Lady in White: Even D.C. media wasn't immune to the collective Whitney Houston mourning yesterday. DCist posted video of Houston's final D.C. performance in 1997, which was packaged as an HBO special called "Classic Whitney Live From Washington D.C."

Hoo-Ah!: In a ceremony on Monday, the White House honored Al Pacino with a National Medal of Arts (photos here). Other arts medals went to Rita Dove, Will Barnet, Martin Puryear, Mel Tillis, Andre Watts, and philanthropist Emily Rauh Pulitzer.

Front Page Muse: In case you missed it this weekend, read the New York Times' fairly conservative, surprisingly positive portrayal of the Washington Post's troubles navigating the choppy waters of the digital age.

Storified!: Washingtonian rounds up local media's Grammys tweets. Are you sick of the Grammys yet? Yes? OK, sorry. Read this piece about 90-year-olds dancing at The Fillmore Silver Spring, then.

That part is intentional: “My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener,” Dave Grohl told The Washington Post recently. “One of the greatest feelings is standing onstage singing a song like ‘Best of You’ or ‘[My] Hero’ or ‘Everlong’ and hearing 80,000 people sing it with you, for 80,000 different reasons.”

The Foos have been an excellent arena show for over a decade, so this makes sense. The problem is the universal functionality of the new batch stands in stark contrast with its rising narrative: Wasting Light is the important 21st century Foo Fighters album. Butch "Nevermind" Vig is behind the boards producing. Pat Smear is back as a full-time member for the first time since 1997. Bob Mould guests on “Dear Rosemary.” Nirvana alum Krist Novoselic drops nonessential bass lines. A well-timed documentary reminds the audience that Sunny Day Real Estate drummer William Goldsmith enlisted in the war on Foo for a two-year stretch. The album was recorded on analog tape, in Grohl’s garage.

Yet for traveling rock royalty with firm roots in the late-'80s/early-'90s Seattle and D.C. scenes, Grohl remains aggressively complacent in his songwriting: Here’s a halting melody about a girl, or John Kerry, and it’ll idle on a riff while the words rhyme broken with stolen. All of this is a disappointment, except that it’s subtly fantastic that such a learned smartass hogs the arena spotlight—going blow for blow with Linkin Park and Kings of Leon.

Wasting Light—the seventh Foo LP—burns its memorable rockers early, carrying on a tradition of frontloading the gems that began with 1999’s excellent-for-the-first-four-songs There Is Nothing Left To Lose. If Wasting Light was a Verizon Center concert happening in real time, drunkard calls to play something good would start around track six.

The first song is great. “White Limo” recalls the mosh-pit energy of 1995’s “Watershed,” the hardest-hitting of the Foo's early cuts. “Arlandria” exists to live on the modern rock charts. But the back five is familiarly bland, weighed down by static ballads like “I Should Have Known” and sucky retreads like “Back and Forth.” “Walk” closes the 11-number album with a built-for-lights power ballad that combines dignity with (at last) a modicum of autobiography: “I think I lost my way/getting good at starting over.”

Due to warm adolescent memories, I often think about the band's legacy. It was always cool to see the skate kids drop in The Colour and the Shape alongside Pennywise, NOFX, and Busta Rhymes: a shared edge that stemmed from Grohl’s punk sensibilities and punishing drums. I’ve seen the Foo Fighters six times and on only one of those occasions was I there to see the Foo Fighters. The Foos lurk around festival campgrounds, heisting occasions to plant rock flags by way of dispensing visceral chords that implore one to respond in sustained “oh yeahs” when the brain recognizes specific licks.

There are certainly worse things than being the most air-drum-able rock band ever.

Radio Free Burma: Local indie rockers Deleted Scenes have a new album out this year, and they went on Radio CPR's Dissonance program to spin some tunes. The shout-outs to bands from D.C. and its environs are cool; the inclusion of some Burmese psych-pop is much, much cooler; the new Deleted Scenes tracks are by far the coolest.

A Final Shutdown Poem: Well, we tried to prepare you for the shutdown by highlighting its arts implications, but then there wasn't a shutdown. Here's a post-almost-shutdown Haiku:

Glad the Metsu show
opened. Phillips, I still want
my Arnold Palmer!

Today on Arts Desk: What Robert Redford taught me last night at Ford's Theatre.

By all rights, Dave Grohl should have faded from public view once Nirvana ended in a final, irreversible decision by Kurt Cobain 15 years ago.

At most, he should have either squeezed out a brief, increasingly irrelevant solo career or found another group where he could pound away in the background while someone else claimed the spotlight. He was a vital member of a seminal band but ultimately a secondary one who didn’t write songs in Nirvana until it was too late to matter and never got a single vocal as prominent as even Krist Novoselic’s mocking refrain of “Get Together” at the start of “Territorial Pissings.”

For crying out loud, Grohl was the drummer. There’s a whole field of jokes devoted to drummers. (For instance: What was the last thing the drummer said before getting kicked out of the band? “Hey, guys, I wrote these songs….”) There was no reason to expect him to do much more than coast on his past association.

Things didn’t work out that way. In the wake of the sudden end of his iconic band, he formed a merely very, very good one. Unlike, say, George Harrison, Grohl didn’t chafe under the yoke of being a sideman to Nirvana’s resident genius. He simply transformed himself into a frontman, something toward which he’d previously shown no aspirations, to such a successful and odds-defying degree that there might not be any precedent for it in the history of rock ’n’ roll. In terms of Foo Fighters’ longevity and consistent popularity (though not, of course, musical style), it’s as though Mitch Mitchell had followed the Jimi Hendrix Experience by forming Queen.

Both sides of Grohl’s career are captured by the simultaneous release of Nirvana’s Live At Reading CD/DVD (Geffen) and Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits (RCA) on Nov. 3. One offers a fleeting glimpse of a generation-defining band at its impossible peak, just before the experience began to sour; the other is a survey of a more or less uninterrupted run of solid work that shows no signs of flagging after 14 years. For those keeping track, that’s three times his tenure in Nirvana. More sobering, it’s also more than half as long as Cobain’s lifespan.

Unsurprisingly, the focus of Reading is more on Cobain than Grohl (or anything else, really). It’s a stark reminder of just how much Cobain was blessed with: surfer-boy good looks, a feral intelligence, unquantifiable charisma, immeasurable talent. All he truly lacked was a way to deal with the world. Music worked for a while, but only a while. He tried family, which came too late to fully take. And he tried drugs, which would eventually backfire in the worst possible way.

On Aug. 30, 1992, though, with steam rising up from a massive festival audience, Cobain gritted his teeth, smiled (so it would appear) exactly once, spattered blood on his pickups, and solidified his band’s stature so thoroughly that he would spend the rest of his life trying to bring it back down to earth (that his efforts had the opposite effect demonstrates how complete the apotheosis was).

The piecemeal From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, released in 1996, might be a more comprehensive live album, but Reading has the advantage of being all of one piece, each song building off the energy of the last. Cobain’s raging antipathy is so entrancing that neither the camera nor the lights can seem to be bothered with Grohl, but he’s crucial to the performance: Steady and firm, he held back the chaos that Novoselic gleefully pursued and that Cobain couldn’t fight by giving them something to which they could tether themselves.

On Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits, the chaos is gone, replaced by a controlled intensity (control being necessary for a project that began as a one-man band). It confirms how sharp Grohl’s songwriting, singing, and guitar playing—all things he largely kept under wraps while in Nirvana—truly are. While none of it is quite as soul-shattering as what Cobain was capable of (the guitars, in particular, are harder and more hammer-like, as opposed to corrosively acidic), the upside is that Grohl, unlike Cobain, could walk away with his soul intact.

That doesn’t devalue a catalog that includes excellent songs like “This Is a Call,” “Monkey Wrench,” “Times Like These” and “The Pretender,” which span a decade and a half without any discernible drop in quality or ferocity. It just means that Grohl found a way to remain at the forefront of mainstream rock but at a less headlong, more manageable pace. It means that he figured out something Cobain could never handle: how to sustain a career at the top.