Archive

Critical Voices: Leila, “Blood, Looms and Blooms”

Blood, Looms and Blooms is the most captivating electronica album I’ve heard since The Knife’s Silent Shout, though her latest release “electronica” doesn’t begin to capture the veritable musical circus Leila Arab is orchestrating.

By Traviss Cassidy August 28, 2008

Page 13 Cartoons

Dispatches from the Obama campaign

With deepening gloom, I had continued to call people, hoping I’d strike gold and find a volunteer. The next day passed uneventfully. I paced the room, talking eagerly to whoever picked up their telephone. Occasionally, pedestrians would slow down or stop when they saw that someone was walking around inside the office, but they’d soon move on again, and my hopes for a walk-in volunteer would dissipate into the sweltering August air.

By Nick Wertsch August 28, 2008

Get Your Groove on in the Jazzy District

Fortunately for me, D.C. has plenty of stellar jazz, blues, funk, and R&B shows, and the next six weeks are the best time of the year to be a jazz aficionado in the District. Here are three events that you absolutely won’t want to miss.

By Alexander Haddad August 28, 2008

Martin Puryear at the National Gallery of Art

Minimalism is not easy to get into. Even if you can appreciate beauty in simplicity and purity of form, it’s hard not to be skeptical when you read that a big black rectangle is really a reflection on the nature of our inner and outer selves. The National Gallery’s retrospective of sculptor Martin Puryear’s work, though, woos visitors with displays of graceful shapes and clean lines, without hitting them over the head with lofty, obtuse meanings.

By Katherine Norton August 28, 2008

DCPS loses with Capital Gains program

“School is Money,” the original name of a D.C. Public Schools pilot program being instituted this fall wasn’t referring to the intangible value of an education, nor was it trying to relate to students using slang. Rather, it was alluding, quite literally, to the program’s substance: paying students—up to $100 each every two weeks—for good academic performance, behavior, and attendance. Since renamed Capital Gains, the initiative is modeled after a program underway in New York City and has been championed by DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee in a press release as an effective way to “re-engage students and increase their potential.” Though Rhee has shown a refreshing willingness to shake-up DCPS, Capital Gains misses the mark. The program is a cynical vote of no-confidence in the District’s students, a waste of scarce resources, and an abandonment of every educator’s true mission: teaching students to love learning for its own inherent value.

By the Editorial Board August 28, 2008

Celebrating the new LGBTQ center

It took a horrific hate crime, numerous protests by GU Pride, and countless hours of meetings between dedicated administrators, faculty, and students, but on Tuesday Georgetown finally took a giant step forward with the official opening of the LGBTQ Resource Center. Located on the third floor of the Leavey Center, the center marks a new chapter in Georgetown’s history as it strives to become a truly inclusive university for all of its students, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. The center promises to become a vital resource for LGBTQ students at Georgetown and all those who helped create it should be commended for their tireless dedication to helping Georgetown address the needs of all of its students.

By the Editorial Board August 28, 2008

Van Slyke needs to address his past

Boasting an impressive blend of academic background and practical experience, Dr. Jeffrey Van Slyke, Georgetown’s Director of Public Safety since June 1, seems like an ideal candidate on paper. However, as the Voice’s cover story this week details, a number of controversies in Van Slyke’s past raise questions that he needs to address before the Georgetown community can put their trust in him.

By the Editorial Board August 28, 2008

Biloxi, three years later

Biloxi is the cultural center of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a region that has always been more New Orleans gumbo than Mississippi catfish. In fact, it was the original New Orleans, founded around twenty years before the Big Easy ever came into existence. It is a city settled by French, Croatians, Cajuns, and Vietnamese, a city that is proud of its Catholic heritage and cannot live without its Mardi Gras, a city where a po-boy is always lunch and no dinner is complete without French bread.

Three years ago, it was all swept from under my feet.

By Dylan Richmond August 28, 2008

The last person on Earth without a cell

As time wore on, I got attached to the idea that rejecting technology signified a bohemian, responsibility-free existence. Everyone with their cell phones and iPods and fax machines could just go work at Merrill Lynch and rape the earth. I would be barefoot and bake vegan cupcakes, the American answer to Amelie, sprinkling joy wherever I went, free from the onerous burden of communicating with others.

By Sarah Harman August 28, 2008

Unpaid? Uninterested

My dad never went to college. My siblings and I were raised on the tenets of hard and honest work, no matter how much we hated our jobs. In high school I bagged groceries at a local supermarket. For two years, I bit my tongue as suburban moms complained about the rising price of peaches and the bruises on their cantaloupes. But I never regretted taking the job, because even though I absolutely loathed standing for five hours ringing up groceries, I had one thing to be grateful for: I was getting paid.

By Madeline Reidy August 28, 2008

Women’s volleyball looks to bounce back

The Georgetown volleyball team is anxious to improve after a disappointing, injury ridden 5-27 season last year.

By Nicole Bush August 28, 2008

Little big league

While Lebron James and Carmelo Anthony led fans in a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” after Sunday’s gold medal game in Beijing, a far more unlikely group of heroes were treated to the same cheer half a world away. After flirting with elimination a day earlier in the semifinals of this year’s Little League World Series, the team of seventh-graders from Waipahu, Hawaii emerged triumphant in the title game, beating the opposing squad from Matamoros, Mexico, 12-3. Hours after China sent off the world’s athletes with an ambitious closing ceremony, the fans in Williamsport, Pennyslvania—most of them face-painted parents or sunburned little sisters—departed as well. There were no fireworks or lip-synching nine-year-olds, only tired dads loading poster-boards bearing messages of good luck and empty coolers into their RVs.

By Walker Loetscher August 28, 2008

Field hockey rebuilds

Despite the fact that more than half the team is new to college, Georgetown field hockey has high hopes for the 2009 season. The squad welcomes eight freshmen to its ranks, as well as new head coach Tiffany Marsh and assistant coach Emily Beach. Both joined the team as interim coaches during the first week of August last season.

By Liz Kuebler August 28, 2008

Sports Sermon: First Annual D.C. Cup

As a freshman in Harbin Hall who couldn’t see anything but the football field outside of my dorm room window, I would probably have been considered a shoe-in to attend the 2006/2007 season opener against Holy Cross. I didn’t—I slept in. For me, a football fan with familial claims to powerhouse programs like West Virginia and Tennessee, Holy Cross was just another name in our outdated fight song and Georgetown football barely even existed at all.

By Anthony Francavilla August 28, 2008

Hoyas ride a bounty of goals to Hollywood

This won’t be a relaxing three-day weekend for the members of the Georgetown men’s soccer team. With just a single day of school behind them, the team boarded a plane early this morning to participate in the Cal State Northridge Tournament in Los Angeles. The Hoyas will open up regular season play against their hosts—who knocked off the University of California 1-0 in an exhibition last week—before taking on Cal State Fullerton on Sunday and boarding the red eye back to D.C.

By Anthony Francavilla August 28, 2008

Features

D.C.’S BEST ‘HOODS

Adams Morgan Born out of the integration of all-white John Quincy Adams and all-black Thomas P. Morgan elementary schools in 1955 and the city’s subsequent redrawing of neighborhood boundaries, Adams... Read more

By the Voice Staff August 22, 2008

This Georgetown Life: First days of school

On the last day of summer before the start of second grade, I sat at the pool with some friends playing with a bee sting remover. The device is like a plastic syringe and uses suction to pull the sting out of the flesh. Who knew that suctioning the thing to your chin could be so outrageously fun? Prancing around in my little Speedo, I exclaimed, “look, I’m a Pharaoh!” as it dangled from my chin, or “now I’m a unicorn!” when stuck to my forehead. What I should have anticipated is that I’d be showing up on the first day of school with perfectly round purple dots about one inch in diameter all over my face.

By the Voice Staff August 22, 2008

Pride of the People’s

In the last two weeks I have heard the Chinese national anthem more times than I have in the rest of my life put together. Although I’m sure any avid Olympics viewer is starting to become familiar with the song, being in Beijing this summer means that those notes follow you everywhere. Not only is every television in the city tuned into the Olympics, but the new buses, subway stations, and subway cars are all equipped with TV screens so you won’t miss a single moment. Montages of gold medal moments air in between all programming, so in a given day I could see the same flag rise at least twenty times. It’s gotten to the point where I saw a group of inebriated Germans singing the Chinese national anthem on the Olympic Green and wasn’t surprised that they hit all the right notes.

By Vivian Chen August 22, 2008

Culottes for you lots: a bi-weekly column on fashion

It sounds very third grade of me to say so, but I love back-to-school shopping. I can’t resist the earth-toned window displays, and every year I buy corduroy that I never end up wearing. There are still a few humid weeks of August left and nary a leaf has fallen, but I’ve already cast my summer wardrobe aside and am imagining crunching through leafy drifts in knee-high boots and a navy blazer. I’m getting giddy just thinking about it.

By Katherine Norton August 22, 2008

War is Hell

Tropic Thunder surprised me. The trailer and ads had me braced for a classic screwups-in-peril format: hopeless incompetents defeating death with liberal doses of slapstick and potty humor. In that respect it didn’t disappoint, pouring on sight gags and classic slap in epic proportions. But the real reason to see Tropic Thunder is its razor sharp satirical dissection of the Hollywood hit machine.

By Anna Hunter August 22, 2008

Carrying On: Plumage Pilgrimage

I didn’t know it before I took the job, but the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge where I worked sees 325 different species of birds throughout the year. As a result, it’s a world-famous birding site, drawing visitors from allover the globe. Late spring though August is the prime time for migratory birds, and the number of birders following them made it feel similar to what I imagine it must be like to work in Mecca during the Hajj (that is, if Mecca were visited primarily by upper-middle-class, middle-aged white couples).

By Dan Newman August 22, 2008

Critical Voices: Brian Eno and David Byrne, “Everything that Happens Will Happen Today”

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today doesn’t have nearly the same coherence as its distant predecessor. Eno approached Byrne a few years back, expressed dissatisfaction with a set of songs he had been working on for “up to 8 years,” and eventually asked Byrne to write lyrics and sing over the music. In other words, the collaborative starting point of Everything That Happens Will Happen Today was “salvage Eno’s botched tunes”—a far cry from the ambitious raison d’etre of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

By Daniel Cook August 22, 2008