Leisure

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

From Australia with Love of Diagrams

Antonia Sellbach pulls her bleached bangs behind her ear and leans out past the edge of the sofa. It’s a Thursday night at the 9:30 Club, and her Melbourne, Australia-based band Love of Diagrams has just wrapped up a 45 minute opening set for Ted Leo, punk rock local hero and elder statesman. His set is being recorded for NPR’s All Songs Considered live series, but she’s upstairs in the dressing room, doing something relatively new for the band—talking to the press.

By Chris Norton April 12, 2007

Grindhouse: yummy, bloody, puss-filled fun

Sporting tight leather booty shorts, soaked in blood and roaring at 9,000 RPM, ‘70s exploitation films appeal to humanity’s basest of desires and all the better for it. With Grindhouse, a double feature ode to trash cinema complete with fake (and hilarious) movie trailers, directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez try to rekindle America’s passion for the drive-in experience, missing reels and all.

By Traviss Cassidy April 12, 2007

Singing in the Brain

A New Brain, despite what the title may suggest, is not about zombies, Frankenstein-style experiments or metaphysical conversions. It’s about the trials and tribulations of being a young, gay, Jewish composer living in Manhattan in modern time…

By Shira Hecht April 12, 2007

Get your local on

March for D.C. Voting Rights If last month’s March Madness-filled march to the White House left you hungry for more, D.C. Emancipation Day offers the opportunity to relive the magic of Pennsylvania Avenue all over again—this time for a real cause. If you’ve been crushing on Mayor Fenty or you’re looking to meet guys in converse sneakers or disenfranchised, angry locals, this is the place to be.

By Sarah Harman April 12, 2007

You Taste Like a Burger

While growing up in Saudi Arabia, I would watch our cook as he prepared complex, gourmet meals. It was not only a distraction in a place without neighborhood parks or television, but also a cultural adventure into his native Filipino culture, as well as romps to Italy, France and home to the U.S. I’d watch, fascinated, as he would remove the meat and bones from a whole chicken’s skin, mixing the meat with vegetables and seasoning, and then somehow get it all back into the skin before stitching the floppy bird back together and roasting it.

By Kathryn Brand April 12, 2007

I wanna be a cowboy, baby

An average, white-bread upbringing wouldn’t be complete without the cowboy dream. It may be as simple as that pair of boots with the spurs you saw at K-Mart, or those horseback riding lessons you took after you watched an old John Wayne film. Or maybe it is, as the exhibit “Jolly Cowboy” suggests, a complex mix of intangible fantasy and commercial delusion that has attracted hearts of all ages across the globe.

By Madeline Reidy March 29, 2007

Etiquette lessons: the road to the final fork

Our soup spoons were poised delicately in the air. The smell of the tomato bisque wafted to our noses as we restrained ourselves from slurping away. Surely we could manage this with grace; we certainly looked like confident young professionals.

By Frances Bajet March 29, 2007

Goes down easy: a rotating biweekly column about drinking

If you want to see how drugs and alcohol breed artistic genius, take a glance at Manet, Van Gogh and Picassoshy;—the artists who gave absinthe its modern notoriety as a mysterious elixir that left lonely men dreaming of bright colors in drab pubs.

By Chris Stanton March 29, 2007

John Malkovich is Stanley Kubrick

John Malkovich is Alan Conway, an impersonator of Stanley Kubrick, who is as powerful and creepy as they come: flamboyant, with faint lipstick, colorful neck scarves, and an array of accents tailored to his con victims.

In Color Me Kubrick, Malkovich is the desperate con man Alan Conway, who baits men with his assumed identity—that of directer Stanely Kubrick. With the young designer he is an oily Brit; with the heavy metal band Exterminating Angels he is deep-throated and boastfully masculine; and with another man he impersonates an eclectic oil-baron from Texas.

By Ryan Maye Handy March 29, 2007

Critical Voices

Timbaland, Timbaland presents Shock Value, Interscope There’s been massive hype surrounding the release of Timbaland presents… Shock Value, and understandably so. The producer was on fire in 2006, crowning Justin Timberlake as king of pop with FutureSex/LoveSounds and morphing Nelly Furtado into a sexy dance-floor queen with erotic beats on Loose. But, even though Shock Value is loaded with similar flourishes, it is weighed down by stale vocal collaborations.

By Justin Hunter Scott March 29, 2007

Getting political with Ted Leo

New Jersey native Ted Leo isn’t your typical semi-knowledgeable, politically-charged artist. He’s a punk rocker, yes, but he also earned an English degree at the University of Notre Dame. In his recent interview with the Voice via e-mail, Ted discussed in depth the political themes that run through his latest release, Living with the Living, demonstrating a mastery of syntax seldom seen in the world of indie rock.

By Traviss Cassidy March 22, 2007

Maya Roth’s Big Love is a lot to love

Big Love just isn’t big enough to conquer all the staples of a social drama—free will, “love thy neighbor” and unrelenting feminism are just a few issues tackled in this revival of an ancient classic. Nevertheless, the performances are captivating, and the script is tinged with enough humor and cynicism to redeem the occasional dragging monologue.

By Madeline Reidy March 22, 2007

Critical Voices: Andrew Bird

Album number seven from Andrew Bird finds the midwestern singer-songwriter returning to many of the elements that made his last few albums beloved by his fans. It makes for a good album, and while Armchair Apocrypha can’t quite match 2005’s excellent Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs, it nonetheless stands as another remarkable entry in an increasingly varied and impressive oeuvre.

By P.S. Hepburn March 22, 2007

Critical Voices: Low

Low never used to be a surprising band. These pioneers of the minimalist, glacially-paced subset of indie rock called slowcore made a name for themselves, beginning with their early ‘90s debut, by doing exactly what everyone expected: producing album after album of quietly gorgeous songs stealing plays from the Velvet Underground.

By Chris Norton March 22, 2007

You Taste Like A Burger

Red Ginger is unusually quiet for a Wisconsin Avenue restaurant, but don’t let the empty tables fool you: this Caribbean eatery is everything you could want in a restaurant, and then some.

By Kathryn Brand March 22, 2007

The best German film since Run Lola Run

The opening scene of The Lives of Others is austere and deadpan, an appropriate introduction to a film set in communist East Berlin. In a sterile classroom, secret police lieutenant Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) instructs students in the merciless process of interrogation, emphasizing that only the guilty shed tears.

By Madeline Reidy March 15, 2007

Gray Matters? More like gay matters

Gray Matters is like its star, Heather Graham—bubbly, nice to look at, but a bit lacking in depth and substance. It’s the story of a young single professional in Manhattan, named Gray, only in this hackneyed plot the twist is that Gray falls for her brother’s girl.

By Shira Hecht March 15, 2007

Critical Voices

Modest Mouse: We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank

By Shira Hecht March 15, 2007

Critical Voices

LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver

By Daniel Cook March 15, 2007

Goes Down Easy

Black and Tan

By Chris Stanton March 15, 2007

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