Nothing satisfies quite like reading a hit piece about a guru gone belly-up. Gospel-of-Wealth-obsessed evangelical Joel Osteen suffered a ding to his image late last year when Hanna Rosin fingered him in The Atlantic as a subtle influence behind the collapse of the mortgage industry. Richard Florida is getting his comeuppance from The American Prospect [...]
As jazz edges ever further from the mainstream, keyboardist Erik Deutsch continues to assimilate sounds from the pop charts—of the 1970s, that is. His second album, Hush Money, draws from the prog-rock and singer-songwriter movements, edgy funk, Afro-soul, and especially album-oriented jazz-fusion like Steely Dan. (It might be the only record in that style to [...]
I had planned to give a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s newest book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, to all the divorced people in my family as a gag gift. Then I broke out the abacus and realized I am not made of money. Committed should be required reading for the one-half of the [...]
The most surprising thing about the Phillips Collection’s “Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens” is learning just how common it was for major photographers of the 1920s and 1930s to dabble in African art. Works not just by Man Ray but by Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Charles Sheeler, Josef Sudek, Andre Kertesz, and [...]
There’s nothing like an enduring tradition viewed from afar to highlight the strains of mythology in organized religion. Take crèches, for example. See just one in front of your church, perhaps on a snowy night, maybe with carollers nearby, and you probably won’t feel compelled to think about what it must have been like had [...]
When Space Tigers spoke with Washington City Paper in July, the band was all giggles—understandable, really, given that its music spills over with childish glee. The group makes stripped-down art folk that could come from another dimension, the sort of playful, repetitive songs that Animal Collective wrote before its ambitions ballooned to underwater-amphitheater scale. At times, [...]
An improvisational musical is like the proverbial walking dog: The miracle isn’t that it’s done well, but that it’s done at all. With iMusical, Washington Improv Theater trots out a dog that hops, skips, and can-cans for an hour and change of consistently gleeful, new-under-the-sun musical comedy. Here’s how it works: Upon entering the theater, every [...]
So far Wale has shown that he’s poised, skilled, magnetic, and shrewd, and those qualities will keep the paychecks coming for the foreseeable future. But is he interesting? As a savvy rapper who has neither a huge hit nor certifiable grassroots cred, he inspires the kind of will-he-or-won’t-he coverage that young NFL quarterbacks get. And as [...]
“Life is good in Los Angeles. It’s paradise on Earth,” narrates Danny DeVito in the first moments of L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson’s thickly and richly plotted 1997 police drama based on the novel by James Ellroy. “That’s what they tell you, anyway.” It remains the best film about systemic corruption in the City of Angels [...]
Not to get all “Leave Britney alone!” on you, but Scot Lefavor’s 2008 painting Modern Day Role Models for Your Teenage Daughters picks an easy, albeit irresistible target. You’ll find America’s most damaged living celebrity parodied at some of her worst moments, from the crotch-flashing to the head-shaving. Britney, who is depicted in the work as [...]
