Author Archive
Tonight in Rap: Brother Ali at Otto Bar
Last week, while Sasha Frere-Jones and the rap duo Das Racist debated whether Jay-Z’s new album is evidence that hip-hop is dead, and if so, whether it’s OK for a white guy like Frere-Jones to make that call, Minnesota’s Brother Ali was proving, one wildly heralded tour stop at a time, that such discussions are best answered in rhyme. Jay-Z may be tired, but Ali is proof that hip-hop ain’t nowhere near dead. —Mike Riggs
Read the full City Lights pick here; deets below the jump.
Today in Galleries: New Works at the Long View Gallery
What a difference a block makes. For the Long View Gallery, a short move down 9th Street NW may become a major coup in a year when many galleries are struggling. Owner Drew Porterfield has opened a cavernous 5,000-square-foot gallery in an old warehouse across from the convention center—a major upgrade from his previous storefront space. The opening show is a collection of new work from gallery artists, among them, Scott G. Brooks, Anna Davis, Steve Pyke, Dan Ellyn, and Matt Sesow. —Maura Judkis
Read the full City Lights pick here; deets below the jump.
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Tonight in Music: Widespread Panic at Merriweather Post Pavilion
On paper, an evening with Widespread Panic has all the makings of being one of the most excruciating of your life. There will be gray-haired men playing congas. Hammond organ lines that can make a 10-minute-long version of a Black Sabbath song feel like a 20-minute-long Deep Purple deep cut. And six-string bass solos. Lots of those. Ordinarily in a preview, this is where I’d tell you that as bad as all that sounds, Widespread Panic is really OK live. But actually, I’ve given you the executive summary here: Widespread Panic will drain the blood from your night as expertly as it will exsanguinate a Talking Heads song, or a Parliament song, or any of the songs jam bands have to cover lest their audience notice how dire their originals are. —Andrew Beaujon
Read the full City Lights pick here; deets below the jump:
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Tonight in Music: Between the Buried and Me at the 9:30 Club
North Carolina’s Between the Buried and Me is a prog-metal band in the most time-honored sense of the word “prog.” The group does nothing subtly; Why write a simple four-minute song when it could be extended to 10 minutes by throwing in snippets of every musical genre imaginable? (Why yes, that is in fact a country & western hoedown in their popular song “Ants of the Sky.”) This approach has doomed many bands, but Between the Buried’s best songs evoke a sense of epic scope and grandeur while maintaining an element of suspense. —Brandon Wu
Read the full City Lights pick here; deets below the jump.
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Tonight in Comedy: Donnell Rawlings at the DC Improv
While waiting for Dave Chappelle’s next unpublicized stand-up, let’s do ourselves a favor and learn to like Chappelle’s co-host and fellow D.C. native Donnell Rawlings, who’s not only unafraid of tweaking black stereotypes but can’t seem to get enough of doing so. As the least violent member of the Time Haters, a group of pimps who traveled back to the 19th century to dole out pimp justice to slave owners, Rawlings gave us an effeminate, Jheri-curled pretty boy who, upon seeing the foreman’s whip, ran away screaming and shellacking his hair back into place. Ironically, Rawlings’ current routine has him obsessing over femmy men and bemoaning that gay jokes are no longer acceptable standup fare. Should make for a racy night. —Mike Riggs
Read the full City Lights pick here; deets below the jump.
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Tonight in Books: A.J. Jacobs at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue
Esquire editor-at-large A.J. Jacobs turns his curiosity and subsequent humiliations into New York Times bestsellers. After delivering book reports on the two most daunting tomes in Western civilization—Encyclopedia Britannica (The Know-It-All) and the Bible (The Year of Living Biblically)—Jacobs collates some of his smaller experiments in The Guinea Pig Diaries. For some, 256 pages of stunts involving morality, marriage, and objectification might seem more like a guide to the care and feeding of an outsized ego. But perhaps due to experiences like posing nude for Mary-Louise Parker, Jacobs’ Diaries are delightfully unpretentious. —Hilary Crowe
Read the full City Lights pick here; deets below the jump.
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Today in Galleries: Janina Wick’s “Thirteen” at the Goethe-Institut
What is it about “Thirteen”? First a movie, then a Broadway musical–now a photography exhibition, featuring 13 images of 13-year-olds by the German photographer Janina Wick. Echoing the portraits of young people by Dutch photographer Rineke Djikstra and using the understated color palette of Stephen Shore and the soft backgrounds of Uta Barth, Wick’s images inevitably probe the delicate, fraught moment between childhood and adulthood, between Hello Kitty gear and studded collars. —Louis Jacobson
Read the full City Lights pick here. Deets below the jump.
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Today in Fall Arts: Ralph Eubanks, Juliette Lewis, Kill Hannah, Blackboard Jungle
In 1914, a white man named James Richardson married a black woman named Edna Howell in what would seem one of the least hospitable places for a mixed-race couple in Jim Crow’s America: south Alabama. And with that exchange of vows began the story that made W. Ralph Eubanks’ House at the End of the Road possible.
Eubanks will be reading tonight at the Fairfax Regional Library. Those details and more after the jump. Read Erika Niedowski’s entire pick on Eubanks’ new book here.
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Tonight in Music: Soulsavers with Mark Lanegan at the Rock & Roll Hotel
With the help of vocalist Mark Lanegan, Britain’s Soulsavers put together an album with Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers, Mike Patton of Faith No More, and Martyn LeNoble of Porno for Pyros. But instead of a crappy update of ’90s alt-rock, Broken, released last month, features Haynes and company making dark, symphonic pop…. And they can conjure that same sort of sadness onstage, without the aid of a Macbook. —Mike Riggs
Read the full City Lights pick here. Deets below the jump.
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Tonight in City Lights: Elizabeth and the Catapult @ the Rock & Roll Hotel
Here’s what our dear, dear Jule Banville–just gimme a sec to dry my eyes–had to say about tonight’s musical offering at the Rock & Roll Hotel:
If Elizabeth and the Catapult hit its debut a touch sooner—and landed an iPod commercial, of course—it’d be Elizabeth Ziman, and not Leslie Fiest, singing with Tweedy on the new Wilco album. Instead, Ziman’s folksy, jazzy chamber-pop trio has built a loyal downtown following in New York, where Ziman grew up, and packed the Red and the Black last month at the start of the Taller Children tour.
JESUS! Did somebody say WILCO? WILCO ALERT! Lizzie and her Cat-o-pole playing music after the jump. Show deets right this way.
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