Leisure

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

Leisure

Being the top dog

Questions plague mankind. What are we doing here? What do we know? What are we waiting for? Topdog/Underdog, a fierce new play penned by Suzan-Lori Parks, follows closely in the footsteps of playwrights Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard by delving right into such inquiry.

By the September 18, 2003

Leisure

Eat this

From Atkins to South Beach, there’s a diet out there for just about everyone. While most popular diets help you lose weight by controlling caloric intake and portion size, diet programs of the past took a much more effective approach: make the food so unappealing that you literally can’t eat it.

By the September 18, 2003

Leisure

Thrifty thrills

A hefty price tag has come to denote the following: quality goods, a designer outfit, or a new piece of clothing that looks 20 years old. Evidence of this phenomenon abounds in stores like Abercrombie & Fitch and Urban Outfitters, where retailers strive to make costly clothes that look like they were produced decades ago.

By the September 18, 2003

Leisure

Britney does D.C.

LEISURE BY JULIA COOKE Football is the quintessential American sport. It makes sense, then, that the Capitol would be the backdrop for the NFL-America rally that took place last Thursday evening on the National Mall.

By the September 11, 2003

Leisure

This charming band

I’ve never met a person who isn’t at least a closet fan of the Cure’s great pop music moments. It’s almost impossible not to love songs like “Friday I’m in Love,” or “Boys Don’t Cry,” or, of course, “Just Like Heaven.” Each is a masterful pop achievement that combines the perfect mood of melancholic longing with appropriately sentimental lyrics.

By the September 11, 2003

Leisure

‘My spoon is too big!’

If you’ve ever enjoyed the quirky antics of Comedy Central’s Adult Swim you are guaranteed to love Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt’s Animation Show. As Adult Swim enlivens an otherwise humdrum Sunday night, so Animation Show provides an amusing, creative alternative to mainstream cinema.

By the September 11, 2003

Leisure

‘Gyroscope’ defies convention

No one visits art museums for the permanent collections anymore. Museums employ a simple formula: special exhibitions attract visitors who feel they “must see” shows with compelling themes or “big-name” artists. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in preparation for its 30th anniversary, rejects this trend with its new exhibit, Gyroscope, a revival of the Museum’s permanent collection.

By the September 11, 2003

Leisure

Filmsy excuse

In case you didn’t get the memo-post-Soviet cinema is thriving. It’s unsurprising that there are two separate film festivals in D.C. this month that deal with the tragic beauty and realities which linger over much of the former Soviet Union. Recently emerged from the shroud of centuries of empire, the Newly Independent States of Central Asia boast a surprisingly rich cinematic tradition.

By the September 11, 2003

Leisure

40 years from Lincoln’s steps

Although classes had begun only a day earlier, Georgetown students eager to celebrate Thursday’s 40th anniversary commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, formed a line that quickly wound around the Village C staircase.

Buses that could hold only 25 people came and went on 15-minute intervals, frustrating the growing crowd of students.

By the September 4, 2003

Leisure

Anne Frank, revisited

“I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death, I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness … yet if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right.” These words, written by Anne Frank in her last diary entry, reveal the mind of a girl coming to terms with her extraordinary predicament.

By the September 4, 2003

Leisure

Who is Harvey Pekar?

Although comics may be the oldest narrative medium, comic creators are still marginalized as creators of a preadolescent art form. In the 1960s, R. Crumb, founder of the underground comic book movement, helped change that impression by introducing over-the-top sexual perversion into comics, revolutionizing them for an adult audience while managing to stay within the familiar framework of larger-than-life archetypal characters and animals.

By the September 4, 2003

Leisure

Hybrid Restaurants

As Georgetown students, we all know how to multitask. Whether we use Palm Pilots or Post-Its, read history reading in theology or talk to our parents as we walk to a party on O Street, doing just one thing at once is never enough. Most of us have even ventured into the world of multitasking while eating and drinking, planning group meetings at Darnall or breakup conversations over coffee.

By the September 4, 2003

Leisure

Good twin/bad twin

LEISURE BY JULIA COOKE What do pink-collared blouses turned into straightjackets and cheerleading uniforms doused in blood have in common? In Paula Vogel’s The Mineola Twins, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s newest production, both are integral components of each sister’s personal hell.

By the September 4, 2003

Leisure

Queue and not you

LEISURE BY SONIA SMITH The day before Q and Not U was supposed to embark on their spring tour of the United States, drummer John Davis broke his foot while playing street hockey. While the timing of this break was certainly unfortunate-all the spring shows had to be cancelled to give Davis’ foot time to heal-Davis managed to find something positive about the situation.

By the August 28, 2003

Leisure

Better than nothing

You’re excited to be back on campus. You’re looking to get out, and you hear about a cheap, on-campus show of a band that you vaguely remember. What was the name of that song? “Good.” And the band name? Better than Ezra. Unfortunately, neither “good,” “better,” or “best” is an appropriate adjective for the NSO show this past Sunday in McDonough Gymnasium.

By the August 28, 2003

Leisure

Summer leftovers

While many Georgetown students doubtlessly spent this summer backpacking through barren stretches of Central Asia and others kept busy idling by pools in The Gambia with boarding school friends, others (like myself) spent the bulk of the summer doing mind-numbing office work in the District.

By the August 28, 2003

Leisure

Urban underbelly

by Tali Trigg

Imagine traveling around the world trying to find the ugliest possible places. Then imagine trying to simultaneously convey the ironic beauty and underlying destruction of these places. Edward Burtynsky, a Toronto photographer, has managed to do both by expertly locating and portraying sites that bear terrible witness to man’s excess of industrial waste.

By the August 28, 2003

Leisure

Bye Wesley

If you’re like most people, you arrived at college and spent your first five minutes of high-bandwidth-induced euphoria downloading important-sounding music you had always meant to learn to appreciate, like Bob Marley’s Legend. Then your music-stealing tastes turned to novelty songs, and you spent the rest of freshman year clogging the network by downloading such tracks as King Missle’s “Detachable Penis.

By the August 28, 2003

Leisure

This just in: stamps enrich life

LEISURE BY CHRIS JAROSCH If you still think that stamp collecting is extinct, there’s an entire museum solely dedicated to the history of stamps and the postal service ready and waiting to prove it to you.

By the August 21, 2003

Leisure

Hail Radiohead redux

Over the summer, Radiohead had indie rock aficionados more excited than a sugar-happy nine-year-old on his birthday-and all they did was release another album. When the group that is often called the Earth’s most relevant rock band plays, everyone listens.

By the August 21, 2003