Leisure

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

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Critical Voices: Beach House, Devotion

Baltimore’s Beach House, the name of dreampop duo Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand, garnered critical acclaim with their self-titled debut in 2006. Its sound was strikingly original in the increasingly homogenous indie rock world—the songs, comprised of distant organs and slide-guitars over drum machine beats and accompanied by Legrand’s stunning voice, moved forward at a snail’s pace while remaining fascinating. Devotion is an excellent follow-up to that album, a set of eleven love songs that subtly update the group’s sound for the better.

By February 21, 2008

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Critical Voices: Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears, Flight of the Knife

A year after releasing his well-received solo debut, The Shredding Tears, Bryan Scary is set to unleash his second album, Flight Of The Knife. Scary’s touring band, The Shredding Tears, joined him in the studio to help create an electric follow-up.

By February 21, 2008

Leisure

Popped Culture: a bi-weekly column on entertainment

The writers’ strike is over, and thank God, because the strike made the entertainment world profoundly boring. In addition to the obvious problem—the lack of newly written words for actors to say—there was the problem that the strike itself, for all its worthwhile rationales and my love of the Writers Guild of America (WGA), was really boring to hear about. As NBC’s wacko chairman, Ben Silverman, explained, “Sadly, it feels like the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom.”

By February 21, 2008

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Catch Oscar!

The Oscars are here, and be glad you live in D.C. this movie season, because there are quite a few places to gorge on quality films of all sorts. Just be ready to rail against the academy when they invariably pick the wrong one.

By the February 21, 2008

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SBF, seeking love and redemption

“In the Blood,” staged by the Black Theater Ensemble and written by Susan-Lori Parks, is a dark tale of a woman whose poverty and sexual prowess have given her five bastard children and a life of perpetual social exclusion. The story is loosely based on Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”—although the only vestiges of that archetypal classic are Hester La Negrita (the heroine) and an abundance of A’s (the only letter that Hester can read or write).

By February 14, 2008

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Culottes for you lots: Pretty in pink

When it comes to dressing up for the holidays, Valentine’s Day is notoriously short-changed. We get to wear pretty hats for Easter and little black dresses for New Years, but the idea of dressing up for Valentine’s Day seems, to many, a decidedly tacky thing to do. Mention anything about a Valentine’s Day outfit, and two visions come to mind: the middle-aged elementary school teacher in a voluminous cardigan covered in sequin hearts, and her polar opposite, the lingerie model in a trashy see-through teddy and crotchless panties. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

By February 14, 2008

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Finding Love, Etcetera

This Valentine’s Day, why not expand your cultural horizons? The Davis Center is putting on “Love, Etcetera,” a stupendous dance show by the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange based on the work of those two classic romantic Wills, Shakespeare and Nelson. A surprising pairing, but as Artistic Director Peter DiMuro explains, “their works are about human foibles, and they’re great storytellers.”

By February 14, 2008

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Recognize! what what?

Recognize!, the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibit about hip-hop culture, is slightly self-admonishing, born of a desire to recognize the movement’s work as “museum-worthy.” Doing a bit of sampling of its own, the Portrait Gallery chose a photographer, a painter, a poet, a video artist and two graffiti artists to showcase different aspects of hip-hop. Forgoing its usual strategy of sticking to retrospectives, the Smithsonian museum has produced an awkward first foray into current culture. Although the exhibit feels disjointed and insufficient at times, most of its pieces are unique and worth seeing.

By February 14, 2008

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Nanking: documenting “the forgotten Holocaust” in China

Nanking sheds light on this forgotten event in history, but this is not to say that it explains the underlying reasons for the massacre. It is a testament to the strength of the film that viewers are left wondering how teenagers buy into a mentality so perverse that it permits rape of twelve-year-old girls for sport, how officers can place bets on how many people their swords can cut down, or how a small group of noble men and women can still feel like failures after saving tens of thousands of people. The film contains equal parts human depravity and human courage, and manages to show how intricately the two are linked.

By February 14, 2008

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Critical Voices: Bon Iver

There are some albums that would have been impossible without just the right recording environment. Example: Enter the Wu Tang (36 Chambers), which owes much of its grit to the grimy gutters of Staten Island where six of the nine Wu Tang Clansmen honed their craft. Likewise, For Emma, Forever Ago, folk artist Justin Vernon’s debut as Bon Iver, owes its gorgeously sylvan vibe to the hibernating Wisconsin woods where Vernon wrote and recorded most of these songs.

By February 14, 2008

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Critical Voices: Mountain Goats

Who’s responsible for the state of the Mountain Goats in Heretic Pride? Overproduced and with lyrics that would make high schoolers at a Battle of the Bands blush, this once-fantastic band has released a lamentable album, and someone must be to blame.

By February 14, 2008

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Critical Voices: Strangefolk

Strangefolk, British psychedelic outfit Kula Shaker’s first album in eight years, is a tight set of tracks that works best when striking at the heart of the classic rock tradition.

By February 14, 2008

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Forte: An open letter to Apple

The bottom line is that between the iPod, iTunes and the Apple image, you’ve made being alone awfully convenient, even attractive. If the streak continues, maybe we can expect streaming concert footage on iTunes and albums made entirely with GarageBand.

By February 14, 2008

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4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days in the life

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, the latest success from Romania’s growing filmmaking community, is honest and brilliantly directed. The film recently opened in D.C. after winning the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or and garnering international praise for writer/director Cristian Mungiu’s nonjudgmental portrayal of a young woman seeking an illegal abortion with the help of a close friend.

By February 7, 2008

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High School Musical, the Musical!

I spent one week babysitting my cousins over winter break. And so, by no fault of my own, I just so happen to know every single word to the High School Musical soundtrack by heart. I even might have it on my iPod. Okay, okay—I just may be a secret HSM fanatic.

I love the utter corniness of Disney’s uber-simplistic version of high school, where the main characters don’t even kiss until the sequel. So when given the option to see High School Musical live, I hauled out to the National Theatre.

By February 7, 2008

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Popped Culture: Romcoms and Reviews

It’s February, which means that, in addition to more sunlight and an influx of pink at CVS, we can expect lots and lots of bad movies. The beginning of the calendar year is the usual dumping ground for movies no one expects to be considered for Oscars: action movies too dull for the summer, comedies that have been “reshot” six or seven times, and a plethora of formulaic romantic comedies (romcoms, if you will), a genre that gets less respect than almost any other.

By February 7, 2008

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Talking vaginas in Poulton Hall

Giant, talking vaginas. It’s the image that comes to mind when one hears the title Vagina Monologues, and which the play’s opening line intentionally invokes. “My vagina’s pissed off,” the first actress declares, before explaining what her “vagina would say if it could.”

By February 7, 2008

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Critical Voices: British Sea Power

Nationalist rockers British Sea Power return on February 12 with their third album, Do You Like Rock Music? Occasionally leaving behind some of the radio-friendliness of 2003’s Open Season in favor of their debut’s less nuanced—though arguably better—rock sound, the lads from Brighton, England hope your answer is yes. Although the band still fails to write great hooks consistently, the uptempo songs here are among their best to date.

By February 7, 2008

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Vox Around the Blocks

Compiled by your lovely Leisure staff, this calender covers upcoming events in D.C. for the museum-goer and concert-goer alike.

By the February 7, 2008

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Warm up on Wisconsin Ave. with cafes

Smaller than a restaurant but with more room to relax than a carry-out joint, cafés are meant for light bites with little wait and warm coffee for defrosting. Despite their name, cafés are not limited to French cuisine, and a bounty of options is available just north of campus on Wisconsin Avenue.

By January 31, 2008