Leisure

Reviews and think pieces on music, movies, art, and theater.

Leisure

George de Forest Brush paints people and dreams

There are countless portrayals of the American Indian available to those who seek them. Less easy is the task of finding images of Native Americans that are unadulterated by centuries of stereotype. Luckily, the National Gallery of Art, in conjunction with the Seattle Art Museum, have compiled a small exhibit of images of American Indians by the painter George de Forest Brush, a late 19th century American artist who fell in love with “the noble savage.”

By September 25, 2008

Leisure

Los Cuates: not the spice of life

Los Cuates isn’t a bad Mexican restaurant. But it’s just average, and in a city with so many options for dining out, average is worth about as much as Los Cuates’ barely-passable salsa.

By September 25, 2008

Leisure

Semiconductor: wild!

The Hirshhorn’s new installation in its Blackbox exhibition space, “Semiconductor,” will simultaneously engage the left and right sides of your brain. Two English artists, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, comprise the artistic duo dubbed Semiconductor, which ignites artistic expression through self-described “digital noise and computer anarchy.”

By September 25, 2008

Leisure

The music that actually matters most

Some albums are so good you can’t stop listening to them. You listen and listen, memorize the ins and outs, and the music means so much to you—it is you—that when someone asks you what your favorite record is, there’s no hesitation in your answer.

By September 25, 2008

Leisure

Critical Voices: Friendly Fire, “Friendly Fire”

It’s fitting then, that St. Albans-based Friendly Fires come at the idea from the other end on their self-titled debut album, mixing rock influences into their more electronic sound. Nowhere is this mixture more clear than on “White Diamonds,” which plays like a T Rex song for the post-disco era, loping guitar riffs, cowbells, and all.

By September 25, 2008

Leisure

Critical Voices: Jackson Browne, “Time the Conqueror”

Jackson Browne fans are accustomed to tender vocals, swinging melodies, and a clean cut sound. Time the Conqueror meets most of these expectations. Since his heyday in the 1970s, Browne has continued to produce a steady stream of ballad-heavy albums, but Time the Conqueror is his first new album in six years.

By September 25, 2008

Leisure

The premier premieres of fall

With temperatures below 90 degrees, your increasing workload, and a plethora of russet-hued clothes on M street, it seems as though fall is finally here. Fall brings plenty of opportunities to try new things, from doing your reading this semester, to new fashions, to new TV shows, and see what sticks. Fortunately for you, we’ve scouted out all the newly-premiered shows and can tell you what’s worthy of a time commitment.

By September 18, 2008

Leisure

Critical Voices: Astronautilus, “Pomegranate”

At first listen, Pomegranate, Astronautalis’ third full-length album, is underwhelming to say the least. But the record’s subtle inner workings become apparent on the second or third listen. On Pomegranate, Astronautalis (née Andy Bothwell), weaves stories of love, betrayal, loss, lust, and rabble-rousing. Throughout the album, Bothwell mixes together his obsession with historical tidbits, his own family heritage, and his Walt Whitman-esque love for the hard-working man into a conglomerate of stories, sagas, and adventures that span several generations and locales.

By September 18, 2008

Leisure

Critical Voices: Young Jeezy, “The Recession”

Three years ago, Young Jeezy’s album Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation went largely unnoticed aside from the Akon collaboration “Soul Survivor,” which dominated radio waves for most of the summer. According to Young Jeezy, his new album “is like Thug Motivation on steroids.”

By September 18, 2008

Leisure

Critical Voices: Mogwai, “The Hawk is Howling”

Mogwai’s 1997 debut, Young Team, featured songs that alternated between long tranquil stretches and equally lengthy, face-melting, pummeling hard rock. It won them a lot of fans, but over the years, as they added minor electronic touches and adopted more conventional song structures, those fans begged for a return to their more dynamic early work. Unlike 2006’s Mr. Beast, which largely did away with their vaunted quiet/loud dynamic and stuck with a whole bunch of loud, The Hawk is Howling returns to that template, and longtime Mogwai fans will likely be pleased.

By September 18, 2008

Leisure

Chinese triathlon

Two years ago, I conducted a historic competition that took place among three giants of the Georgetown Chinese delivery circuit: Kitchen No. 1, Best Hunan, and Hunan Peking. Scored on price, delivery time, taste, and texture, the judges based their decisions on three dishes: Orange Beef, General Tso’s Chicken, and Chicken Fried Rice. The winner? Hunan Peking, hands down, with Best Hunan a close second and Kitchen No. 1 more like Kitchen No. 3.

But these times, they are a-changin’. Hunan Peking has since closed its doors, and Best Hunan has changed its name and image to the posh Banana Leaves and Asian Restaurant. It was time for a do-over.

By September 18, 2008

Leisure

Righteous Kill retread

I have never seen a movie that adheres to the typical cop-movie formula as strictly as Righteous Kill does. Director Jon Avnet fails to build suspense and ends up producing an overdone story, drenched in lukewarm predictability. The plot, themes, and characters are simply too recognizable to be exciting.

By September 18, 2008

Leisure

D.C.: Drab City

This past Sunday, New York Times photojournalist Bill Cunningham chronicled the close of Fashion Week with a study on the shoes about town. While hanging out on 5th Avenue taking pictures for his weekly “On the Street” feature, Mr. Cunningham ran across studded stilettos and snakeskin stacked heels paired with super-high hemlines. Three hundred miles south, I observed a very different scene in Columbia Heights.

By September 18, 2008

Leisure

Burn After Reading: very un-Dude

Who didn’t see this one coming? In their twenty-four years of screenwriting and directing, Joel and Ethan Coen have bounced between dark plunges into a killer’s abysmal psyche and zany tales of boneheaded crime schemes gone awry. After last year’s bloodthirsty adaptation, No Country for Old Men, the brothers’ oeuvre seemed ripe for a few giggles, and Burn After Reading presumes to deliver the goods.

By September 18, 2008

Leisure

Avedon: power and politics in portraiture

“Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power,” a comprehensive collection of 200 images of iconic figures of the past and present spanning five decades, presents interesting ideas about who qualifies as a political figure, and what constitutes a person in power.

By September 18, 2008

Leisure

Water Polo? Seriously?

The Georgetown gallery scene doesn’t always get the attention it deserves, but gems are ready and waiting to be unearthed for those industrious enough to pick up a few brochures. But first, a brief lesson in jock culture: because the bodies of water polo players are submerged in water, the helmets players wear serve the same identifying function as jerseys do in other sports. John Trevino, a D.C. based artist and Howard University professor, has taken this idea and run with it in “What Comes Next,” an exhibit of portrait photography at District Fine Arts (DFA) on Wisconsin Avenue. The portraits, photos of black men and women in cartoon water polo helmets, ultimately fall short of their aim to “examine dreams and memory created as the residual of human interaction.”

By September 11, 2008

Leisure

By any means necessary

In case you didn’t know, the Internet is a remarkable source for learning about music and finding that music for free. While many collectors are in the habit of finding full albums to add to their libraries, casual downloaders are often in search of single songs.

By September 11, 2008

Leisure

Just one more night in Bangkok

“The work is steady, the money’s good, but it’s not for everyone,” says Nicolas Cage’s assassin Joe at the beginning of Bangkok Dangerous. He’s describing his globe-trotting, gangster-murdering job, but he could just as easily be describing Cage’s career. The actor has delivered reliably decent performances in action movies for years, sometimes giving the impression that he worked harder on a single scene than the screenwriter did for the whole movie.

By September 11, 2008

Leisure

The shorter the better

It’s that time of year again! No, not “International Housekeeper’s Week,” although I’m sure everyone’s super excited about that. This bit of news is just as good; District’s very own DC Shorts Film Festival is back for the fifth year in a row, starting on Thursday, September 11th.

By September 11, 2008

Leisure

Doomsday drinks

If you’re reading this, then you know that the world did not come to an end on September 10, 2008 at 4: 27 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. At that moment, a group of European scientists under the city of Geneva, Switzerland, flipped the “on” switch of the Large Hadron Collider, a massive proton accelerator whose essential purpose is to recreate the Big Bang on a miniature scale.

By September 11, 2008