“I Never Knew You,” the first single from Cage’s new album, Depart From Me, is an ode to stalking; the music video, directed by Shia LaBeouf, features a young man perpetrating a B&E at the home of a woman he’s been following while he sings, “It’s like the sky opened up/and God handed you directly [...]
Artist James Rosenquist began his career as a billboard painter, painting characters like Smokey the Bear on signs and the sides of buildings. Ironically, after decades of critical and commercial success making billboard-sized paintings that reside in all of the world’s major collections, Rosenquist’s Florida studio burned last April, destroying millions of dollars worth of [...]
Anyone who thinks the quintessential color of the polar regions is white ought to check out the photography of Paul Nicklen. In an exhibit at the National Geographic Society, Nicklen captures a stunning range of blues—ethereal blue ice crystals, clear blue skies, churning ocean water—that are overshadowed only by the even more stunning images of [...]
Unlike the pictorialist, almost old-fashioned work exhibited earlier this year in “Picturing Progress: Hungarian Women Photographers, 1900–1945” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the contemporaneous work of Eastern European men in the Phillips Collection’s “Object as Subject: Photographs of the Czech Avant-Garde” does really seem ahead of its time. From the flat, [...]
It’s OK to be slightly suspicious of Distant Relatives, the upcoming collaboration between rapper Nas and reggae scion Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley—it’s got some potential for preciousness, even if both men know how to bring the grit. Their sincerity, however, is indisputable: The goal is to celebrate the historic links between Afro-Jamaican music and American [...]
The 30th anniversary of the first Secret Policeman’s Ball is as good a time as any for: 1) the festival’s braintrust to pat itself on the back; 2) the rest of us to enjoy the collateral benefits. Chief among those is archival footage of the concert series, which began in 1979 as a fundraiser for [...]
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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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
