Leisure

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

Leisure

Critical Voices: Ra Ra Riot, “The Rhumb Line”

Ra Ra Riot is an enigmatic band. A mere six months after their formation, this Syracuse sextet worked their way to the stage of the CMJ Music Marathon and shortly thereafter played esteemed festivals like South by Southwest and the South Street Music Festival. The group’s defiance of the standard slow stagger towards acclaim is even more admirable when you take their genre into consideration. Ra Ra Riot’s indie pop niche is usually flooded with ambiguous, recycled material, but The Rhumb Line mixes the instrumental bounciness with the vocal serenity of a Belle and Sebastian ballad. The product can only be described as a tranquil yet danceable medley of sounds.

By September 4, 2008

Leisure

Critical Voices: Fujiya & Miyagi, “Lightbulbs”

The opening of Lightbulbs, the third LP from Brighton, UK, quartet Fujiya & Miyagi, is uncomfortably similar to the beginning of the band’s 2006 Transparent Things: singer and guitarist David Best chants, “Vanilla, strawberry, knickerbocker glory” much like he intones “Fujiya, Miyagi” in the song “Ankle Injuries,” as a drum beat replicates the earlier song’s bassline. “I saw the ghost of Lena Zavaroni,” Best whispers, like a harbinger of tragedy. (Zavaroni was a child star that died at 35 due to complications from anorexia.) The album only gets worse from there.

By September 4, 2008

Leisure

Sweet cuppin’ cakes

From an etymological perspective, a cupcake is a cake, but in a cup. A name as commonplace as cupcake, like any word said too many times, loses the emotional connection to its referent, and many have forgotten just how marvelous cupcakes can be.

By September 4, 2008

Leisure

Mourning the demise of DIY fashion

It’s obvious that times have changed, but in past decades, people held on to vestiges of the do-it-yourself spirit. Groovy 70s gals routinely crocheted vests, and jeans of the 1980s were bathed in sinks full of bleach. No such trends exist today, though.

By September 4, 2008

Leisure

Muppets take over the International Gallery of Art

Jim Henson’s Fantastical World lies three levels below the unassuming dome of the Smithsonian’s International Gallery of Art. To enter the exhibit, you must walk past two or three dimly lit galleries and through a colored hall, its walls embossed with phrases like, “The only rule is that there are no rules.”

By September 4, 2008

Leisure

Fame, fashion, fads and fantasy: posters as portraits

College students know that posters have the power to transform a space, often choosing to adorn their walls with depictions of favorite bands or the obligatory “I Heart Beer” slogan. The National Portrait Gallery has caught onto this phenomenon with an exhibit entitled “Ballyhoo: Posters as Portraiture.”

By September 4, 2008

Leisure

There are much better ways to go to College than this

There is something amazing about Deb Hagan’s late summer comedy, College: the fact that such an unoriginal theme was combined with a practically plagiarized story to produce a movie that has earned only a little over two and a half million dollars.

By September 4, 2008

Leisure

Hamlet 2-Rollicking Ribaldry

Imagine the most ludicrous, politically incorrect version of High School Musical possible. It would probably look a lot like Hamlet 2, whose cast is led by a Napoleon Dynamite-meets-Zoolander drama teacher (Steve Coogan).

By the August 28, 2008

Leisure

Beat it: Unexpected Results

Every once in a while, an artist will follow a string of homogenous-sounding records with an absolutely unexpected curveball. Bloc Party are the latest to do it with their breakbeat-influenced, bombastic electronic album Intimacy, which was a surprise release much like Radiohead’s In Rainbows. And it was Radiohead who made perhaps the most famous curveball record over the last decade: released in 2000, Kid A is a blippity bloopity electronic record released after one of modern rock’s most bombastic and powerful statements, OK Computer. But Radiohead was hardly the first band to disappoint fans with high expectations.

By August 28, 2008

Leisure

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 August 28, 2008

Leisure

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 August 28, 2008

Leisure

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 August 28, 2008

Leisure

Concert-going munchies

The D.C.-concerting-novice may not know where to seek out the best sources of quick and cheap pre-show energy or post-show replenishment. Here’s a short guide to enhance your concert-going gastatory experience.

By August 28, 2008

Leisure

One for the Road: Professorial Potables

In their appreciation for alcohol, students and their teachers find a point of common interest.

By August 28, 2008

Leisure

Campus Theater worth Falling for

Clean House

Nomadic Theater, October 8-12, Walsh Black Box. Tickets are $9.

While this house may be clean, it is filled with emotional baggage. With everything from depression to an affair to an identity crisis, there is much for Matilde, the new Brazilian live-in maid, to do. The only problem is she hates to clean and is on a quest to find the perfect joke. With a comedic spin on the usual dramatic struggles, expect equal parts smart and serious from this Pulitzer Prize finalist play, as well as a number of monologues in Portuguese.

By August 28, 2008

Leisure

Traveling through history with colors and shapes

“The significance of a project such as this rests, I think, on its educational value.” So Jacob Lawrence wrote in the outline for his Migration Series before he started work on it in 1940. His goal, he wrote, was for Americans, black and otherwise, to learn something about the historical movement known as The Great Migration, when blacks from the South moved North in great numbers during the years following World War I. The Phillip’s current exhibition of the series he eventually painted underscores the difference between art and education, between portraying information and conveying feeling, between a timeline and a story. Even if he set out to educate, Lawrence also produced amazing works of art.

By August 22, 2008

Leisure

Steak Out: a bi-weekly column about food

Newton vs. Leibniz. Itchy vs. Scratchy. Disraeli vs. Gladstone. Michael Scott vs. Toby. The writer Elbert Hubbard once said that rivalry is the life of trade, and if you take a look at the local Georgetown food circuit you’ll see that he was right.

By August 22, 2008

Leisure

Best of the Summer

We here at the Leisure section sincerely regret the standard school schedule that prevents us from being able to tell you what to like and dislike over the summer months. To that end, we’ve compiled a collection of some of our favorite movies, music, and shows from the summer, in the hopes of allowing you to catch up on the culture you may have missed. Quick, catch these while the last rays of summer still shine and before those silly classes start.

By the August 22, 2008

Leisure

Critical Voices: The Walkmen, “You & Me”

No, the Walkmen did not hang up their sneakers after everyone declared “The Rat” to be one of 2004’s best singles. And yet, when they came back in 2006 with the wildly underrated A Hundred Miles Off, nobody seemed to notice, probably because there was nothing like “The Rat” there. There is nothing like “The Rat” on their latest release, You & Me, either. The Walkmen have evolved, mellowed, even—gasp!—matured.

By August 22, 2008

Leisure

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 August 22, 2008