The annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund begin on Friday, and the city will see a number of changes in traffic patterns and road closures this weekend as a result. Here's what you should plan around: Streets closed to vehicles: Beginning at 8 p.m. on Friday, October 19, until 2 a.m. on Sunday, October 21 * Pennsylvania Avenue, NW between 17th Street and 20th Street, NW * 19th Street, NW......

It's summer and our beloved Arts Editor is away this week, so the agenda is a little on the short side. Here are a few things to see. >> We have written before about the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran's Experimental Media project. Starting this week, WPA\C is hosting a new show called SiteProjects DC. Curator Welmoed Laanstra has asked 15 local artists to create site-specific outdoor artwork, both installations and performances, through July 28,......

Among all the things that come across our neighborhood listservs on a daily basis, it's easy to become frustrated with living in the District. My local listserv, which covers the eastern end of Capitol Hill, has been brimming with complaints of roving gangs of teens, vicious unleashed dogs and drug dealers that move from block to block faster than the police can stop them. And that's just today. But just recently a plea came over......

>> Rorschach Theatre begins its "pay what you can" previews of References To Salvador Dali Make Me Hot tonight. The surreal and emotional play runs through May 13, but tonight through Friday ticket prices are fluid. There are no reservations, so you'll have to get to the box office at 7:00 p.m. to snatch up cheap seats for the 8:00 p.m. show [The Sanctuary Theatre, Casa del Pueblo Methodist Church, 1459 Columbia Road NW]......

>> You might want to pick up your porn before heading to the beach this summer. Ocean City has passed a moratorium on sex shops of all kinds. We can only see this as a boon to Washington's own hard-working purveyors of such merchandise. Not that anyone at DCist has any idea where such stores might be. [WTOP] >> One D.C. blogger has already had it up to here with clueless tourists on the Metro.......

Good morning, D.C. Thanks to all of you who came out to the Voting Rights Happy Hour last night. We had a great time meeting everyone and chatting about the future of full voting rights for D.C. Our friends and co-hosts at DC Vote were thrilled to be able to sign up so many new interested members and volunteers for their upcoming Voting Rights March on April 16, so thanks to them for coming out......

There may not be many concerts happening during this coming work week, but the number of concerts scheduled for the weekend will require shrewd planning for serious listeners. SYMPHONY: >> Renaud and Gautier Capuçon, the brothers from France who play violin and cello with exceptional flair, will join the National Symphony Orchestra this week. The program in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall includes the Brahms double concerto (for violin and cello), Debussy's iconic symbolist poem......

When thinking of Emily Dickinson, one might picture a kindly woman in a white dress who periodically took breaks from her gardening to write a little poetry. Oh, Em, we hardly knew ye. BosmaDance’s vibrant work, Violet in my Winter, moves far beyond the breezy misanthropy and chuckling morbidity we encountered from Dickinson in grade school. Choreographer Meisha Bosma reveals a striking passion that resided beneath Dickinson's seemingly quiet life. Violet in my Winter does......

If Hitler had been a gangster, what color tie would he have worn? To some, that inquisitive trajectory is irrelevant and even downright disrespectful. Hitler was not only obsessed by power and violence, but a monster to whom, most would say, we should never extend the benefit of a psycho-history. To Bertolt Brecht, however, the value of an inquiry into Hitler the gangster outweighed the dangers. Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (pictured), now......

Even from the time before a hack named Samson trawled Washington's streets, searching for fares and pityin' fools galore, D.C. residents have had issues with the city's taxicab service, from ride refusal to incivil drivers. This week, the D.C. Taxicab Commission began hosting a series of community fora in each Ward of the city for residents to raise questions and voice concerns over a host of cab-related issues. Of course, if DCist's comment boards are......

If you ever wondered what possessed the Renaissance sculptors to think they could make a hunk of hard marble look like flowing silk, you might want to find Evan Reed. Reed's first solo exhibit in D.C., New & Recent Sculptures, at Flashpoint, however, represents a much different class, as his modern-day equivalent turns rough, corrugated tin into bird feathers, braided ropes, and rumpled jersey shirts. While Michelangelo used the finest stone and worked for......

D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams testified before the City Council's Committee on Education, Libraries and Recreation today in favor of his proposal to build a brand new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at the site of the old convention center, a few blocks from its current site. We've debated this issue before at DCist. But we thought it might be fun to do a little point/counterpoint with the Post's Benjamin Forgey, writing today in response......

It's going to be a beautiful weekend, folks. Don't spend it inside watching some lame soccer game (yeah, I said it). Get some sun, some exercise, and - better than that - get some art this Saturday. Go ahead, grab your roommate, your sweetie-pie, or hey, subvert the Hallmark Establishment by bonding with Dad on your own time, and set off on an art walk to our local galleries. A number of shows are closing......

Take a drive around the city. Expensive downtown high-rises lining one block contrast with poor and working class neighborhoods a few miles down the road. Sandwiched in between are the complex "emerging" neighborhoods whose ever-changing streets are constantly clogged with construction equipment. This is the urban landscape, and it's what photographer Ken D. Ashton seeks out to document as its inhabitants constantly change and rebuild and, sometimes, neglect it. His new show at Flashpoint, De......

D.C. Mayor Williams officially introduced legislation Tuesday to approve the financing of a new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Dubbed the Library Transformation Act of 2006, the Mayor's plan calls for a new "State-of-the-Art Central Library" to be located at the nearby site of the old convention center. The new Library would act as an anchor for a larger development plan that would include "new office, retail and housing" space around the site. The......

There's no question that something needs to be done with the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, which, after 30 years of neglect and mismanagement, is in about as good a shape as a D.C. group house populated solely by young men in their first two years out of college. The carpet is threadbare, nothing works like it's supposed to, and it's really a pretty depressing place to read. Not exactly qualities you hope for......

TUESDAY Are you so pissed off at DCist for our marginal abetting of the Death Cab pre-sale sellout that you’re just busting to express your righteous hipster indignation in unrhymed dactylic hexameter? Rail against the machine, dude, at Busboys and Poets' weekly open mic “session.” It all goes down tonight at 9 p.m. Tickets are handed out “approximately one hour” before, and they cost two dollars. Hmmm. We recommend “Indig Nation” as the new name......

World AIDS Day, observed today, has particular relevance and importance for the District. The city has the distinction of suffering from one of the nation's highest rates of HIV infection, afflicting 1 in 20 residents, ten times the national average, and 1 in 7 African-American men. The District's response to the problem has been so ineffectual (some say the city is 10 to 15 years behind where it should be) that in August D.C. Mayor......

Some readers have chimed in wanting news about the new Pope, Benedict XVI. Since we don't have a Vaticanist and the announcment was made from beneath the dome of St. Peter's Basilica and not the U.S. Capitol, we are coming up empty as to a District of Columbia angle. So here we go. We were waiting for a chicken philly at Sun Spot Cafe on G Street NW near the Georgetown University Law Center, "YMCA"......

Sad News at the Zoo. No, we don't have any word about the status of possible panda babies at the National Zoo, but you can check for pregnancy watch updates here. Sadly, we must turn to camels. The Post reports that the zoo's only camel died. It was an 18-year-old Bactrian camel, an endangered animal native to northwestern China and Mongolia that typically lives 35-50 years. Just to be clear, we don't know if......

The circus is coming to town (the MCI Center to be exact), and that means it's time for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey animals to parade across Capitol Hill. On Monday, March 21, at approximately 1:30 p.m., the elephants (and, for the first time, a donkey -- "in order to celebrate the non-partisan event of the circus and the spirit of the Nation's Capital") will make the trek from 32nd and D Streets,......

Good morning, Washington. The weather today is supposed to be frigidly chilly this morning with temperatures later rising into the 40s, according to Capital Weather. Drew McDermott's recent photo of the Virginia Square metrorail station entrance seems timely considering this morning's first item ... A Transit Surplus and a Rate Hike?: Thanks to a 4 percent increase in subway ridership and a 10 percent increase in bus ridership, WMATA officials have gleefully announced they......

(Written by Mike Grass and Kanishka Gangopadhyay) It was perhaps one of most lavish non-political parties Washington has seen in quite some time. The much talked about opening of IndeBleu on Saturday evening saw limos pulling up on G Street, photographers deployed to the entryway, all the while champagne greeted guests at coat check and at least one woman, painted as a forest nymph, walked about the place in A Midsummer Night's Dream-esque fashion.......

On Friday, DCist got an advanced look at IndeBleu, the restaurant and lounge on G Street that is primed to set a new standard for service, design and taste in the District. Though IndeBleu is still under construction, you can tell from this DCist photo that the view from its second floor dining room will provide a great vantage point of the Seventh Street corridor, MCI Center and the National Portrait Gallery (whenever renovations are......

Be aware that on Friday, meetings at the headquarters of the World Bank will cause the closure of streets in the vicinity of the White House and Foggy Bottom. From the AP, via WJLA/ABC-7: The traffic troubles begin right smack in the middle of Friday morning's rush hour. At 8:30 a.m., police will shut 18th, 19th and 20th streets, between Pennsylvania Avenue and F Street. And G Street will close between 17th and 21st. We......

DCist is not a big fan of MapQuest. Despite the fact that the mapping service can be very useful, direction queries can often give confusing directions, or in some cases, directions that are just plain wrong. So we decided to torment the MapQuest computers by giving it two locations near the White House: 1550 Pennsylvania Ave. NW and 1750 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. One is inside a restricted zone, the second is outside. 1550 would......