Chris Norton

Voices

This man is living the dream, occasionally

After graduation, I moved to the big city with three friends from high school to play our own radical take on the music we grew up listening to together. Our band was called … let’s just say it starts with L and ends with Zeppelin. Fortunately, one of our members had spent some time touring with the Yardbirds while I was in school, so we were entering the game with a pretty high level of professionalism. Our debut album drew a little bit of noise from the press and the fans alike, we toured here and there, and before you could say “alcohol poisoning” it was all black magic and mud sharks. Then our drummer died in a pool of his own vomit.

By November 15, 2007

Features

Suggestive figures, Grading on curves, Georgetown gets down

Everybody’s doin’ it! Or are they? Last Monday, the Voice wrapped up an anonymous web-based survey of more than 300 students, designed with the advice of the Mathematics Department’s Statistics Consulting Clinic, and the results show that more often than not, they are. 62.8 percent of the 269 undergrads who fully completed the survey described themselves as sexually active, and 91.7 percent of those sexually active have had intercourse in the past year.

By April 26, 2007

Page 13 Cartoons

Fish

His feet never fit comfortably into his shoes. Once he had a pair of sneakers that made them look like the feet of a fat man squirming into a pair of dress spats several sizes too small, but mostly his feet looked like dead fish crammed into cases of canvas and leather.

By April 12, 2007

Leisure

From Australia with Love of Diagrams

Antonia Sellbach pulls her bleached bangs behind her ear and leans out past the edge of the sofa. It’s a Thursday night at the 9:30 Club, and her Melbourne, Australia-based band Love of Diagrams has just wrapped up a 45 minute opening set for Ted Leo, punk rock local hero and elder statesman. His set is being recorded for NPR’s All Songs Considered live series, but she’s upstairs in the dressing room, doing something relatively new for the band—talking to the press.

By April 12, 2007

Leisure

Critical Voices: Low

Low never used to be a surprising band. These pioneers of the minimalist, glacially-paced subset of indie rock called slowcore made a name for themselves, beginning with their early ‘90s debut, by doing exactly what everyone expected: producing album after album of quietly gorgeous songs stealing plays from the Velvet Underground.

By March 22, 2007

Leisure

Critical Voices

Low never used to be a surprising band. These pioneers of the minimalist, glacially-paced subset of indie rock called slowcore made a name for themselves, beginning with their early ‘90s debut, by doing exactly what everyone expected: producing album after album of quietly gorgeous songs stealing plays from the Velvet Underground.

By March 15, 2007

Page 13 Cartoons

poetry: benediction

By March 1, 2007

Features

One of your friends has an eating disorder. Have you noticed?

Eating disorders at Georgetown are all about what you overhear, and what you don’t hear at all. They’re about what you thought you heard in the girl’s bathroom on your freshman floor after dinner one night. They’re about the rumors you hear of the dining hall lettuce being sprayed with protein. They’re about the quiet conversational asides and the quieter stigmatization of conditions like anorexia and bulimia, about the snap judgments and misconceptions that discourage sympathy and stifle awareness of the real issues at hand.

By February 15, 2007

Page 13 Cartoons

poetry: watching an in-flight movie

By January 18, 2007

Features

Mapping the Atlas District

A three-block stretch of H Street in Northeast might be D.C.’s new haven for nightlife refugees from Adams Morgan seeking lower rents and less vomit on the sidewalk. But you’d never know it peering through the blinds of a shuttered bar on a Tuesday night, while your cabbie yells to get back in the car before you get shot. The so-called Atlas District, located about a mile northeast of Union Station, has been in total disarray since the riots after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death, but the area is now being claimed and renamed by a few forward-thinking scene-builders who know how to squint with the right kind of eyes down the wide, empty H Street Corridor and see a renaissance in utero.

By January 18, 2007