Leisure

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

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

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

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

Leisure

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 August 22, 2008

Leisure

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 August 22, 2008

Leisure

Voice Restaurant Guide

View Larger Map Here you can see all the Voice’s restaurant reviews in one place. Green means go, yellow means think about it, and red means stay away.

By August 15, 2008

Leisure

Drinking the Derby

The Triple Crown is considered one of the greatest sporting events on earth. Man and beast labor as one, sweating and straining to reach the finish line; everyone else hangs out at the bar, showing off their large hats and signet rings. Ponies and potent potables have always gone hand in hand, and though this weekend’s Busch-soaked festivities at Foxfields may give the casual observer the impression that horse-racing aficionados are nothing more than meatheads marauding in madras, the average adult libation at a racetrack is as refreshingly spirited as the fillies galloping around it.

By April 24, 2008

Leisure

Fountains, belly dancers, and finger food, oh my!

Whether it’s a drive-in, a draft house, or a serenading mariachi band, the elusive combination of food and entertainment is dying out. Dupont Circle haunt Marrakesh, though, masters the art of bringing entertainment straight to the dinner table by pairing hypnotizing belly dancers with delectable Moroccan cuisine.

By April 24, 2008

Leisure

Just forget it, Sarah Marshall. Superbad was funnier.

Producer Judd Apatow has created a perverse (yet strangely endearing) Holy Trinity of contemporary comedy in the last few years: The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad. And this machine just keeps spitting out more, with Drillbit Taylor and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story as the most recent (and worst performing) of the bunch. His latest film, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, has its charms, and certainly tries to engage in an honest examination of relationships, like the best of Apatow’s films. But unlike, say, Knocked Up, the laughs feel cheap, and so does its exploitation of the audience’s emotions.

By April 24, 2008

Leisure

High Times with Mr. Doug Benson

There is exactly one difference between comedian Doug Benson’s documentary Super High Me and Morgan Spurlock’s much lauded Super Size Me: marijuana. Benson, who was dubbed “Stoner of the Year” by High Times Magazine in 2006, uses himself as a guinea pig to examine the physical and mental effects of smoking pot non-stop for thirty days. The end result is both an entertaining parody of Super Size Me by a stoned comedian, and a meaningful documentary, thanks to the well-focused effort of the production crew as they confront many of the societal issues regarding marijuana.

By April 24, 2008