Leisure

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

Leisure

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

Leisure

Singing in the Brain

By Shira Hecht April 12, 2007

Leisure

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

Leisure

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

Leisure

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

Leisure

Etiquette lessons: the road to the final fork

By Frances Bajet March 29, 2007

Leisure

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

Leisure

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.

By Ryan Maye Handy March 29, 2007

Leisure

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

Leisure

Getting political with Ted Leo

By Traviss Cassidy March 22, 2007

Leisure

Maya Roth’s Big Love is a lot to love

By Madeline Reidy March 22, 2007

Leisure

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

Leisure

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

Leisure

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

Leisure

Black and white and pop all over

Beach Boy Brian Wilson once claimed he was making “teenage symphonies to God.” Wilson knew, perhaps better than any musician of his time, that a great pop song can be deeply spiritual, each melody crafted as an offering to some unknown musical deity.

By Traviss Cassidy March 15, 2007

Leisure

Getting politcal 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 15, 2007

Leisure

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 15, 2007

Leisure

Critical Voices

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 15, 2007