I hope so! The last time I was there in the summer, Piknic Électronik was indeed still a thing, but had been moved elsewhere in the park because the Jean-Drapeau reorganization project was underway. It’d be great if the DJ sets were back at Trois Disques!

On summer Sundays when I lived in Montréal (in 2004 and 2005), the city would set up decks underneath that stabile and a lineup of DJs would play records while folks of all ages danced around it. It was called Piknic Électronik and I went as often as I could!

I didn’t but I wasn’t looking for them, either. I’m sure a few were held.

Anyway, season’s greetings from DCA where my flight home has been delayed three times and almost four hours now

I’ve known all year that, around the end of 2025 or early in 2026, I would be coming back to DC. I may not be back in DC for a very long time.

The occasion for this third visit was an interview at the Embassy of Sweden to the United States. Within the next two months, if all goes according to plan, I will have fully relocated from Chicago to Stockholm.

Finally, because I was right there in the area, I walked over to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial (Gehry Partners and collaborators, 2020), where a visitor had left a bouquet of flowers for the recently departed architect, Frank Gehry 💐

As many others before me have noted, it’s disheartening in this particular moment to be unable to read the inscription “equal justice under law” on the pediment of the Supreme Court of the United States (Cass Gilbert, Jr. and John R. Rockart after Cass Gilbert, 1935)

I still think of Frank Gehry as among the most dancerly of all architects, and I will forever appreciate how he brought the two art forms I’m most passionate about into close conversation. Thank you, Frank — and rest in peace.

Watching two Gehry buildings take shape, day by day, over a period of two years taught me a lot about the engineering innovations that made Gehry’s wild envelopes possible. Both sites also, in progress, were like bodies in reverse decay — bare ribs were first covered with muscle, then skin.

During the last year I lived in Seattle, I commuted to work on the monorail which passed through the construction site for Gehry’s EMP (now Museum of Pop Culture). Two years later I was living in Chicago and regularly passed another Gehry construction site, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion.

In a lecture on choreographer William Forsythe, I argued that Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum was analogous to Forsythe’s work of the same period (1980s) in the same country (West Germany). Both artists used emergent technologies to distort and manipulate traditional forms, in places just 300km apart.

Gehry emerged as a starchitect and household name on a timeline that roughly coincided with my deeper engagement with dance as an art form which, much like architecture, is eternally present, political, spatial, temporally experienced, and often culturally and / or geographically specific.