Arts Desk » City Lights

Now on View: “Titouan Lamazou: Women” at Adamson Gallery

City Lights — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:44:52 +0000

It would be too easy to classify Titouan Lamazou’s photographic series, “Women,” as a United Colors of Benetton-meets-Oxfam tour through the poverty and prejudices women face worldwide—and how, despite the odds, they persevere. And when you stare into the beautiful faces of twins Soya and Awa from Mauritania, or the scantily clad Katrine and Noris from Colombia, or Rose-Marie, the nun from Uganda in her habit, it’s hard not to look upon them with pity and admiration. But Lamazou, who is French, saves his sympathy for his American subjects instead—particularly, women from Los Angeles. —Maura Judkis

Read the full City Lights pick here; exhibition details after the jump:

THE EXHIBITION IS ON VIEW 11:30 A.M. TO 5 P.M. TUESDAY TO FRIDAY AND NOON TO 5 P.M. SATURDAY TO MARCH 30 AT ADAMSON GALLERY, 1515 14TH ST. NW. FREE. (202) 232-0707.

Tonight in Music: Family Portrait at DC9

City Lights — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:06:28 +0000

A sort-of-D.C.-based band featuring the founders of the sort-of-D.C.-based Underwater Peoples, Family Portrait makes skuzzy, sun-kissed art pop that’s of a piece with the woozy romanticism (Real Estate, Air Waves) the label peddles. Family Portrait killed time last year as a two-piece while half the band traveled abroad. Now back to its original lineup, the group makes music that’s too wistful, layered, and spacey to qualify as indie-rock primitivism—even if, at times, it feels like the only thing standing between the band’s id and your ears is a healthy dollop of tape hiss. —Jonathan L. Fischer

Read the full City Lights pick here; show details after the jump:

FAMILY PORTRAIT PERFORMS WITH ANDREW CEDERMARK AT 8:30 P.M. AT DC9, 1940 9TH ST. NW. $8. (202) 483-5000.

Now on View: “Jason Horowitz: Drag” at Curator’s Office

City Lights — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:26:23 +0000

Jason Horowitz has a history of getting close to the corporeal, especially when we'd rather look away—his last show, “Corpus,” zoomed in on rolls of fat and outie belly buttons that rarely receive glamorous studio lighting. In his new show, “Drag,” subjects Shi-Queeta Lee, Jessica Spaulding, and other local drag queens are used to the spotlight, but they usually court it from a safe, flattering distance—a conceit that Horowitz does not grant them. By putting a magnifying glass to the drag queens, he reveals the testosterone that they work so carefully to mask. —Maura Judkis

Read the full City Lights pick here; exhibition details after the jump:

THE EXHIBITION IS ON VIEW NOON TO 6 P.M. WEDNESDAY TO SATURDAY TO MARCH 27 AT CURATOR'S OFFICE, 1515 14th ST. NW. FREE. (202) 387-1008.

Tonight in Music: Ani DiFranco at the 9:30 Club

City Lights — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:13:14 +0000

Folk music has gotten soft. At least, it’s gotten soft by Ani DiFranco’s standards. Back in the early ’90s, the Buffalo, N.Y.–bred singer-songwriter regularly served up her feelings on the raw—be they about reproductive rights, sexuality, or your untouchable effing face. DiFranco had her own label, her own guitar tunings, and she was not afraid to use the word fuck. What say you, Iron and Wine? To be fair, Ani couldn’t carry on that kind of intensity through the ’00s, either. “I’ve got myself a new mantra,” she sang on “Present Infant,” a song from her ’08 album Red Letter Year. “Don't forget to have a good time." —Aaron Leitko

Read the full City Lights pick here; show details after the jump:

DIFRANCO PERFORMS WITH ERIN MCKEOWN AT 7 P.M. AT THE 9:30 CLUB, 815 V ST. NW. (202) 265-0930. $40.

Tonight in Readings: Patricia Smith and John Burnside at Folger Elizabethan Theatre

City Lights — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:03:25 +0000

In her most recent book, Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina’s emotional and physical devastation, minute-by-minute through New Orleans. She takes on the voices of the city’s individual residents, and her evocation of the city’s destruction is raw, spiritual, and heartbreaking. Smith, a four-time National Poetry Slam champion, reads from her work and converses with Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside , who tackles religion, philosophy, and the natural world in 2009’s The Hunt in the Forest, his 11th collection of poems, which takes its name from a Paolo Uccello painting of a hunt. —Amy Cavanaugh

Read the full City Lights pick here; reading details after the jump:

SMITH AND BURNSIDE READ AT 7:30 P.M. AT THE FOLGER ELIZABETHAN THEATRE, 201 E. CAPITOL ST. SE. $12. (202) 544-4600.

Now on View: “Adam ’5100′ Feibelman: Underbelly” at Project 4

City Lights — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:16:11 +0000

The streets and buildings in Adam “5100” Feibelman’s stenciled paintings could be any city, but they seem like stills from a Hollywood set. Not for a sitcom or rom-com or com of any sort—no, these structures belong in thrillers and dramas; their dingy alleyways could be the last thing a victim ever sees. Like the German street artist EVOL, who exhibited at Irvine Contemporary last year, Feibelman’s urban scenes exhault in the grittiness of metropolitan living. But while EVOL was inspired by post-war architectural uniformity in Berlin, Feibelman has an eye for the familiar but unique—a mint-green house, a flowerlike fan, the shadows from a cascade of fire escapes. —Maura Judkis

Read the full City Lights pick here; exhibit details after the jump:

“ADAM ‘5100’ FEIBELMAN: UNDERBELLY” IS ON VIEW NOON TO 6 P.M. WEDNESDAY TO SATURDAY TO MARCH 6 AT PROJECT 4, 1353 U ST. NW. FREE. (202) 232-4340.

Now on View: “Call + Response” at Hamiltonian Gallery

City Lights — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:35:56 +0000

Anyone who talks about a picture being worth a thousand words can stuff it. For “Call + Response,” Hamiltonian Gallery asked 16 visual artists to create responses to the poetry and prose of 16 writers. In many instances, the words surpass the visuals—as in Christian Howard’s “Spaghetti Western,” in which watching a cowboy flick on a hospital TV makes the writer contemplate mortality, and which is paired with an abstract, metallic print by Ian MacLean Davis. Likewise with Mike Scalise’s “Well, There’s Not Much We Can Do About That,” a vignette about an encounter with Mr. Rogers and an injured bird, which is met by Bryan Rojsuontikul’s tombstone epitaph, which does not explore the nuance of Scalise’s story. —Maura Judkis

Read the full City Lights pick here; exhibit details after the jump:

THE EXHIBITION IS ON VIEW NOON TO 6 P.M. TUESDAY TO SATURDAY TO FEB. 13 AT HAMILTONIAN GALLERY, 1353 U ST. NW. FREE. (202) 332-1116.

Tonight in Film: Play Misty for Me at the AFI Silver Theatre

City Lights — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:59:03 +0000

As an actor and director, Clint Eastwood has fixated for five decades on the theme of revenge, largely through the prism of masculinity. True, he didn’t invent the laconic, badass loner, but over the course of his career—particularly in Sergio Leone’s westerns and as “Dirty Harry” Callahan—he surely perfected the trope. For his directorial debut, the 1971 thriller Play Misty for Me, Eastwood inverted Psycho’s serial-killer plot and essentially invented the female-stalker genre. Starring somewhat strangely as a world-weary disc jockey, Eastwood inhabits his usual archetype, passive but tough-as-nails. But he receives most of the film’s violence, rather than doling it out.

Read the full City Lights pick here; screening details after the jump:

THE FILM SHOWS AT 9:30 P.M. AT THE AFI SILVER THEATRE AND CULTURAL CENTER, 8633 COLESVILLE road, SILVER SPRING. $6-$10. (301) 495-6720.

Tonight in Film: The Secret to a Happy Ending at the AFI Silver Theatre

City Lights — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:31:10 +0000

UPDATE: The mightnight screening is canceled due to the snowstorm. The sold-out 9:15 p.m. screening will continue as scheduled. Original post below:

Sadly, a large number of arts events this weekend have been canceled. But some venues soldier on! From this week's City Lights:

Pardon the hyperbole, but Drive-By Truckers is the only real rock ’n’ roll band left in America. When Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood open their mouths, you know they spent the previous two hours chain-smoking beef-jerky cigarettes and snacking on fistfuls of gravel soaked in Old Crow. Do they Auto-Tune that grit out of their studio recordings? Hell no. This is just one of the secrets I hope will be explained in The Secret to a Happy Ending, director Barr Weissman’s documentary about the Athens, Ga., band. The documentary will probably present DBT in three different ways: DBT as the obvious heirs to Skynyrd’s “triple-threat” guitar section; DBT as real folk who still hang out in Athens, even though they’re famous; and DBT as manly men who dry themselves with cheetah pelts. —Mike Riggs

Read the full City Lights pick here; screening details after the jump:

THE FILM SHOWS AT 9:15 P.M. AND MIDNIGHT AT THE AFI SILVER THEATRE AND CULTURAL CENTER, 8633 COLESVILLE road, SILVER SPRING. $6–$10. (301) 495-6720.

Tonight in Music: Alberta Cross at the Black Cat

City Lights — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:49:57 +0000

Feeling angsty about city life? Alberta Cross feels you. The British rockers despised living in Brooklyn so much they wrote an album about it how much it sucked, ditching the acoustic gang-sings of their debut EP for wailing, wallowing grunge. But if the gratuitous use of exclamation points on the band’s Twitter feed is any indication, the guys are feeling much better now that they’re back on the road. After all, the songs of frontman Petter Ericson Stakee—who grew up in perpetual transit (his father was an itinerant musician)—tend to reflect geographic restlessness: As a Londoner, he wrote Americana; as a Brooklyner, he wrote about wanting out of New York. –-Steve Kolowich

Read the full City Lights pick here; concert details after the jump:

ALBERTA CROSS PERFORMS WITH HACIENDA AT 9 P.M. AT THE BLACK CAT, 1811 14TH ST. NW. $10. (202) 667-4490.