Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Director Richard Koshalek has resigned, effective at the end of this year, following an inconclusive vote by the Hirshhorn's Board of Trustees on his vision for an inflatable architectural pavilion for the museum, according to a source who attended the meeting.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting, says Koshalek resigned because he didn't believe he had support for his vision for the Hirshhorn—not just the so-called Bubble, designed by the New York architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, but also a project to transform the lobby into an education center and another project involving sculptor Richard Serra.

With Koshalek's departure, plans for those projects will be canceled, the source says.

A spokeswoman for the Smithsonian, Linda St. Thomas, declined to comment, saying only that she has not seen a letter of resignation from Koshalek. The Hirshhorn's communications department couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

During a day-long meeting of the board, the trustees rendered an indecisive vote on the fate of the Bubble, with six trustees voting to recommend building it and six trustees voting against. The issue before the board today was a vote on whether to recommend it to the Smithsonian's Board of Regents, not a vote on whether to build it.

An internal Smithsonian report commissioned by Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian's undersecretary for history, art, and culture, had concluded that the Bubble would operate at a loss under each of the three scenarios officials examined, according to the Washington Post. The inflatable project was first proposed in 2009. Bloomberg LP had committed more than $1 million to the project, securing the right to name it the "Bloomberg Balloon" if it was actually built. Read more Hirshhorn Director Richard Koshalek Resigns; Bubble’s Fate Uncertain

For an exhibit titled “The Salon of Little Deaths,” this dual-artist show at Hamiltonian Gallery doesn’t include much in the way of orgasm art, though at least in the works of Milana Braslavsky, there’s a not-too-subtle sexuality at play.

Braslavsky’s still-life photographs, which have a painterly cast, feature pears, peaches, tangerines, yellow plums, and nectarines in all their bulbous, sensual glory, set on fabrics that range from fancy tablecloths to blue coverings that suggest aseptic hospital linens. Read more Reviewed: Matthew Mann and Milana Braslavsky at Hamiltonian Gallery

Your metalhead friends wept openly when they heard about the death of Jeff Hanneman, one of Slayer's founding members. Right then, something hit you: “Maybe I should listen to some Slayer. Y’know, out of respect.” When you put on “Angel of Death,” you remembered that metal fucking rules, and now you’re fucking hooked. Good, news, convert! Maryland Death Fest is here to melt your face. Big bands always rally for Death Fest: This year unites Virginia’s Pig Destroyer (shown), metalcore band Converge, and Norwegian black-metal titans Carpathian Forest under one roof. Read more >>> The Maryland Death Festival runs May 23 to May 26 at the former Sonar space, 407 E Saratoga St., Baltimore. $51-$57. marylanddeathfest.com. (Alan Zilberman)

DRINK THIS

There is no event too small that some restaurant or bar won't turn it into a drink special. Case in point: Latin American restaurant Ceiba is offering a Sinkhole de Mayo cocktail until the 15-foot-deep sinkhole at 14th and F streets NW is fixed. The $5 drink consists of Appleton VX rum, housemade sour mix, pineapple juice, and grenadine. Ceiba, 701 14th St. NW. (202) 393-3983. ceibarestaurant.com. (Jessica Sidman)

Read more ToDo ToDay: Death Fest! Sinkhole Cocktails!

Actor Jesse Eisenberg is known for playing neurotic, awkward characters. In his 2003 debut Roger Dodger, he played a bumbling high school kid who asks his chauvinistic uncle for help with women, and of course, he earned an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in 2010’s The Social Network. His latest is Now You See Me, a heist thriller where he plays Michael Atlas, one of the world’s best magicians. Along with three other magicians, Atlas uses a dazzling show as a means to steal millions of dollars from a bank abroad. Mark Ruffalo plays the long-suffering cop who can’t quite figure out the heists, which is fun since Atlas is always one step ahead of him.

Off camera, Eisenberg is a lot like the characters he plays. He’s smart, talks quickly, and has a funny way of pausing between his thoughts. I’m caught up in his nervous energy as I sit down to talk to him about his roles, his plays, and the last movie he watched.

Washington City Paper: I feel bad. I biked here from downtown, and I’m sweating.

Jesse Eisenberg: That’s OK. Where are you from?

WCP: I’m from around here, actually.

JE: OK. Where did you go to college?

WCP: I went to the University of Maryland.

JE: Oh, you did? Hmm.

WCP: What about you?

JE: I went to The New School in New York City. It’s a super liberal arts school.

WCP: I was told by my friend who’s a graduate student there that it’s bad for undergrads because there aren’t any common areas anywhere.

JE: That’s what I was looking for. I hate common areas.

WCP: Why?

JE: Oh, because all these people gather there, then you’re stuck in the middle of them.

WCP: But you could leave!

JE: Oh, I see what you’re saying. There were no dorms, which is partially why... Maybe there are dorms, but I didn’t have to live in one. All my classes were with senior citizens, who were taking classes but not for credit. Read more Interview: Jesse Eisenberg Talks About Now You See Me and Never Watching Movies

Odd: The Arlington County Board gives Signature Theatre a $250,000 grant to cover its outstanding tax debts. [ARLnow]

Daft Punk's Random Access Memories is so-so—but sounds better at U Street Music Hall, writes Chris Richards. [Post]

What to look forward to at this year's Capital Fringe: more beer, barbecue sandwiches, cardboard art [Post]

Last year’s LUMEN8Anacostia, the partially city-sponsored arts festival aimed at inspiring future economic development in Anacostia, was all about being big, splashy, and temporary. This year, both the festival and the neighborhood’s growing arts sector are embracing permanence.

The centerpiece of the 2012 festival, planned by ARCH Development Corporation with an assist from the city’s Office of Planning, was a former police warehouse off of Martin Luther King Avenue SE, which at times felt like a massive edifice of synergy: There was a Busboys and Poets satellite; a climbable, a large-scale temporary sculpture courtesy of a city public-art initiative; and a pair of art parties packed with local bands, an elevator-shaft light projection, and sanctioned street art. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, a handful of unused storefronts on MLK and Good Hope Road SE became temporary art spaces.

This year’s LUMEN8, which begins with a 12-hour celebration on June 22, is centered around the neighborhood’s newest jewel: the Anacostia Arts Center. One reason, according to Phil Hutinet, the chief operating officer of ARCH, is that several of last year’s “temporium” spaces did what they were supposed to do: They found people to lease them. Read more What to Expect at LUMEN8 2013

The Anacostia Art Gallery & Boutique

The art of Amber Robles-Gordon is the art of Anacostia, quite literally.

Robles-Gordon cobbles together sculptures and canvas collages from scraps of paper and fabric she finds in the neighborhood’s trash cans and storefront windows. She’s shown her work at the Honfleur Gallery. Right now, she has a striking wire and fabric mesh artwork on view near the Deanwood Metro stop.

But as ARCH Development Corporation continues to expand its constellation of arts destinations in Anacostia—the latest is the Anacostia Arts Center on Good Hope Road SE—Robles-Gordon wonders if her neighborhood will still have room for her.

There’s a tendency to see Anacostia, long on talent and struggle but short on just about everything else, as a blank canvas. With the right kinds of art and advertising, the thinking goes, Anacostia can become a hub for the creative class. But who gets left out?

“The artists here need gallery space, they need exposure,” Robles-Gordon says. “I don’t want [Anacostia] to become a shipping factory, where you’re just shipping people in, giving them something, and shipping them back out. That’s not how you build a community.”

Whether—and how—a community’s art infrastructure should aim to draw new people to the neighborhood or serve the people who already live here (or do a little of both) has animated the debate over Anacostia’s cultural scene for 50 years. As District officials and neighborhood fixtures like ARCH try to use arts institutions to spark economic growth, that same question is popping up again: Whom should these organizations try to reach?

Read more Anacostia’s Arts Scene Is Growing. Who Should It Be For?

A month after the Anacostia Playhouse was originally slated to open, the city’s newest theater is finally starting to look like one.

Julia Robey Christian, the venue’s chief operating officer as well as the daughter of its founder and CEO, Adele Robey, is showing me the newest structure in the playhouse: the box office. Otherwise, what I see mostly feels like a three-dimensional blueprint drawn in steel and wood. Frames for offices and a green room have been raised along the back wall. In the center, steel beams outline the large room that will become the playhouse’s versatile 150-seat black-box space. Over the din of machinery, Robey Christian muses about finding a vintage rolling cover for the box office.

The Anacostia Playhouse on 2020 Shannon Place SE should’ve been operating by now, had everything gone according to plan. Still, the naked beams and construction noises are a positive development. When I visited the space in March, it was still an empty, quiet warehouse, bound up in invisible red tape.

Now, the regulatory barriers have been hurdled, and the new opening date—the “drop-dead opening date,” Robey Christian stresses—is June 21. A show that’s part of the D.C. Black Theatre Festival is scheduled to run from June 21 to 30. At that point, renovation will need to be complete and the space fully outfitted with a theatrical lighting grid and sound system.

While the Anacostia Playhouse continues to take physical shape, the Robeys have turned more of their attention to what they’ll put inside it. A year after the Robeys transplanted their home for small theater companies from bustling, increasingly expensive H Street NE, the building setbacks are short-term hiccups compared to the long-term challenge the playhouse faces: making sure that the Anacostia Playhouse is a place for audiences not just from other parts of D.C., but from Anacostia, too. Read more Stage of Development: In Its New Home, the Anacostia Playhouse Finds a New Mission

Elliott Holt knows exactly when Homeland jumped the shark.

“In the middle of Season 2,” Holt says. We’re at Kramerbooks discussing her debut novel, You Are One of Them. But talking about the book means talking about her native D.C. and misperceptions about it, particularly about the relatively tony part she grew up in.

“The kids are going to a sort of—it’s clearly supposed to be Sidwell, except they have uniforms. It’s supposed to be a kind of Quaker school… And there was one scene where somebody says”—she affects a swagger—“‘What if I told you my father is Secretary of Defense?’

“And I was like, OK, stop. The thing is, the kids who grew up here, nobody talks about it. Because, first of all, everybody kind of knows what people’s parents do. But they’re also not that impressed by it.”

Holt, 39, grew up near the U.S. Naval Observatory. Her father is a former director of programming at PBS and NPR; her mother was a financial analyst for the World Bank. She attended the National Cathedral School. And though it’s a fallacy to connect an author too closely to her work of fiction, You Are One of Them unavoidably circles around what it’s like to grow up in the particular era of Cold War paranoia and D.C.-centric realpolitik in which Holt was raised. The book’s heroine, Sarah, was childhood friends with Jennifer, who as a tween writes a letter to then-Soviet premier Yuri Andropov pleading for peace between the United States and Soviet Union. Jennifer is invited on a tour of Soviet Russia, much to Sarah’s resentment—the letter was her idea. Those feelings well up again in the mid-’90s, when she heads to Russia to work as a journalist and Jennifer’s story insinuates itself back into her life.

The story will sound familiar to readers of a certain age: Jennifer is modeled after Samantha Smith, who wrote a similar letter, went on a similar Russian excursion, and enjoyed a brief moment of celebrity as an actress before dying in a plane crash in 1985 at 13. Holt recalls being fascinated by Smith’s story at the time—she was just two years younger—but didn’t think of her again until she was studying creative writing at Brooklyn College. In 2006 she was spitballing story ideas with the novelist Reif Larsen (who’d later become her brother-in-law), then a student at Columbia. Holt suggested Smith’s story to Larsen. Blank stare—he’s six years younger than Holt. She used it for her own story.

Holt recalls that her creative writing teacher, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Michael Cunningham (The Hours), admired what she wrote, but sensed the premise didn’t resonate with her younger classmates. Holt was a relative latecomer to MFA-dom, juggling fiction alongside a day job at an advertising firm. But she was determined to see if the idea could work as a novel, something that covered the Cold War as something more than an ’80s phenomenon, something that conveyed a more timeless mood of fear and loss. “It occurred to me that that kind of story could only work if I went emotionally deeper into the narrator’s sense of betrayal,” she says. That took three years, one of them more or less flailing for a way to do that. “There was definitely one whole year where I was like, ‘What do I have to show for this year? I’ve written all these pages that I’ve thrown away.’” Read more Commie Dearest: Elliott Holt’s Debut Novel Makes the Cold War Hot Again

Standout Track: No. 2, “Pretty Polly,” an England-by-way-of-Appalachia folk song about a murderous young man who kills his fiancée. The combination of clawhammer banjo and cello, along with the haunting vocals of Vandaveer members Mark Charles Heidinger and Rose Guerin, lends a macabre twang that distinguishes the song from previously recorded versions by The Byrds and Chicago bluesman Otis Taylor.

Musical Motivation: Heidinger considered covering “Pretty Polly” for the 78 Project, a Web series that challenges contemporary artists to select a song from the public domain and record it live using a 1930s PRESTO direct-to-disc recorder. Heidinger found it hard to narrow down his choices to just one, and the band wound up covering another tune for the project. But for Vandaveer’s new album, Oh, Willie, Please, Heidinger decided to record 11 other traditional murder ballads, finding himself strangely drawn to the “darker side of the human condition.”

Clap Your Hands Say Yikes: Listen to the lyrics and you’ll realize how dark “Pretty Polly”is. “He stabbed her in her heart and her heart’s blood did flow,” Heidinger sings.“And into the grave, pretty Polly did go.” It’s also one of the most percussive songs on the album, punctuated by hand claps and foot stomps. Heidinger, a self-described “habitual stomper,” says that the rhythm sharpened the song’s teeth. (Or perhaps its blade.) “It provided that urgency,” he says.

Watch the music video for "Pretty Polly" after the jump. Read more One Track Mind: Vandaveer, “Pretty Polly”