John Hodgman is everywhere. Over the past few years, he’s become comedy’s nerd laureate, a go-to for witty, esoteric humor that both mocks and indulges his cerebral tendencies. Via his role as a PC on those Mac commercials, his segment “You’re Welcome” on The Daily Show, and the snooty hyperliterate villain on the canceled HBO series Bored [...]
Every March, dozens of D.C. artists join thousands of musicians from around the world at Austin, Texas’ massive South by Southwest Festival—a place where hopes are live-tweeted and dreams are expensively publicized. Is this the year the D.C. delegation makes its mark? There will be plenty of individual artists and bands making the Austin trek, but [...]
Any arts critic who maintains otherwise is bullshitting you: At the end of the day, we’re all fans.
No, you won’t see us at comics conventions dressed up as Thor. And we didn’t find Fanboys—that slight 2008 comedy in which a quintet of Star Wars geeks breaks into George Lucas’ ranch—the slightest bit adorable.
When we call [...]
There was a lot of pathos at yesterday's D.C. Council oversight hearing for the city's cash-strapped arts commission ("the arts form human connections") and no shortage of good economic sense (arts create jobs, improve neighborhoods, and assist local businesses). So much of both, in fact, coming from more than 20 D.C. arts administrators, that after [...]
Some interesting advice from Chuck Brown in this video: "Now you no longer have to risk your life going to the go-go. Bring the danger of the go-go right on home for that ass!" OK, so that isn't actually the Godfather of Go-Go. And the product he's pitching, Go-Go Guitar Hero, does not in fact exist.
D.C./LA [...]
Being called twee is kind of like being called a hipster: You never self-identify that way. In interviews, the members of London’s Veronica Falls frequently bristle at being lumped in with the cuddly indie-pop sound, and you can hear why. There may be jangly guitars and delicate boy-girl vocals throughout the band’s excellent debut on [...]
in which, in the spirit of our recent D.C. Giving Guide, we recommend some worthy Kickstarter projects
PROJECT: The Listen Local First Mobile Music Venue, which LLF co-founder Christopher Naoum describes in the video as a musical version of a food truck. The plan: Acquire a van, enlist local artists to paint it, pack it full of [...]
Given Bluebrain's proclivity for free one-off events, no one would ever accuse the experimental-pop duo of not giving back. But members Hays and Ryan Holladay also have day jobs, the kind that pay—which is, you know, kind of important when you give away much of your art gratis.
This month, however, Hays will be handing out some [...]
Country Life: The novelist Wendell Berry will give the 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at the Kennedy Center on April 23, reports The New York Times. Berry, whose many novels, stories, and nonfiction writings center on the American rural South, has in the past criticized certain aspects of modernity, like mountaintop-removal mining (bad!) and [...]
Once upon a time, the airline map was divided up just like a political map: Germans had their Lufthansa, Brazilians their Varig, and every emerging postcolonial nation-state its own Cameroon Airlines or Biman Bangladesh to fly the new flag around the world. Only Americans, with our cacophony of private carriers, stood out. But today, the [...]
