Ars longa, vita brevis. Or so said Seneca, Chaucer, Goethe and other immortals.

But the thought doesn't daunt Jill Finsen, 58, the latest urban artist to launch herself by using the walls of the city's ever-swelling number of coffee shops.

It's a niche to die for. While other artists work for years before a gallery will take them on, the coffee-shop phenomenon provides instant fame, if not instant riches.

After a couple of phone calls and some contact with a woman who "identifies art spaces," Finsen was happily helping to hang a large portion of her existing works on the tawny walls of a popular latteria, Cosi, at 3rd Street and Pennsylvania Avenue S.E.

There, her bright abstract and stylized acrylic paintings and prints are for sale from $350 to $950, creating a classy background for coffee tables filled with laptop users, gabbing couples, and many people who look as if they wished smoking were allowed.

Finsen is not at all deterred that no work in her show, which has been up since Feb. 5, has yet sold. "I was never into the arts to make money," she says, "but because I love it, as a passion."

More unusual is the fact that she recently converted from photography to painting and, after taking courses at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria and the Art League, simply launched herself at Washington's art world.

The mutual advantage of artist and coffee chains has worked for her. The coffee shop - which faces rival coffee Moloch Starbucks across the street - is glad to have the authentic and classy touch of real live art on the walls; and for Finsen the exposure is priceless. Two of her favorite American painters, John Marin and Marsden Hartley, shared the fate of many artists - struggle and financial dependence on others. But Finsen, who has a well-paying job as a "policy worker" for AARP, now wishes she could leave the workplace and do nothing else but paint. Formerly a Hill resident, she now paints on Tilden Street N.W.

She claims complete indifference to the reactions of her audience - or the sale of her works. "No one said, 'Jill, you're fantastic,'" she reports.

She is hosting a reception for her works March 5 at Cosi. "They've been so accommodating," she says.

Sharon Ambrose (D-Ward 6), the Hill's council member since 1997, has been through some perceived changes in her decade: she's been the motherly PTA type, all attentive to detail and neighborhood, then the friend of gentrification, then the pawn (some said) of development and corporate interests.

She's also seen the ward change from a hunkered-down community of middle-class gentry into a "destination" real-estate address. And for the past six years, she has gallantly battled multiple sclerosis.

But Ambrose, who is retiring, saved one fine role for last - the woman who can save the city from the financially risky National Capital Medical Center (NCMC). Ambrose last week said she would demand that the city and Howard University submit plans for the $420 million medical venture to the certificate-of-need procedure - or she'd keep the project bottled up in the Economic Development Committee, of which she's chairwoman.

Whether or not the ploy works to kill the NCMC by delay or by public hearings on the facts, Ambrose and council independent David Catania (At large) are now the only voices asking tough questions about the hospital.

But who will follow her? Only two names so far have officially filed with the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics, Keith Jarrell and Curtis Etherly. Jarrell, 49, a consultant, is former member of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 6A (northeast Capitol Hill) and a frequent participant in local-issue blogs. Etherly, 39, is a well-educated (Yale and Georgetown) lawyer who is a Coca-Cola executive and a former aide to Republican Councilwoman Carol Schwartz (At large). He recently withdrew from membership of the board of D.C. AppleTree, the education group backing a controversial school north of Lincoln Park on 12th Street N.E.

Leo Pinson, 40, former Ward 6 neighborhood service coordinator and a well-known figure at community meetings and functions, has filed as a candidate with the Office of Campaign Finance.

Best known of the candidates, and endorsed by Ambrose, is Tommy Wells, 40, who is hiking up the traditional political trail here: He has been chairman of Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) 6B and is on the school board. He has filed with the campaign-finance office.

SCHOOLYARD SPAT
AppleTree battle gets nastier

There seems to be a merciful period of calm in neighborhood feuds, coincident with the arrival of the lawyers.

But in the case of the ongoing battle for and against the arrival of AppleTree Charter School on 12th St. N.E. near Lincoln Park, the mood remains ever tense. Bloggers are fulminating, signs are everywhere and accusations of NIMBYism and "destabilizing" are on many lips.

Observers say workmen on the site, a plain commercial building owned by the AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation, have been harassed. The opposition group, Northeast Neighbors for Responsible Growth (NNRG), is furious that its request for an injunction against the school won't be heard until May in Superior Court.

The case is headed for a curious outcome. What the court decides is certain to have a big influence on the future of the charter-school movement, which has achieved major inroads on the D.C. Public Schools population, with approximately 18,000 kids in 51 schools enrolled out of a pool of about 54,000 students.

The neighbors' main complaint is that the planned 54-student school is too big. Margaret Holwell, leader of the NNRG, says 16 students would be acceptable. Meanwhile, the city's office of planning has agreed to changes in the rules - the most important a minimum size of 9,000 square feet - relating to charter schools. The AppleTree property is about 4,000 square feet.

Residents who oppose the school found to their dismay that the legislation enabling D.C.'s charter schools gave many special privileges, including the right to open schools in neighborhoods, bypassing the hurdles that zoning and the historic district pose.

Then AppleTree hired local heroine Ellen Opper-Weiner, a neighborhood lawyer who with veteran Advisory Neighborhood Commission member Will Hill defeated the plans of Boys and Girls Town to plant a five-building campus off Pennsylvania Avenue at 14th Street, not far from the AppleTree site. Opper-Weiner took the job partly to clarify the rules, she now says - but soon became the lightning rod for opposition.

METRO

o Mysterious are the ways of the National Park Service, which has abruptly opened the Anacostia Marina in the middle of winter, without electricity or repair services - after five years of shutdown for "major environmental problems." ...

o Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton plans a town meeting this spring in Anacostia to herald the arrival of the $300 million U.S. Coast Guard headquarters that is coming to the west campus of St. Elizabeths Hospital. The money is there in the 2007 federal budget, plus $6.7 million for infrastructure improvements. ...

o The Statehood Green Party is inviting progressives (and "members of the leftist fringe"), according to one party member, to a Vernal Equinox Green Gathering at Busboys and Poets, to be held March 21 at 2041 14th St. N.W. (14th and V streets) from 5:30 to 7 p.m. The program: "Grow Hemp, Legalize Medical marijuana, Use Public Transportation, Clean the Air." Call (202) 546-0940. ...

o The Hill's remaining auto-parts store, AutoZone at 13th and H streets N.E., threatened with closure as neighbors increase their protest of illegal oil dumping and auto repairs on the store's parking lot. D.C. police rules ticketing on private property without the owner's consent - and the property is owned by the H Street Community Development Corp., creating a network of blame but no solution. ...

o Hotter on 7th Street: Uncle Brutha's Hot Sauce Emporium will take the place of Bird-in-Hand Bookstore and Gallery, which has closed, at 323 7th St. S.E. Expect a grand opening in April. ...

o First come, first served is to be the rule with the District's new policy of offering subsidies to low-income grandparents who are raising their grandchildren. The first-in-the-nation plan is funded by $2 million in city dollars and begins March 1. ...

o Respected executive director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute Ed Lazere has added his voice to those arguing that the National Capital Medical Center, to be built here on the Hill at a cost of $400 million, should undergo the examination offered by the certificate-of-need procedure usually used in the case of public hospitals. He suggests savings would be made unit of emergency and other medical services but no beds for longer care.