Leisure

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



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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Leisure

Colonial misadventures

Don’t Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller Random House, $12.95 Although a grammar teacher would balk at the title, don’t let its wordiness fool you. In her memoir Don’t Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller recounts with wonderful clarity her upbringing in Africa in the 1970s and 80s.

Leisure

Embellish!

Was your summer less than exciting? Maybe you sat on your fine ass watching three straight months of All My Children. If a first-year, perhaps you allowed your parents to convince you that college would entail a full summer of preparation and spent the entire time searching for the perfect shade of blue extra-long twin sheets.

Leisure

How to make a bad student film

Two weeks have passed since Georgetown third annual student film festival. In the interim, the Lord has risen on the third day, and we here at Voice Leisure have witnessed intrepid students dashing about with digital cameras in preparation for next year’s competition.

Leisure

It’s no weeping willow

Mark Barrionuevo listed several reasons for using the pseudonym Garcia Anthony for his debut novel, Raintree. “Spelling and correcting others’ spelling of my family name felt like spelling out my ethnicity,” Barrionuevo said. With this name change he also hopes to eliminate readers’ bias towards male or female authors by using an androgynous name.

Leisure

Sketches of strain

You know those people hanging out for peace in Red Square? Chances are nine out of 10 of their leaders will know artist/activist Seth Tobocman by the trail of his reproduced art. Political cartoonist Tobocman is coming to D.C.’s own Vertigo books to support his latest book, Portraits of Israelis and Palestinians: For My Parents, forthcoming later this month from Soft Skull Press.