Valerie Paschall's Selected Works
My Better Bylines
DCist, February 5th 2016
Super Bowl Sunday is obviously a big day for people who care about Sportsball and even people who have an unnatural fondness for advertising. But for the dog lovers in the area who could otherwise care less about football or Clydesdales, there’s another, much fluffier reason to turn on the TV this weekend. And this year, the Puppy Bowl has some local stars...
DCist, April 29th 2015
An album is almost never “just an album” but Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are was always going to be something more.
The eight year timeline of its compilation is altogether dizzying and dramatic. Many of the songs were written in the throes of serious illness. The album was recorded in a memorably public and unusual manner. The entire product was nearly lost when a computer malfunctioned. There was a very real danger that this would become the greatest D.C. album that was never released...
Washingtonian, March 18th 2015
The idea of a South by Southwest party filled with DC bands was born in November 2007 over some crummy Ruby Tuesday’s taquitos after an all-ages show in Alexandria. Four local musicians invited me out to interview them, and the conversation eventually veered toward perceptions that outsiders have of DC’s music scene...
Urban Land, September 26th, 2014
As walkable urban places have become more commonplace across the national real estate landscape, the subject of affordability within these communities has become a greater concern. Developers, government officials, and urban planners and educators in Washington, D.C., determined during ULI’s Walkable Urban Places Conference: Keys to Success for Social Equity and Economic Diversity that building cities more inclusive of people of multiple economic strata would take a multipronged and comprehensive plan that could take 20 to 30 years to fully realize...
Curbed DC, July 8th 2014
It's only just become apparent, but superstar architect Bjarke Ingels has been spending a lot of time in D.C. Although his delightfully quirky, geometric work has yet to make its debut on the D.C. skyline, over the weekend, it made its debut inside the National Building Museum in the form of The BIG Maze. This uniquely fun labyrinth is the first of two exhibitions that Ingels has planned for the museum's Great Hall and while walking through the plywood walls, he took a moment to talk to Curbed regarding the concepts behind its design...
Washington CIty Paper, May 29th 2014
It’s spring’s first balmy Saturday evening, and the Convergence parking lot is packed. The Alexandria church and community arts center regularly hosts punk shows for neighborhood teens, but today, the reception area is filled with an incongruous combination of young church families, foreign dignitaries, and 30-something punks in Replacements T-shirts and full-sleeve tattoos. Meanwhile, the man they’re all here to see, Jason Hamacher, is dismayed to learn that he has to do something wildly out of character: give a speech...
WAMU, March 17th 2014
“Hi, we’re Ex Hex from Washington, D.C.”
Last Thursday, local guitar virtuoso Mary Timony said those words to a full house at The Parish, a 450-capacity venue in the heart of downtown Austin. But Timony’s band is one of a diminishing number of D.C.-based acts that played the city’s annual South by Southwest music conference and festival this year...
Washington City Paper, September 28th 2012
The story of H Street NE has been told and retold. A once-thriving commercial district, scarred by the riots that rocked Washington in 1968, wrestled with violent crime and deep poverty in the decades that followed. Another shot at vitality eventually came, but not without a catch: New businesses wrought a cultural overhaul, replacing the strip’s hollowed-out storefronts with shiny, quirky new establishments, releasing the scent of craft beer and gourmet dining like a pheromone to an outside middle class. It has not always been a smooth transformation: Shop owners complain of a hostile takeover, journalists wax nostalgic over what was lost.
But of all the changes that have come to H Street NE in the past decade, perhaps the least controversial was the story of Al the cat...