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Leisure

Beyond the chili bowl: U St.

If you’re looking for a fresh spot for dinner or drinks, leave pricey M Street behind and take a spin further down the alphabet to U Street, a neighborhood that’s up and coming so fast you want to make sure you get to it before it loses its edge.

Leisure

Critical Voices: Stephen Malkmus, Real Emotional Trash

Stephen Malkmus’ Real Emotional Trash is his first solo release that sounds as willfully sprawling as his best work with his old band. Backed once again by the Jicks, Malkmus has abandoned the clever, artsy pop of his last few releases, opting instead for a heavy jam-fest. Finally achieving the mix of hooks and guitar freakouts that fans have been awaiting through his four releases since the dissolution of Pavement, Real Emotional Trash is his best solo album to date.

Leisure

Critical Voices: Cadence Weapon, Afterparty Babies

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Afterparty Babies, Cadence Weapon’s second LP, is how calculated it seems. Surely, countless hours go into crafting any good hip-hop album these days, but the effort put into Afterparty Babies extends beyond time spent in the studio or obsessively rewriting lyrics. Like the best rappers, Cadence Weapon seems fully aware of his audience, goals and idiosyncrasies; unlike the best-known rappers, he’s confident rather than megalomaniacal.

Leisure

Culottes for you lots: Classy classics

I thought Amy Adams looked absolutely magnificent on Oscar night. She had the whole vampy Jessica Rabbit thing going on while maintaining the poise and grace of one of Hollywood’s early leading ladies. But Kimora Lee Simmons, who was playing fashion critic for E!, disagreed.

Leisure

Sex, drugs and Charlie

The idea behind Charlie Bartlett—a Ferris Bueller for the ‘00 decade!—is interesting enough, but the filmmakers wanted more. So they threw too many ideas at the wall to see which ones would stick, but most don’t. Although inventive and occasionally charming, the movie is too scattered and uneven to be satisfying.

Sports

Hoyas stop the Red Storm

Georgetown (23-4, 13-3 BE) faced an unexpected handful in the St. John’s Red Storm (10-17, 4-11 BE) last night. The Hoyas couldn’t repeat the 32-point rout they enjoyed earlier this year at Madison Square Garden, but walked out with an important 64-52 victory.

Voices

Attacking American Unreason

You’re dumb. It’s a message you can hardly avoid lately, unless you’re doing the very thing that’s making you dumb: not reading. Georgetown’s already told you so, in the form of a 72-page Intellectual Life Report that says you study less, drink more, and “earn” good grades more easily than your historical counterparts did. Your degree, it seems, will be a testament to an intellectual odyssey through a University in a “crisis stage.”

Voices

Roadtrip: Seeing America right

Everyone our age remembers (and maybe even occasionally watches) the 90s classic “The Sandlot.” It had all the elements of a cinematic triumph: the backdrop of 1960s America, James Earl Jones and baseball. Plus, you had to admire Squint’s cajones when he made out with va-va-voom lifeguard Wendy Peffercorn after fake-drowning. The movie brimmed with great moments, but the 4th of July scene is by far the best in the movie, a perfect pictorial encapsulation of summer-time bliss, in which the whole squad gazes in wonderment at fireworks splayed across the sky as Ray Charles’ bluesy rendition of “America the Beautiful” swells in the background. The only thing that could have made the scene more quintessentially “American summer” is if all the boys, inspired by patriotic pyrotechnics, had decided to hop in a Chevy and drive off down the highway to where the setting sun meets the waving sea of wheat.

Voices

Trying to translate the US political system to German

In the month that I’ve been working in Germany before my semester begins, I’ve learned plenty: what a plus sign in a phone number means, how to say instantaneous [augenblicklich] and to buy groceries on Saturday, since everything is closed on Sunday.

Voices

A dose of reality and disillusionment

If I had to pinpoint the problem with the United States government, my answer would be simple. Me.

Sports

The Sports Sermon

With warmer weather rolling around, spring sports are gearing up for their seasons. In particular, baseball is taking advantage of the shift to green grass and sun, both off campus and on. Spring training has begun and teams are counting down to opening day.

Sports

What Rocks

After ending the Hoyas’ eight-year medal drought in the Big East Championships and setting four Georgetown swimming records, junior Goran Bistric was surprisingly humble.

Sports

Court troubles

I haven’t been able to stand watching Georgetown play basketball lately. My roommates and I frequently curse at the television, and no player has been safe from our lashings. Even JTIII has been the recipient of a few unkind words. Every time I watch the highlights of top teams like UNC, Texas, Kansas and UCLA, I can’t help but think how scared I’d be to watch Georgetown play any team in the current top seven. It’s not that Georgetown can’t beat these teams, but with the way they are playing right now the Hoyas would get smacked, straight-up. Don’t let the recent blowout of Cincy fool you. If they want to play in April, the Hoyas have some things to fix, and quick.

Sports

Finding a future in football

For seniors who may be unsure about their plans after graduation, the question always lingers. It echoes from the tonsils of elderly family members and scarcely-seen acquaintances alike: “So what are you doing next year?”

Leisure

Major Barbara’s battle

The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of “Major Barbara” is an incredibly crisp, engaging example of what the greater Washington D.C. theatre scene has to offer. Director Ethan McSweeny’s interpretation stays true to George Bernard Shaw’s impeccable original text and conveys the author’s pertinent social commentary and finely-tuned wit.

Leisure

Effective cinema: the movies of your dreams

Some pieces in “The Cinema Effect” challenge our notion that moving pictures on a screen require a story, while others indulge it magnificently. One of the most impressive exhibitions currently in D.C., “The Cinema Effect” delivers a well-conceived blend of pieces to create an alternate, dream-like world.

Letters to the Editor

Academic Resource Center helps students

I have a variety of learning disabilities for which I receive accommodations at Georgetown. I am now in my fourth semester of working with the Academic Resource Center, and I... Read more

Letters to the Editor

GUSA: Sean Hayes and Andrew Madorsky

Hopefully you are aware that we, Sean Hayes and Andrew Madorsky, are running for GUSA President and Vice-President. We have a lot of great ideas for Georgetown, and a real... Read more

Leisure

Catch Oscar!

The Oscars are here, and be glad you live in D.C. this movie season, because there are quite a few places to gorge on quality films of all sorts. Just be ready to rail against the academy when they invariably pick the wrong one.

Leisure

Popped Culture: a bi-weekly column on entertainment

The writers’ strike is over, and thank God, because the strike made the entertainment world profoundly boring. In addition to the obvious problem—the lack of newly written words for actors to say—there was the problem that the strike itself, for all its worthwhile rationales and my love of the Writers Guild of America (WGA), was really boring to hear about. As NBC’s wacko chairman, Ben Silverman, explained, “Sadly, it feels like the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom.”

Leisure

Critical Voices: Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears, Flight of the Knife

A year after releasing his well-received solo debut, The Shredding Tears, Bryan Scary is set to unleash his second album, Flight Of The Knife. Scary’s touring band, The Shredding Tears, joined him in the studio to help create an electric follow-up.

Leisure

Critical Voices: Beach House, Devotion

Baltimore’s Beach House, the name of dreampop duo Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand, garnered critical acclaim with their self-titled debut in 2006. Its sound was strikingly original in the increasingly homogenous indie rock world—the songs, comprised of distant organs and slide-guitars over drum machine beats and accompanied by Legrand’s stunning voice, moved forward at a snail’s pace while remaining fascinating. Devotion is an excellent follow-up to that album, a set of eleven love songs that subtly update the group’s sound for the better.

Leisure

Black Comedy: wit in the dark

Mask and Bauble’s “Black Comedy,” written by Peter Shaffer and directed by Hunter Styles (COL ’08), is a bright, raucous show filled with bubbly British accents and witty jokes that bring the complexities of sexuality to light.

Leisure

Living purgatory In Bruges

The opening shots of In Bruges—sweeping views of the eponymous Belgian town’s brick houses, lush countryside and cobblestone streets, accompanied by streams of obscenities by Colin Farrell—set the tone for a smart black comedy filled with comedic juxtapositions.