wide around men and women in hats and The DJ urged listeners to come on down tonight to catch Midland at
boots leading horses whose hoofs clopped ringingly on the asphalt. the rodeo.
“We plan on doing this a long time, so we have to take care of The cavernous building was filled with stalls for bulls, cows,
ourselves and maintain our relationship,” said Cam. “We all want to horses, goats, sheep, rabbits, giant guinea pigs, llamas, alpacas. All
be one collective team. Nobody has to be the dude. That’s why we all the animals seemed to be talking at the same time, as were the
love baseball.” Harmony was the operative metaphor. “Harmonies thousands of people in the building and the amplified voices issuing
are the first thing. If the harmonies aren’t good, everything suffers.” instructions to exhibitors and visitors. Mark, freshly showered after
Jess sings a third above Mark’s robust lead, and Cam sings well above working out in the stadium’s weight room with members of the
Jess, soaring into falsetto range. Texans, Houston’s NFL franchise, took the lead. After extemporiz-
So, I asked, did having Mark out front, dominating the stage show ing on the fine points of primping purebred Herefords for exhibition,
and attracting most of the attention and often doing most of the he explained that he had participated in livestock shows as a 4-H kid.
talking, ever strain the group’s harmony? “Being a frontman, Mark is “This is all in my DNA and my background, my family history,” he
doing a lot of frontman work,” Cam said. “But you look at the Stones, said. He was in head-to-toe denim, topped with a perfectly creased
the Eagles, the frontman isn’t the man. Especially the Eagles. You got and tilted flat-crowned hat. Young exhibitors flocked around, taking
Joe Walsh, Don Henley, it’s not just Glenn [Frey]. pictures of him with their phones and shyly coming in
Mick Jagger’s the lead singer of the Stones, but it’s not Midland formed in close for selfies. Cam and Jess stayed off to the side,
his band.” What’s Mick without Keith? 2013. “We plan on taking in the sights.
Still, he allowed, tension among members of the doing this a long time,” The trio played a quick acoustic rendition of “Mr.
band was natural and inevitable. “Mark and I are bassist Duddy says. Lonely” for the stock show kids and their adult ad-

24 JULY 19, 2020 PHOTO: HARPER SMITH

juncts. The crowd packed in close so that they could hear the
delicately harmonized tale of a gigolo who obligingly takes on all
comers, socialites and divorcées and mamas from the PTA, over the
cacophony of mooing, bleating and human hubbub.
D
uring sound check the band got acquainted with the stadi-
um’s high-tech mobile stage, which resembled an enormous
mechanical spider. The stage rolled out across the dirt to the
center of the stadium floor, then rotated so that the band members
could play in the round. During their cover of Jerry Reed’s “East
Bound and Down,” an up-tempo truckin’ anthem made famous by
“Smokey and the Bandit,” they worked on a bit of business in which
the stage’s two pseudopod-like wings would extend and rise high
above the crowd; Mark and Cam would run out onto one of them;
and Jess and Luke, the guitar players, would run out onto the other.
Mark was having trouble getting back to his mic at center stage in
time to start the next chorus, and eventually they decided that a
roadie should come to him on the raised wing and hand him a
portable mic. While they rehearsed the sequence, a potent manure
smell wafted over the scene and a small herd of rodeo calves appeared
out of nowhere and started running around and around the stage,
followed by wranglers who expertly hazed them into a pen.
On to the backstage meet-and-greets, a staple of the Nashville
industry’s customer relations, which it conducts with unparalleled
virtuosity. We are so glad you could make it, Nashville makes a policy
of saying to its fans in a thousand ways. You are the rock on which we
build our church.
Midland had the warm routine down cold. As each successive
group of two or three peeled off from the long line of radio station
contest winners, people who had paid extra, and people who knew
somebody who knew somebody, the band would absorb the visitors
in a brief but satisfying industrial embrace. An arm around the waist
of a woman or the shoulders of a man, a smile for the phone cameras,
a friendly word to each, and on to the next.
“I hope we don’t give you the virus,” a woman said as she
reluctantly broke from a photo op clinch with Mark. Polite laughter
all around. The pandemic didn’t seem quite real yet, but everyone
could feel it coming. Public health experts suggesting that the rodeo
should be canceled were still being shouted down by those claiming
that this virus was a hoax or a New York and California kind of thing,
blown out of proportion by media elites.
After the meet-and-greet, the band returned to its green room in
the bowels of the stadium. It was actually a suite of rooms, equipped
with makeup mirrors, couches, giant TVs, vintage video games, a
juicing station and a spread of junk food so vast that it suggested a
factional struggle between those who insisted on a juicing station
and those appalled by such namby-pamby foodways. A crew of rodeo
officials who resembled the booted-and-suited shooters who come
after Steve McQueen in “The Getaway” arrived to give Midland
ceremonial belt buckles. Jason Kane, the rodeo’s entertainment
director, attended this rite. I asked him why he had chosen Midland
for opening night. “Because it says Texas, and their popularity is
gaining steam,” he said. “I’ve got to have some red-carpet pizazz. We
have over 56,000 here tonight. The size of this venue, you either
shrink the stadium or the stadium shrinks you. I need somebody that
can make a fist, as they say.”
The bronco riders and steer wrestlers having wrapped up their
show and cleared the stadium floor, it was time to get ready. The boys
put on jackets embroidered with glittering figures of musical notes
and playing cards and horseshoes and other such talismans. Mark,
having walked around with his baby daughter in his arms until she
stopped fussing, handed her off to his wife and stepped into a corner
to do vocal warm-ups. Singing fragments of songs, working up his
stage presence, he seemed to expand to the scale of the venue as he got
more and more hyped up. Cam slipped into character as well:
Smoldering Rock Star, tinctured with elements of Scheming Evil
Genius and Utility Infielder. Jess remained pretty much himself, a
slightly abstracted digger of beauty. On the back of his jacket under
the cursive words “Electric Rodeo” was an image of a cowboy riding a
guitar through a thunderhead studded with lightning bolts. The
cowboy wore a red bandanna around his neck that now reminds me
of a pandemic face mask.
T
hey went out and made a velvet-gloved fist. It was both a
professional show and a soulful one — understatedly slick
and heartfelt, which is not an easy split to pull off. They
executed the rising-wings routine on “East Bound and Down”
without a hitch, Jess smiling a little up there as he put some extra
body English into strumming. Okay, this is a little hokey, his manner
seemed to be saying, but it’s every guitar player’s fantasy come true.
At one point, Mark recapped the band’s official narrative for the
crowd: three best buddies who started out playing tiny bars and now
got to headline opening night at the Houston Rodeo. “This is beyond
a dream,” he said. He did a kind of drunken-master tightrope-walk
dance during “Drinkin’ Problem,” their breakthrough hit, as the
crowd sang along. When Midland’s set was over, the three of them
came down from the stage and piled into an open truck, which circled
the stadium’s dirt floor to waves of cheers and applause as Mark
toasted the crowd with a bottle of Insólito.
Looking on from the tech deck below the raised stage, I was
thinking about the rock-solid foundation of songcraft underlying the
showbiz routines and the many layers of irony and earnestness that
go into Midland’s performances, onstage and off. Cam, Jess and
Mark collaborate with Josh Osborne, Shane McAnally and other
exemplars of Nashville’s peerless concentration of song-making
expertise to fashion deceptively deep and lasting work. “Cheatin’
Songs,” “Drinkin’ Problem,” “Electric Rodeo,” “Burn Out,” “Every
Song’s a Drinkin’ Song” — they all have a tensile strength and a
staying power that you might miss behind the gentleness of the
melodies and harmonies, the easygoing midtempo grooves, the
touches that betray list-making nerds’ enthusiasm for this sub-sub-
genre or that obscure influence. These songs get in your mind’s ear
and take root there, not just because the hooks are catchy but because
they feel complete, almost excessively well-wrought, satisfying in a
slightly new way each time you hear them.
Underneath the band’s let’s-enjoy-the-ride facade moves a seri-
ous rage to produce work of lasting, timeless merit. During my time
with Midland, all three members of the trio lectured me on the
importance of continuing to evolve as an artist. “When you start out,
everybody says you should find your lane and stay in it, but we’re not
interested in staying in that lane,” Mark said. “We’re ambitious. We
don’t want to just compete with country bands. We want to be a great
band.” Jess kept coming back in our conversations to “perfect songs”
in the canon of American popular standards, like “Summertime” and
“Georgia on My Mind.” That’s where he set the bar.
“It wasn’t until this band that I understood how to hold yourself
to a higher standard,” Cam told me. For him, the Eagles set that
standard. “They’re the pinnacle, master craftsmen,” he said.
“There’s tracks on their records that aren’t great, but every album
has, like, four perfect songs. For me, that’s where I aspire for this
band to go. That’s my dream, to keep evolving, grow our songbook,
cross into all genres. To be stylishly unique” — and make albums
that each have, like, four perfect songs.
Carlo Rotella is the author, most recently, of “The World Is Always Coming to an
End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood.”
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 25
Dining WITH TOM SIETSEMA
Sure bets: Fresh flavors from veteran chefs
E
ven in ordinary times, opening a restaurant is tough work.
Just imagine what it’s like to follow a global virus on
stage. These new restaurants met the challenge with
experienced chefs — and plenty of flavor — in their favor. Eat on.
G erald Addison and Chris Morgan are good at keeping
secrets. Ask anyone who tried to find out where they were
headed after the chefs announced they were leaving the beloved
Maydan. Just as the talented twosome were poised to reveal all
at the former Whaley’s overlooking the Anacostia River in Navy
Yard, the coronavirus stole their thunder and pushed back their
rollout. Admirers had to wait till the end of May to get a taste of
Bammy’s, a little love letter to the flavors of the Caribbean.
And when they did, wow! At least that was my reaction to the
smoky jerk chicken, which rivals that served up at Fish, Wings &
Tings, the singular and sorely missed Jamaican restaurant run
by Jimmie and chef Sharon Banks in Adams Morgan. (The place
was pure sunshine, such a joy I requested it for my farewell party
when I left The Post after my first tour of duty.)
Addison figures the jerk chicken went through 50 iterations
before he and Morgan found their Goldilocks version after years
of trials. The prize starts with an allspice cure; continues with a
marinade shocked with Scotch bonnet peppers; and moves on to
26 JULY 19, 2020
A plate of jerk chicken, with sides of chana,
collards, cabbage, and rice and peas, is paired
with the Painkiller cocktail at the new Bammy’s in
Navy Yard.
a slow smoke over pimento wood, a stint on a grill and a few
minutes in the oven. The result is skin that’s crisp throughout
and improved only with a bit of the chefs’ pungent jerk sauce.
Bammy’s is no one-hit wonder. Proof is in the saucy curry
goat heaped over rice and peas. The kitchen also produces
collards cooked to retain some bite in coconut milk and thyme;
chickpeas lavished with butter and curry paste, and brightened
with lime juice. The Painkiller does what the creamy rum
cocktail’s name suggests: It cures what ails you. The same could
be said for the signature rolls, pillowy riffs on Jamaican coco
bread served with spicy cheese and pepper jelly.
The debut menu at Bammy’s was Twitter brief. “Carryout
freaked us out,” says Morgan. “We didn’t know how our food
would translate.” Since my early visit, the list has been
lengthened to include jerk pork, escovitch fish and cou cou, a hat
PHOTO: DEB LINDSEY
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 tip to Barbados in the form of okra and
cornmeal. Hankering for a bammy? A
shortage of cassava from Jamaica

WE CHOSE delayed its introduction. The root

vegetable is ground into flour, mixed

WESTMINSTER with coconut milk and fried, creating a

flat, soft-crisp “cake” that can be split
and stuffed.
AT LAKE RIDGE For the first time in their careers, the
chefs are at the mercy of the weather.
The dining room has yet to open. For
now, customers spread themselves
across the outdoor front bar, with 44
seats and a water view.
Addison and Morgan recruited as
their chef de cuisine Nico Leslie, a
native of Montego Bay and a former
colleague of Morgan’s at B Side in
Fairfax. Morgan also has family ties to
the islands. His aunt is from Jamaica,
and he grew up eating her cooking,
bammy included. Has she tasted his
passion project? Not yet, says Morgan.
“I joke, she’ll be our hardest critic.” If
she doesn’t like something, he says,
“she’ll shoot me straight.”  301 Water
St. SE. 703-927-2276. bammysdc.com.
Open for takeout and patio dining 5 to 9
p.m. Wednesday through Friday and
noon to 9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. From left: Chef Jeeraporn Poksupthong at Baan
Delivery via Toast soon. Entrees $14 to Siam in Mount Vernon Square; the restaurant’s
$20. pineapple bites.

WE HAVE BEEN HERE FOR

A museum’s worth of antique Thai
cooking utensils awaits closer
inspection. So, too, do the handwoven
bamboo baskets suspended from the
5 YEARS AND NEVER ONCE ceiling. Sorry to report, you’re going to
QUESTIONED WHETHER have to wait to experience the charms of
the dining room at Baan Siam in Mount
WE DID THE RIGHT THING. Vernon Square. For now, the co-owners,
including chef Jeeraporn Poksupthong
YES, WE WERE YOUNG and Tom Healy, are welcoming guests
WHEN WE MOVED IN, only on their L-shaped patio.
Right out of the gate, however, the
BUT IT HAS BEEN A cooking is some of the most alluring
around, plenty to keep you entertained,
VERY GOOD MOVE. even if the stage for your pineapple bites
is your own kitchen table. The snack —
juicy yellow fruit topped with chicken
meatballs — is rooted in royal Thai
ceremony, says Healy. Roasted peanuts,
fermented radish and palm sugar also
flavor the balls, black as midnight and
pleasantly chewy. One orb is too few.
Another glorious dish, an ambassador
12191 Clipper Drive from southern Thailand, gathers folds of
Lake Ridge, VA 22192 chicken in a green curry, fragrant with
703-822-5372 Thai basil and slippery with what turns
out to be tender young coconut in the
www.wlrva.org mix. Seemingly simple water spinach
soaks in a salt bath before it’s stir-fried
to greatness with chiles and garlic sauce.
A NOT-FOR-PROFIT LIFE PLAN COMMUNITY
Remember the cramped and busy
Baan Thai on 14th Street? The
principals closed it on New Year’s Eve,
decamping 10 blocks away for more
than double the kitchen space in the
former Alba Osteria. Its successor, Baan
Siam, comes with lots of bells and
whistles, including a new custom wok
that Healy likens to a jet engine at full
blast and a pizza oven too big to remove.
Poksupthong is considering cooking
fish in the design leftover, or maybe a
whole pig.
Can’t wait. Until then, splurge on her
stir-fried catfish and that icon from
north Thailand, pork shoulder
sharpened with fresh ginger and pickled
garlic and cooked to a nice breaking
point with a curry paste made from
scratch. At Baan Siam, there’s not a bite
out of place.  425 I St. NW. 202-588-
5889. baansiamdc.com. Open for
takeout 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 to
9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday,
11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 to 9:30 p.m.
Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday.
Delivery via the restaurant ($3 within a
1 1/2-mile radius). Entrees $15 to $17.

M ost of Ian Hilton’s many ventures are in the District. Why
did the entrepreneur pick Arlington for the just-opened
Cafe Colline? Peer pressure from friends and family in the Lee
Heights neighborhood, for starters. “It’s kind of selfish, frankly,”
says Hilton. The new, 50-seat French bistro is “right near my
house.”
Easy access to the cooking of chef Brendan L’Etoile, whose
work you might know from Chez Billy Sud in Georgetown, is
something to aspire to. With the exception of a croque monsieur,
L’Etoile isn’t repeating any performances from across the
Potomac. One could fashion a meal from just his pork dishes.
Cafe Colline’s pink pâté, sporting a thin band of pork fat, hints of
KEY TO THE PREVIOUS SECOND GLANCE JULY 12
1. Lost shadow 5. No “P” 9. Smoothed feather
2. Another stripe 6. Another knob 10. No hinge
3. Less floor
4. Filled in
7. Thicker
8. New pattern
11. Changed pattern
12. Missing leg
A NOT-FOR-PROFIT LIFE PLAN COMMUNITY
PHOTOS: RESTAURANT BY DEB LINDSEY; ORIGINAL SECOND GLANCE PHOTO BY RANDY MAYS
garlic and thyme and has the spreadable texture of rillettes.
Boudin blanc, teased from ground shoulder and belly meat, adds
up to a sausage of distinction. Seasoned with cloves, cinnamon
and black pepper — think Christmas, but warmer — the entree
comes shored up with butter-rich mashed potatoes and a
reduction of chicken stock and madeira that gilds whatever it
touches.
Summer gets addressed with a revivifying cold soup: corn
whipped to a creamy state with water and aromatics and
garnished with bite-size balls of honeydew and cantaloupe. The
cafe should market it. Oh, wait. It already comes in a little
container, and will continue to be served that way, at least until
the rear patio and cream-colored dining room start seating
customers. Other antidotes to warm weather include a taste of
Provence in the form of a brassy chilled ratatouille; vinegar-
steeped beets gathered with tiny green lentils, toasted walnuts
and blue cheese; and raspberry sorbet lush with Aperol
(although the chocolate-hazelnut pot de creme topped with
Chantilly cream is mighty seductive, too).
The newcomer’s single stove and lone fryer explain the
concise menu in what used to be Cassatt’s Cafe. Regarding the
name, Hilton was prompted by both the location and the French
word for “hill.” Colline brings to three the owner’s Gallic venues,
which include Parc de Ville in the Mosaic District. Is French his
pet cuisine?
“I think Brendan is my favorite flavor,” says the justifiably
proud owner.  4536 Lee Hwy., Arlington. 703-567-6615.
cafecollineva.com. Open for takeout 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday
through Sunday. No delivery. Sandwiches and entrees $15 to
$28.
COMING
SOON
SPECIAL
SECTIONS
PRIVATE
SCHOOLS
DESIGN
TRENDS
SENIOR
LIVING
SOLUTIONS
Second Glance

The water
tower
BY RANDY MAYS

Find the 12
differences in the
photo of a water
tower in Crisfield,
Md., in April 2019.

PUZZLE
ANSWERS
See them online
now at
washingtonpost.
com/secondglance
or in next week’s
issue of the
magazine.

SEE YOUR
PHOTO
To submit a photo
of the Washington
area for use in
Second Glance,
email a high-
resolution jpeg
attachment of 8
megapixels or
larger to
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washpost.com. For
information about
our guidelines for
user content, see
washingtonpost.
com/secondglance.

30 JULY 19, 2020 PHOTO: RANDY MAYS

 “FOURSQUARE” BY EVAN BIRNHOLZ Crossword

The answer to this 81 Vessel-building sites ä á Þ Ú Ö Ò Î Ë È ä. ää äá äÞ äÚ äÖ äÒ äÎ

week’s metapuzzle is 83 Heavy metal blaster
äË äÈ á. áä
an eight-letter phrase. 86 “C’est moi,” in America
88 Summons, as a taxi áá áÞ áÚ áÖ
ACROSS 90 Insect in a formicary áÒ áÎ áË áÈ Þ.
1 Shire in “Rocky” films 91 1979 film “Norma ___”
6 Flavorful Indian brew 92 Language in Iraklion Þä Þá ÞÞ ÞÚ ÞÖ ÞÒ ÞÎ ÞË
10 “The Coldest Rap” 93 Memoir about the first ÞÈ Ú. Úä Úá ÚÞ ÚÚ
rapper, aptly year of law school
14 Cord fiber 94 Auto fill ÚÖ ÚÒ ÚÎ ÚË
18 Three-time NFL MVP 97 “My Fair Cousin ___” ÚÈ Ö. Öä Öá ÖÞ ÖÚ
Favre (season 2 premiere of
19 One spun in a tornado “The Addams Family”)
ÖÖ ÖÒ ÖÎ ÖË

in a disaster film series 98 Squeaker, so to speak ÖÈ Ò. Òä Òá ÒÞ ÒÚ ÒÖ ÒÒ ÒÎ ÒË

20 Awesome, in slang 100 Brown delivery?
21 Length × width 104 Achieve
ÒÈ Î. Îä Îá ÎÞ

22 “The Entertainer” 106 “That’s disgusting!” ÎÚ ÎÖ ÎÒ ÎÎ ÎË

composer Joplin 107 Abided
23 Hulkamania wrestler ÎÈ Ë. Ëä Ëá
109 Insinuates
24 Activity with many ËÞ ËÚ ËÖ ËÒ ËÎ ËË ËÈ È.
112 Self-cleaning organ
cycles
114 One moving to a lot Èä Èá ÈÞ ÈÚ ÈÖ ÈÒ
26 Trig formula originator
115 Little by little
28 Crushing jungle beast ÈÎ ÈË ÈÈ ä.. ä.ä ä.á ä.Þ
117 Encouragement for a
30 Stone or Mason, e.g.
boxer to attack ä.Ú ä.Ö ä.Ò ä.Î ä.Ë
31 Gain some
119 Purse part
understanding ä.È ää. äää ääá ääÞ ääÚ
123 Corned beef dish
35 “1917” backdrop: Abbr.
124 Military outfit? ääÖ ääÒ ääÎ ääË ääÈ äá. äáä äáá
37 Warhol’s style
39 Some chem majors 125 Ms. Turner’s life work? äáÞ äáÚ äáÖ äáÒ
40 “I Want Candy” band 126 Ace Hardware offerings
with a canine-inspired 127 Analogy phrase äáÎ äáË äáÈ äÞ.

name 128 “___ goes” (selection

44 “That call was terrible!” method in which 19 Saw sites? 64 Vodka brand that 96 Had an advantage 111 Highland hats
45 Wailing woodwind people touch a certain 25 Packs of people sounds like it should 99 Royal Rumble grp. 113 Ceremonial procedure
46 “We use only 10 percent body part to avoid an 27 Cookie jar cover be available on a plane 100 Alpaca’s relative 115 21st 92 Across letter
of our brains,” e.g. undesirable task) 29 Reaction to a video of a 65 Smash hit for OutKast 101 Zebra moray, e.g. 116 Cleaning compound
47 Brandish 129 6 Across and 80 Down kitten rolling around on 66 Say suddenly 102 Waveform peaks 118 Grp. often subject to
48 Sandwich can? 130 Dirty, as from a flue its back, maybe 67 Cleave 103 “Ink Master” creation FOIA requests
49 ___ Journal of Ethics 31 Traffic director, briefly? 68 Clubs or leagues: Abbr. 105 Dried poblano pepper 120 Tigger’s marsupial pal
(monthly pub. for docs) DOWN 32 History text chapter 70 Compound atomically 108 Appliances seen on 121 Model Carol
52 Like exchanges with 1 Conan’s cable network 33 Cuisine with grilled and similar to another “Cupcake Wars” 122 “Gangnam Style”
raised voices, perhaps 2 Part of a parabola smoked meats, briefly 71 Not exacting 110 Nautical opening? rapper
53 Colombian range 3 Late July zodiac sign 34 Unfathomably bad 73 Interlibrary ___
54 Vitals checker, briefly 4 Grp. of software experts 36 Waterloo denizen 76 Al or Bobby on a track SOLUTION TO:
55 Death ray in sci-fi, e.g. 5 Bring into accord 38 Warn with a horn 78 Lengthy academic A MEAL WITH CAPTAIN OBVIOUS (JULY 12)
58 Gordian ___ 6 Routine responsibility 41 Mel of the majors records, for short ‚ ã æ ã ‚ } æ Ý 7 ã ‚ 7 Ú } B ‚ : Ú
: æ Ý N Ý N € Ô × N Ð æ < Ô 7 ã B 7
59 Coastal reflux 7 Malevolent magic user 42 Ryder of “Beetlejuice” 80 “Orange” drink € B H H N Ý K B Ú E × æ K Ý ª Ú Ô 7 7 B
60 Botanical source of gel of folklore 43 Stuck on, as a notion 82 ___-inclusive Ô Ú ‚ Ò N × × N ‚ ã Ô Ú × Ý N N ã
8 N 7 } N Ú Ú ã B : : × E N € N ‚ 7 Ú
63 Quick snack 8 Swift horse 46 Culpa preceder 83 Song for a coloratura B 7 × N : æ : N Ý ‚ ã B }
66 “Cool story, ___” 9 “The reason is apparent 50 Dole (out) 84 Scorpions guitarist Jabs B } : N 8 æ Ú Ú Ú × B Ý B 7 8 ‚ ã

69 Convent figure to me” 51 Come about 85 Maximally mean-spirited × æ Ô H E ~ æ æ < B N N 8 8 ‚ ×Ú æ 7 N

B 8 ~ æ æ : K ‚ × ‚ : N æ Ò ‚ :
70 Randy Newman song 10 Bar requirements 52 Wearable item of rock 86 Spark, as a blaze Ú N ‚ ã ‚ ã ‚ × N × Ý ‚ Ú × B : ×
about a SoCal city 11 Lola’s club, in song concert memorabilia 87 Guy protected € Ý B 7 H E æ 8 N × E N € ‚ ~ æ 7
€ æ Ý æ 7 ‚ Ú ã N 7 } N : ‚ H ã Ú
72 ACLU co-founder Helen 12 Awesome, in slang 55 Veined part of a plant against employment B Ý ‚ Ú ‚ : Ô 8 7 ‚ × Ý B Ò N ×
74 User’s guide 13 Camp shelter supporter 56 “Honey Honey” band discrimination, per } ‚ Ú E B × ‚ : : ã B N ~ N æ K ~ ‚ < N
N : B } N : B Ú E × æ × N ‚ 7 N Ð
75 Birds with long necks 14 2019 Wimbledon champ 57 Erotic role-playing a landmark SCOTUS ~ æ 8 ã Ú æ ã × Ú < B : :
77 2012 Batman film villain Simona letters decision in June 2020 Ú 8 ‚ : : ã æ × ‚ × æ N Ú ~ N : : ‚ Ý
7 ‚ 8 N B × Ô Ý : × Ý ‚ B 7 ‚ Ý N
78 Pitcher who pitched a 15 Like ink, for some pens 58 Astute 88 “What did you think?” ‚ Ý 7 ‚ § 8 ª H æ æ Ú N B Ú ~ æ æ < N }
record 7,356 innings 16 Sailor’s dining space 61 Part of the cerebrum 89 Little Skywalker, to Shmi H : æ Ò N Ý N N } ‚ Ò ‚ B : Ý N 7 æ
Ú ‚ × N } × ‚ Ý Ú } N 7 Ú N € Ý ‚ Ú
79 “That ain’t right” 17 Faux ___ (gaffe) 62 In vitro cells 95 Explosive feeling

ONLINE: CLASSIC MERL REAGLE PUZZLES AT WAPO.ST/CLASSIC-MERL. THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 31
Below the Beltway BY GENE WEINGARTEN

Don’t worry.
Gene’s got it covid.

O
n the morning of March 27, 2020, I woke from a
fitful sleep to discover that my eyelids had been
super-glued shut, like some cruel message of
vengeance from the mafia. I felt my way into the
bathroom and unglued myself, using warm water
and soap, after which I discovered I also had eyeballs like an
albino hedgehog’s. Crayola red.
I knew immediately what this was: conjunctivitis, or pinkeye.
It’s a common condition that tends to run its gooey, itchy, sticky,
crusty course and then disappear, and is usually no cause for
concern. Accordingly, I remained unconcerned for another 21/2
full minutes, by which time I had gone downstairs in my
underwear, fired up my computer, and, just out of curiosity, just
to be sure, looked for a Google nexus of “pinkeye” and “covid-19.”
This was a connection I considered preposterous until right then,
when I discovered from news reports that very morning that
doctors were reporting a new diagnostic marker, a statistically
significant link between having the deadly virus and having
albino-hedgehog eyes. That is when I decided I was dying.
I had been feeling kind of lousy for weeks, roughly from the
time the news got really bad about the extent of the spread of the
virus. I slept almost nonstop for 10 days, parsimoniously
parceling out my awake times to eat, go to the bathroom and do
my columnist’s job half-assedly. (Yes, I am long over that, thank Yes, yes, I am famously a recovered hypochondriac. I even
you very much.) Extreme fatigue is a known thumbprint of the wrote a book about it. So it became important to me to not seem
disease, as are headaches, which I also had, and bleeding gums, to be backsliding — meaning that despite all of this, I acted as
ditto. Another thumbprint: My dreams had become so vivid that though nothing was wrong, except for the fact that I quarantined
at one point I woke my girlfriend, wanting to know who was myself from Rachel in our home for two weeks, which got
screaming in the street. Dutifully, Rachel listened, peered out the pathetic, such as when I tried to console myself by imagining that
window, considered the evidence and diagnosed: “No one.” I was able to smell her hair from across a room.
Then … pinkeye. Anyway, you probably know where this is going. The
I emailed my symptoms to a friend of mine who had suffered symptoms ebbed and went away. What did it mean? Did it mean,
through the virus and recovered. Realizing I was probably as I suspected, that I had been one of those people who
overreacting, I told him I figured I had maybe a 40 percent contracted and survived a case that never approached life-
chance of being infected; after all, I wasn’t coughing or spiking a threatening?
fever. My friend, who had become something of an amateur Just this week, for the first time, I got a chance to find out. I
expert on covid-19, told me, instantly, the way friends do, that he took an antibody test, which would show if I had ever had covid-
believed I was wrong. “It’s probably more like 70 percent,” he 19.
said. He wasn’t kidding. He advised me to try to buy a pulse It came back clean. Not a trace. The pinkeye, apparently, was
oximeter, if I could find one. It is a medical device that tells you coincidental. The exhaustion? The dreams? Both probably
how much oxygen is in your blood. You use this to determine attributable to anxiety over, say, the impending death of
when it is time to go to the hospital, put yourself in the hands of civilization. The bleeding gums? Well, what with all the
qualified professionals, and expire. existential panic, I suspect I hadn’t been brushing as much as I
The oximeter search took two days; they seemed harder to should.
find than a 1909 Honus Wagner. In the end, because of the sort of So, everything is great now. Except the virus is returning
over-duplication of effort inspired by panic, Rachel and I wound nationwide, with a vengeance. And now I know I have no
up with two of them. One, obtained through a sketchy-seeming antibodies, which makes me a sitting duck. So I am trying to
international medical website, has only Japanese writing on the remember good oral hygiene, practice social distancing and
box. For all I know, it is an enema. holding on to both oximeters, even the enema one.

32 JULY 19, 2020 ILLUSTRATION: ALEX FINE


Summer at the Springs
Teeming with parkland, art and outdoor adventure, this historic West Virginia town offers
a relaxing getaway this upcoming season.
A s people toe the line between getting
some much-needed relaxation and
taking the necessary precautions needed
to travel this summer, places like Berkeley
Springs, WV make for ideal destinations.
For travelers in the D.C. area, the town’s
proximity to the city lets families avoid air
travel, and after so many months inside,
visitors can try the area’s activities, which
allow for social distancing amid lush
mountain scenery.
Set in the ridge and valley section of the
Appalachians, Berkeley Springs offers easy
access to two rivers and two state parks,
including Cacapon State Park, a 6,000-acre
haven with variety of options for outdoor
activities. Travelers can walk, hike or bike
along 23 miles of trails within the park,
ranging from easygoing Piney Ridge to the
more strenuous Ziler Loop.
To soak up the scenery from another
vantage, visitors can head to the water;
Craft’s Adventures offers tubing trips down
the nearby Cacapon and Potomac Rivers.
And for direct access to the town’s unfiltered
spring water, travelers can head to Berkeley
Springs State Park. There, 200-year-old
Roman Bath House are still available to
the public—and have even been recently
updated to include historically-accurate
white octagonal tile.
The unique character of Berkeley Springs
is also present at the soon-to-be-open
THIS CONTENT IS DEVELOPED AND PAID FOR BY BERKELEY SPRINGS, WV. THE WASHINGTON POST NEWSROOM IS NOT
INVOLVED IN THE CREATION OF THIS CONTENT.
CONTENT FROM BERKELEY SPRINGS, WV
Cacapon State Park Lodge. There, visitors
can choose from 78 new rooms, including
four suites, or they can also enjoy a stay in
some of the recently-renovated historic park
cabins—all of which offer an authentic taste
of the area’s history. Before ground was
broken on the renovation and construction
projects, Scott Fortney, superintendent of
Cacapon and Berkeley Springs State Parks,
uncovered a photo of the lodge’s opening
day in the 1950s that gave a glimpse of its
previous decor. “The furniture we picked out
is almost identical” to the photo, said Forney.
In addition to outdoor activities, Berkeley
Springs has ample art-centric attractions.
From May 29 through July 19, the Morgan
Arts Council co-op gallery will host “Go West,”
a multimedia exhibit exploring influential
images of the American frontier, from
cowboys to pioneer life. A quilt show opening
in July at the Ice House called “America
Proud” will feature displays of American-
themed quilts, and yard square quilts will
hang in the windows of local businesses
around town. All the town’s famed spas are
open and its restaurants have both outdoor
and indoor dining at 50% capacity.
Many group events, beloved by visitors and
locals alike, may not feel quite the same this
year, as people prioritize remaining safe and
socially distant. But Jeanne Mozier, local
historian and president of the Museum of the
Berkeley Springs, takes comfort in knowing
the town has been through challenging
times before—and, as always, the town will
make it through.
“Throughout its long history, Berkeley
Springs has experienced periods of boom
and decline, and with new places opening
and reopening, we’re looking forward to a
memorable summer,” she said.
Plan your trip by visiting
berkeleysprings.com
Sources:
https://wvtourism.com
https://www.imba.com/trails-for-all/
trail-accelerator-grants