Articles
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The best case for the argument that it’s time to retire the descriptive term “DMV” is that it still requires explaining to just about everyone who doesn’t reside in the metropolitan DC area. Though it’s been used quite a while, except for us locals and Nikki Minaj, no one intuitively gets that the acronym means District, Maryland and Virginia. And except for us, no one uses “DMV”. Now we know this is just opening up a very old discussion thread, but we revisit the subject because there’s a point to be made to aspiring artists from our region that using the term doesn’t help when the goal is building a national following. Brand recognition is a measurable indicator for growing an audience. So here’s the rub; if using DMV was indeed a cultural phenomenon cultivated by the area hip hop community, it’s had the opposite effect than its original intent. DMV is still very much a local brand. It’s had years to grow into a nationally recognized brand. It hasn’t. And it won’t.
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Thursday Celebrate Historic Mount Pleasant Street at Humanitini: Celebrating Great Streets
On Thursday, you're invited to Conversations on Great Streets: Celebrating Historic Mount Pleasant St. Join the Humanities Council and Mount Pleasant business and cultural leaders and residents for cocktails and conversation during a provocative after-work "Humanitini" happy hour celebrating the vibrant culture of historic Mt. Pleasant Street. A panel discussion featuring Alberto Ferrufino, owner of Don Juan Restaurant and Pedro Aviles, founder of Aviles Associates, LLC and others will help Humanitini participants wind down on one of Washington's vibrant corridors and gain wisdom about the remarkable past and present places, people and resources. Conversations on Great Streets is free. RSVP here.
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So much has changed in the District of Columbia in the past 8 years, and almost all of it without the 
consideration, approval, objection, or active participation of a demographic that is otherwise indisputably the most influential and coveted in America. But millennials don’t vote in local elections. And politicians know that, and they don’t really care. It means that as elected officials they aren’t beholden to a cohort that had nothing to do with putting them in office. The result is what you see in DC from the past 2 mayoral administrations; a scarcity of programs that positively affect and change the conditions of District citizens between the ages of 18 and 35.
Political analysts and government policy makers may object to this characterization of the Fenty and Gray administrations, but the bike paths and dog parks of the Fenty years and the support for the imported technology sector of the Gray years hardly constitute real support and care for younger DC residents. Dogs don’t create jobs and those 20 something tech geeks who’ve been here for a year and a half only hire folks who look like them. Sure, the renovated libraries and recreation centers in DC are in theory beneficial to this age group, but less so in context when more funding has gone to dysfunctional jobs programs, laughable affordable housing programs, and to a Department of Corrections that has a budget of $140,476,000.
Let’s be more specific, because our focus and that of our audience is arts and culture. In a city that has been home to some of the greatest talent ever seen in entertainment and that is absolutely full of brilliant promoters, bloggers, performing artists, videographers and filmmakers, DC spends more in one half of one month to arrest, prosecute, convict and incarcerate its youth than it commits in a year to supporting a home grown entertainment industry. As a sop, it makes $8,503,000 available to “the Arts” if they are fronted by non-profit organizations that have been on the take for years without doing much of anything to elevate DC’s artistic reputation. And how much does our local government spend to invigorate and grow the business of entertainment? Nothing.
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We found ourselves thinking about three unrelated subjects the other day; chess, a SWOT analysis, and Kenny Burns, when suddenly they morphed into a single topic and became the inspiration for this article which is about Kenny Burns and using the advantages gained from SWOT to become a master in the game of entertainment. Or something along those lines…
Anyway, we were thinking about chess because we play a lot of it, but not on the level we’d like to be proficient at. We were thinking about a SWOT Analysis because in business it’s essential to recognize your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and to constantly review them. And Kenny Burns came up because of his appearance in a YouTube clip we were watching about ODB. Looking at that footage of a younger Kenny Burns doing A&R on the ODB project for Roc-A-Fella Records in 2004 reminded us that his straight-outta-DC success story is a great example of having a strategy and staying loyal to it.