Archive for the ‘Awesomeness’ Category
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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Five Books I Did, in Fact, Read
Greetings, readers! As few individuals whose names aren’t Beaujon may have noticed, I’ve been gone for the past two weeks. (In New Hampshire. Writing something other than blog posts.) Hey, the leaves were pretty…there were rabbits to be eaten…there were felled Black Locusts to be sawn through! (And reams of leaden prose, of course, demanding the same treatment.)
But now I’m back. Hell, I may even start twittering again. Still, those bookish weeks up north gave me time for something other than woodwork and typing. After the jump, four books suitable for reading by a crackling woodstove, and one suitable for kindling.
Creed Was Never Underrated
Reading Jonah Weiner’s Creed encomium yesterday reminded me that when “Higher” hit the airwaves in 1999 as the first single from Creed’s Human Clay, I knew on first listen that I had to learn that song.
Taylor Becomes a Wolf: New Moon Clip
Eeeee! It’s, like, SO hot when Jacob totally saves Bella.
In all seriousness, though, Kristen Stewart has a nice right hook. But I’m not sure I’m impressed with the wolf transformations. Benicio Del Toro is much scarier.
Get ready to squeal in 3…2…1:
Thao Nguyen Wants to Write You a Song
Remember singing telegrams? Yeah, me neither. At least in my lifetime, their existence seems to have been purely pop-cultural.
But no longer(!), provided you like your missives flavored with saccharine, and occasionally anarchic, indie pop.
Thao with the Get Down Stay Down—formerly of Virginia, lately of San Francisco—will write and record a singing telegram for the winner of a raffle; the (kinda steep) $20 ticket price benefits CASH Music. The nonprofit creates open-source software and code to ease the distribution of music.
Shudder to Tweet
Sampling the thought streams of D.C. musicians past and present.
-Our brand new album, “in ‘Love’”, is out on October 27! Keep your eyes peeled for ordering info and tour dates!: http://bit.ly/CeTKL
-Surprisingly underwhelmed by the new Revolver remaster. :( -E
-Vintage episodes of American Gladiator just aren’t doing it for me right now.
-New Sockets column FORGOTTEN VINYL. First download is a posi disco raga by Charanjit Singh! http://bit.ly/2MKvoQ
Edie Sedgwick:
-Speedy Gonzales on the phone…trying to get me a licensing deal. Gonna need a big advance if I’m gonna sign with a stereotype…
-Hanging with Rodney Dangerfield and Trotsky tonight. Trotsky really pissed that Dangerfield called Marx’s dialectical materialism “a farce.”
-http://bit.ly/oj8Tr AND http://bit.ly/ZFB1v. Weird day for a Washingtonian.
-my bus driver hit a squirrel today and mumbled at it for the rest of the ride. You can’t just jump out in the road like that.
Tonight in Fall Arts: The Deen Bros.
Good gosh, y’all, Paula Deen’s boys are in town plugging their gourmet cookbook, Transfats Don’t Mean Shit To Me The Deen Bros. Take It Easy: Quick and Affordable Meals the Whole Family Will Love, at the Barnes & Noble in Tysons Corner.
And it’s not just them—there’s more stuff going on all over the DMV.
I Should Have Sent My Surrogate to See Surrogates
Not even a CGI-treated Bruce Willis sporting a toupee can redeem Surrogates, the dystopian robot movie that forsakes a promising plot in favor of blowing shit up at random.
“But I love blowing shit up/blowing robots,” you’re probably thinking. “And I love watching Die Hard on USA. Oh, heh, I just remembered that time he yelled, ‘YIPPIE-KAY-YAY, MOTHERFUCKER’.”
I submitted my fragile, Bruce-obsessed psyche to Surrogates despite (well-founded) reservations after a friend told me, “Dude, it’s only like 45 minutes long.”
And after the closing credits finished, sans perfunctory gag reel, my first thought was: That loving, sweet, melodious sack of shit lied and now 88 minutes of my life is gone.
My second thought was: I think I taste blood. I should not have eaten that entire box of sour skittles.
I did not think again after that until today.
After the jump is my case for Surrogates’ potential and the reasons it failed. So long as you don’t do anything weird, this post will not make your mouth bleed.
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Bluebrain—And You—To Perform “Cakeblood” In Dupont Circle
If you’re going to make strange music in Washington, D.C., this is the week to do it.
“Cakeblood,“ a composition-on-cassettes for 50 boomboxes, isn’t officially part of this year’s Sonic Circuits festival, but the participatory work by local electro-indie-pop duo Bluebrain is certainly of a piece with the experimental music festival’s try-anything mission.
The skinny: Bring a boombox or some kind of tape-playing device to Dupont Circle tomorrow night at 7:30 p.m. (rain or shine, as of right now). There, Bluebrain—which is brothers Ryan and Hays Holladay, formerly of the Brooklyn band The Epochs—will distribute as many as 50 cassette tapes containing about 30 distinct musical parts, and lead a procession of ad-hoc musicians around the city. There’s no way to ensure precise synchronization, which is hardly the point, anyway: The more chaotic, apparently, the better.
“It’ll sound like we’re in this weird, electronic jungle,” says Hays Holladay, 26, of the 30- to 35-minute work. “Sometimes it’s very eerie, and sometimes very pleasant. It has this sort of chirping kind of feeling.”
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