Leisure

Sifting through the thrift in D.C.

By Sonnet Gaertner January 17, 2008

Leisure

Critical Voices: Dengue Fever

L.A.-based sextet Dengue Fever has the kind of back-story that’ll crinkle more than a few cynical noses: five white dudes from the United States travelled to Cambodia, fell in love with that country’s ‘60s psych-rock output, enlisted Cambodian pop singer Ch’hom Nimol and released a self-titled album comprised almost entirely of Cambodian pop-rock covers. Luckily, over the course of seven years the band has melded its diverse influences into a strikingly distinct Cambodian-pop-meets-Ethiopian-jazz aesthetic that in no way hints at the white-boy cultural misappropriation its back-story suggests.

By Traviss Cassidy January 17, 2008

Leisure

Critical Voices: Vampire Weekend

Vampire Weekend began their career like most college bands: toiling away in the relative obscurity of bars around campus. Eventually, though, the indie press noticed their clever mixture of well-crafted melodic pop, African rhythms and New York rock sensibilities, prompting XL Recordings to sign them and put out their very good eponymous first album. Its youthful energy, more than its oft-touted world influence, makes it a compelling and involving listen.

By Justin Hunter Scott January 17, 2008

Leisure

She’s all that… jazz

Crandall hopes to introduce new music to her peers. “The two artists I admire most are Ellen Fitzgerald and Sara Vaughan,” she said. “Too often, I hear that jazz is for old people. I want to enlarge that age range. There are so many styles and ways you can approach [jazz] that I hope [people our age] will open up to it.”

By Suzy Chen January 17, 2008

Leisure

2007’s best?

For me, the best album of 2007 was Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam. Despite the critical gravitation toward frontrunners such as Radiohead’s In Rainbows and LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver, Jam provided the most exciting batch of songs last year, effortlessly progressive in execution and more cohesive than the band’s earlier releases. I read the year-end, “best-of” lists like anyone else and compared my thoughts to other critics, but I’m a big boy—I can make my own opinions.

By Daniel Cook January 17, 2008

Leisure

Patrician food at plebeian prices

If you find yourself forgetting how to use utensils because your diet consists entirely of finger-food favorites like bagels and pizza, you’re in luck. There are only three days left of D.C.’s Restaurant Week (extended at some places like Farrah Olivia), when the best restaurants in the city offer top-quality cuisine for a fixed price of $20.08 for lunch and $30.08 for dinner in honor of the new year.

By Sara Carothers January 17, 2008

Leisure

Leave the “House,” ASAP

“House of Blue Leaves” wants to say something, and touches on a lot of grand themes—fame and media in society, the individual in our saturated world, the tension between dreams and reality. Unfortunately, it just ends up a mess, so nothing much comes through. One leaves feeling battered, rather than contemplative.

By Shira Hecht January 17, 2008

Leisure

Not cool

It’s January. In January, wearing a sundress when the thermometer hits sixty degrees is the fashion equivalent of wetting your pants with excitement: overzealous, and (eventually) uncomfortably cold.

By Katherine Norton January 17, 2008

Leisure

Decaying Photos

Christopher Myers’ “Standing on Two Eyes” is a refreshing departure from the modern-day overkill of digital photography, confronting the unrest of urban gentrification with a collection of hauntingly beautiful and nostalgic black and white giclee (a type of fine-art ink-jet) prints.

By Madeline Reidy December 6, 2007

Leisure

El Pollo Rico: a taste of Peru

Some restaurants do everything decently, others do a few things well and a small number do one thing spectacularly. Just as Ben’s Chili Bowl is all about the chili, El Pollo Rico earns its customers by serving delicious chicken.

By Sara Carothers December 6, 2007

Leisure

Performing LGBTQ Awareness

In the wake of the two hate crimes against LGBTQ students that occurred at Georgetown earlier this year, Nomadic Theater’s Square Pegs Productions will present a staged reading of Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project tonight.

By Grace Erdmann December 6, 2007

Leisure

Golden God?

The Golden Compass, which comes out nationwide on Friday, has all the ingredients of a standard big-budget fantasy epic. Complex fantastical universe, surprisingly like our own—check. Talking animals—check (several times over). Ian McKellen and/or Christopher Lee—check and check! Shadowy, evil villain bent on controlling the entire magical world—check.

And that’s where things get complicated.

By Shira Hecht December 6, 2007

Leisure

Critical Voices: Ghostface Killah

Ghostface Killah’s third release in two years, The Big Doe Rehab, proves that he’s quite the prolific rapper, but does little to silence the cries of inconsistency that have plagued him since his breakthrough Supreme Clientele. With its lack of innovation and absence of any true standout tracks, The Big Doe Rehab doesn’t live up to its colossal expectations as the follow-up to 2006’s excellent Fishscale.

By Justin Hunter Scott December 6, 2007

Leisure

WEB EXCLUSIVE: The nightmare that keeps on giving

Director Tim Burton delivers a visionary new nightmare before Christmas with his macabre adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning musical Sweeney Todd. As the haunted pipe organ and bloody opening credits make abundantly clear, this gory film, laced with coal-black humor, is not your average musical.

By Joshua Speiser December 6, 2007

Leisure

WEB EXCLUSIVE ‘There Will Be Blood’: There Was Blood … And More

Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is a devilish movie that isn’t easily absorbed in its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Although it offers hardly any satisfying moments, There Will Be Blood is challenging and engaging, polished filmmaking at its best that makes for a demanding, but extremely rewarding, experience.

By Michael Evans December 6, 2007

Leisure

No Country for Old Men

Joel and Ethan Coen’s brutally masterful new film, No Country for Old Men, is an unnerving piece of filmmaking as harsh and unforgiving as the parched Texas landscape where the story unfolds.

By Joshua Speiser November 29, 2007

Leisure

Lonely channels: surviving the writers’ strike

With the Writers Guild of America entering its fourth week on strike and no new episodes remaining of most scripted shows, networks are pulling out the big guns—namely, a bowtie clad Tucker Carlson. He’ll be the host of a new game show about trusting complete strangers to win cash. If that isn’t depressing enough, there’s no shortage of horrible ideas for unscripted shows to fill in the slots usually taken by 30 Rock or The Late Show: “My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad,” “Baby Borrowers,” and “When Woman Rule the World” (what, we don’t already?). To help cope with the onslaught of mediocrity that will rule the airwaves until the writers and networks get a contract signed, here’s some TV-on-DVD you may not have heard of:

By Sara Carothers November 29, 2007

Leisure

Dylan biopic all there

I’m Not There is fantastic, in all senses of the word, exploring one of the most alluring stories in modern American history—the rise of Bob Dylan.

By Jeff Reger November 29, 2007

Leisure

A new tune for Burns

Several months after Radiohead challenged the way music is sold by self-releasing the download-only In Rainbows, the film industry has followed suit. Purple Violets, the latest movie by writer/director Ed Burns (The Holiday, The Brothers McMullen) passed on a theater run and was released directly to iTunes on November 20 with a price tag of $14.99. While it’s not as revolutionary as Radiohead’s offering—it doesn’t allow users to choose their own price—it nonetheless opens up an intriguing new possibility for independent films hoping to find a larger audience.

By Justin Hunter Scott November 29, 2007