Diogo Nogueira

DANCING

Tomorrow night at U Hall, DJs Tittsworth and Klever make their debut as—wait for it—Kleavage. It should be a respectable evening of brandy-swirling and a sing-along 'round the family piano. 10 p.m. $10. 21+ without advance tickets.

If you'd rather stray from the tats and caps, maybe check out The Singles Club at DC9 with DJ Heartbreak Beat and longtime Razzmatazz DJ William Alberque. Expect to hear Britpop, electropop, and girl pop, which I didn't realize was a genre. 9 p.m. Saturday. $5, or free before 10:30 p.m. 21+.

Sunday, rock promoter Sasha Lord debuts a new monthly at Cafe L'Enfant in Adams Morgan called Redeem Your Soul on Sunday. From her email blast: "Think swampy, that new/oldish garage sound, girl represented, arty, soulful heartache, that space age sound, Parisians in love, danceable beats and head nodding." With DJ Baby Alcatraz. 9:30 p.m.

DANCE

When British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon was creating a new Swan Lake for the Pennsylvania Ballet in 2004, he photocopied pictures of every Degas dance painting he could find and plastered the images all over the studio walls. Saturday, the Phillips Collection puts that creative process in reverse. The museum has 30 real Degas works hanging on the walls, and while you can’t see dancers in the flesh, you can attend a screening of Wheeldon’s Swan Lake, as performed in 2009 by Germany’s Badisches Staatstheater Ballet. The screening coincides with the final weekend of the museum’s special exhibit, Degas’ “Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint,” which closes Sunday. The exhibit features ballerinas in less-than-flattering positions, stretching, flexing, and futzing with their shoes. “What struck me most of all was how accurate all these paintings are in their depiction of the rehearsal process and how things haven’t really changed,” Wheeldon says in an interview with Wall Street Journaldance writer Robert Greskovic. The Swan Lake showing also opens a Wheeldon-heavy ballet season in Washington: In April, the New York City Ballet will perform an as-yet-untitled new Wheeldon work, and on Feb. 1, American Ballet Theatre will give the Washington premiere of his Thirteen Diversions. Guess who will be the starring dancer? Sarah Lane, Natalie Portman’s Black Swan body-double. Because in the ballet world, Swan Lake is never more than a few steps away. The film shows at 2 p.m. at the Phillips Collection on Saturday. $10-$12. (Rebecca J. Ritzel)

FILM

Karp came together for two principal reasons: 1) Jocks fucking suck, and 2) There’s nothing else to do in Tumwater, Wash. A target for bullies in high school, Chris Smith started a newsletter called “Kill All Redneck Pricks.” He borrowed the name for his band, Karp, which was hatched later in a note exchanged with his buddy Jared Warren. The band, wrote Smith, “would probably be set up like this: You, bass. Scott, duh. Me, vocals. But at times everyone needs to pukishly scream.” After a period practicing in a three-walled shack behind Warren’s mom’s house, Karp went on to become one of Washington’s best and loudest post-grunge bands. Bill Badgley’s 2011 film, Kill All Redneck Pricks: A Documentary Film About a Band Called Karp, tells the trio’s story, beginning with its unassuming origins as a clique of angry, dorky kids who had no idea how to be rock stars. Karp’s first national tour, with the rising star Beck, was awkward: Three kids recently out of high school didn’t know they weren’t supposed to break into bands’ dressing rooms and steal their beer. They later struggled through crises—Smith attempted suicide and got hooked on heroin—and disbanded in 1998, splitting off into other groups. (Warren even went on to join The Melvins. Rock ‘n’ roll wishes do come true.) In 2003, drummer Scott Jernigan died in a boating accident on Lake Washington. Badgley’s documentary brings together a cast of Olympia musicians eager to tell stories about Karp’s onstage antics and ear-splitting shows. But despite the aggro act, their roots showed: Kathleen Hanna had Karp pegged for high-school outcasts right away. The film shows at 8 p.m. Sunday at Black Cat Backstage. $6.

Addendum: PUNK

This punk-rock announcement comes forwarded from our dear leader Jonathan L. Fischer: Venomous World Fest is happening tomorrow in Petworth, with a slate of bands that hearkens back to the Wilson Center's golden years—only with online ticketing. It's so punk, it's listed on Craigslist. (But it's not too punk for Facebook.) $8 for eight bands. 4 p.m.

And in City Lights: Gruff Rhys, Davy Rothbart's My Heart Is an Idiot, Hitchcock's Notorious, Hobo With a Shotgun, Big Freedia, "Old Fashioned New Media" at Flashpoint, and Win Win.

Fresh for the Club I Just Took a Half-an-Hour Jog: In addition to DJing and producing tracks and co-owning U Street Music Hall, Jesse Tittsworth is a weight-loss pro. Dude lost 100 pounds in four years, and then he assembled some advice. (Sample tip: "if you go down a size or two, buy tighter fitting jeans.") On his reliably entertaining blog, he's posted an update. "Get tattooed!" goes one tip. "As odd as it sounds, doing little things like buying the occasional tank top or tattoo helps with pride in the body you have worked hard toward." Got it: Tight jeans, tattoos. Weight loss! Also, one pair of Ray-Bans = three waist sizes.

Get Pumped: The Heights Life is excited that discount shoe monstrosity DSW is apparently coming to Columbia Heights. Now the only thing Columbia Heights needs to fully replicate my suburban Maryland childhood is, well, my parents. If that ever happens, I'm going back to Rockville, the sage advice of a famous college-rock anthem be damned.

Radio Daze: I'm pretty sure WaPo told us last year how cool and influential NPR Music is, but in case you forgot, here's WaPo's NPR-Music-is-cool-and-influential update from South by Southwest. The big difference: Countering its stereotype as a home for lily-white singer/songwriters (as well as the fact that indie-rock acts "gobble up most of the site’s bandwidth"), NPR Music is now featuring a wider array of sounds, like R&B, dancehall, and extreme metal. It even had hoped to broadcast a Bun B performance at South by Southwest (it didn't materialize). But has NPR Music overcome the DORF Matrix? Pro tip: Hardly.

Today on Arts Desk: South by Southwest post-mortem! Maximum India post-mortem!

We're not big on retrospective articles for their own sake, but it's worth noting that tonight is U Street Music Hall's first anniversary. Jesse Rose, Justin Martin, and hometown heroes Nadastrom are spinning tonight at 9 p.m. And so we bring you this encore showing of "Big Bang Theories," a little film we made last April to examine the club's more, erm, destructive possibilities.

If you've been to U Street Music Hall over the past few Saturdays you've surely noticed that there's been a change in the crowd – more bad behavior and less respect for other patrons. In an effort to curb this, as of Friday, February 18th we'll be admitting patrons 18-20 years of age by advance ticket only on the weekends (ticketfly.com). If you're over 18 but under 21 and you come to U Hall to hear great music then we still want you to be able to see your favorite DJs and bands, but what we don't want is to be the hot underage party spot just because our doors are open.

Our weekdays will remain 18+ at the door, this change only applies to Friday and Saturday nights. And if you ever see anyone of any age at U Hall acting like an asshole, feel free to mention it to our staff and we'll take care of it. Without a great crowd it's not a great club.

This follows an incident Saturday in which a rowdy Steelers fan was kicked out of the club and was banned for life and caused his team to lose the Super Bowl after he requested that a DJ spin Wiz Khalifa's Pittsburgh-repping "Black and Yellow" after it had already been played. Rebuffed, the patron slammed the DJ's laptop shut. Interesting! Fucked up! But not necessarily a big deal.

Except that the not-very-serious item I wrote on the incident generated a decent amount of traffic. And now the changed age policy has merited a medium-length article on The Washington Post's Going Out Guide blog. People really care about what happens at UHall.

In his GOG Blog item, Fritz Hahn starts getting to why:

Last Saturday was the tipping point, [Will] Eastman says. I was there, and it's easy to understand his frustration. Outside, I watched a woman try to use her George Washington University student ID to get into the club. When the bouncer refused to accept it because it didn't have a date of birth on it, she responded, "But you let in people who are under 21, right? Just mark me as being under 21."

At the bar, a friend and I watched as a guy (clearly over 21) took off his coat — and also tried to slip off the wristband identifying him as being of-age so he could hand it to the under-21 woman who was with him. Unfortunately for him, he wasn't smooth enough, and the bartender saw what he was doing.

As someone who has been going to U Hall since it opened, the crowd just felt ... off. Many of the people were more dressed up for a velvet-rope style place than the casual U Hall.

D.C. has a history of smart DJs with punk values—think Dava Nada, or Tittsworth, one of UHall's owners. Tittsworth and Will Eastman and the other owners of U Street Music Hall almost said as much when they opened the space—the idea was a club that was inclusive and unpretentious but for people who are serious about music. City Paper wrote at the time: "The vibe is largely populist—there are no reservations and no bottle service—to the point that the space is unfriendly to benchwarmers. 'The club is for dancing, not for sitting,' says Tittsworth."

As I think most followers of the scene agree, D.C. has no shortage of "high-minded" DJs—a term I frequently hear in reference to UHall. "Black and Yellow" notwithstanding, you'll almost never hear Top 40 at UHall; many of the DJs that spin there have large, serious, world-spanning fanbases.

And yet: If the music moves, often it'll move the masses. Punk openness works for punk shows because not everyone wants to hear punk music. The distinction between "high-minded" electronic music and the bland house and Top 40 you'll hear on K Street is huge if you know about that stuff. But I'm guessing to most people, U Street Music Hall is just a hot, newish spot with low covers and long lines. If you want anyone, you might get everyone—especially in a nightlife scene that's not exactly huge.

UHall remains one of my favorite spots in the city, and I applaud any and all moves meant to repel douchebags. I also wouldn't be surprised if many of those douchebags turn out to be over 21, and aren't disappearing anytime soon. Oh well.

On any other Wednesday night, U Street Music Hall’s dance floor would not be packed. There would be no cloud of smoke outside the club’s doors, and there certainly would be no line to get through it.

Then again, if it were any other Wednesday night, Steve McPherson’s head wouldn’t be nine days away from being sliced open.

While weaving through the dance floor last week, McPherson—a mainstay of the city’s DJ scene, whose polyglot tastes gravitate toward the 1980s—offered few signs of sickness. The clue was in the hugs: Almost every person McPherson encountered offered an embrace.

McPherson, 39, has a tumor growing inside his left auditory canal, and the crowd was there to help him foot the impending bill. “In the punk rock scene, whenever anyone’s in need, there’s a benefit show,” says McPherson, who has spent more than a decade spinning records as DJ Stereo Faith. “I never thought someone would throw one for me.”

It says something about D.C.’s punk-rock DNA that a ground-level benefit show was the DJ scene’s response to its friend’s illness. And it says something about that scene’s increased dominance over the city’s musical life that the event could come together within a week in a space owned by DJs—including two regular club-packers, Will Eastman and Jesse Tittsworth, and Eric Hilton, who as half of Thievery Corporation is one of D.C.’s most successful electronic artists.

Last spring, McPherson noticed hearing problems in his left ear, and made a sensible assumption—that years of concerts had finally taken their toll in the form of tinnitus. He visited an audiologist to be fitted for custom earplugs. “The audiologist discovered that my right ear was perfect, but my left ear was significantly less than perfect,” McPherson says. “That doesn’t happen with tinnitus.”

His next stop was to an otolaryngologist. The doctor, who specializes in the treatment of ear, nose, and throat disorders, recommended an MRI. “She told me that 99 percent of the time, it comes back negative,” McPherson says.

Turned out McPherson is a member of the 1 percent. On a Friday afternoon in May, his doctor called with his MRI results—a tumor resting on a nerve in his ear was responsible for the hearing loss. It’s too early to know for sure, but the MRI suggests it’s benign.

McPherson researched his options. Noninvasive surgery was out, because doctors warned him the tumor could then return. Another doctor suggested a procedure that would have sacrificed his hearing; McPherson balked. McPherson eventually chose a different procedure, which offers a 60 percent chance of preserving his hearing. He’s psyched about the surgery’s date: Friday the 13th. “When I found out, I was ecstatic,” he says. “Coming from a metal and punk background, that’s a lucky number. It was a sign.”

The cost, however, is high. Even after choosing a neurosurgeon who falls under his insurance coverage—a full-time DJ and occasional paralegal, he has been paying for it out of pocket since the 1990s—McPherson could drop as much as $5,000 on the procedure. Coupled with plane tickets and lodging for him and his mother (he’s being treated at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.), the total bill could reach five figures.

Enter Tittsworth and Eastman. “It’s Stereo Faith. Of course we’ll do fucking anything to help him out,” Tittsworth says. “It’s all about a community doing something for a guy who has helped us all out for years.”

D.C. and Baltimore DJs quickly volunteered for the concert—rapper Tabi Bonney even agreed to spin his first-ever hip-hop set. The benefit, organizers say, surpassed many expectations. With almost 700 attendees cycling through the club—its official capacity is 300—U Street Music Hall was full shortly after midnight. Ed Porter, a Columbia Heights resident who attended the concert, suggested the crowd rivaled the one at U Street Music Hall’s opening night in March.

Maybe this wouldn’t have been possible before this moment—when DJs, some of them former punk rockers, frequently have bigger draws than bands. After all, the city’s alternative DJ scene crowds out most of the city’s rock clubs on weekends—even though the most popular dance nights migrated to a single venue, U Street Music Hall, when it opened.

Or maybe McPherson just has a lot of friends. “This is totally unsurprising. He knows everybody from here to NYC,” Porter says. “He’s ubiquitous. He seems to touch every scene.”

While McPherson hasn’t quite touched every scene, he’s come close, and can easily slip between punk, indie-dance, and hip-hop crowds. He spent his childhood at D.C. punk and hardcore concerts during the ’80s, and returned here in 1996 and split his time between DJ sets and Brace, his punk band. He spins almost every night as Stereo Faith, and hasn’t stopped post-diagnosis. And his friends can be awfully generous: the U Street Music Hall benefit raised almost $7,000 last week.

McPherson will have to avoid the club scene for six months to a year after the surgery—doctor’s orders. Once he’s healthy, he plans to produce music. As for those customized earplugs? “They’ll definitely be my first purchase,” McPherson says. “I can’t wait to buy them. When I do, that’ll mean that I’ll be back to doing my job.”

Photo by Matt Dunn.

Good morning, everyone! Wednesday's looking at temperatures in the 90s and a 40 percent of thunderstorms. I'm hoping for rain.

U Street Music Hall is hosting "Keepin' the Faith" tonight, a benefit for local DJ Stereo Faith, who's been recently diagnosed with a brain tumor. There's no cover charge, but a $5 donation is requested and proceeds will go toward his medical bills—he's scheduled for brain surgery on Friday, Aug. 13. The benefit starts at 9 p.m., featuring Tittsworth doing drum 'n bass, Scottie B spinning disco and house, Will Eastman spinning indie, punk, and post punk, Tabi Bonney spinning hip-hop, Dave Nada, and Jerome Baker III.

NoMa Summer Screen is showing its final film tonight, Donnie Darko. Summer's slipping by, as questions are still in the air in the early June slaying of Washington National Opera singer, Don Diego Jones. Around TV land, TLC has picked up a second season of D.C. Cupcakes—um... why?

In case you missed it, our own Chris Klimek spends eight minutes with the cast and crew of Eight, the Evens at Fort Reno, reviewed, and D.C. rapper Wale drops his mixtape, More About Nothing. The Seinfeld ode is almost as sweet as the Elaine dance. Last night the line  wrapped around the block at Commonwealth, where he was giving away 300 copies of his mixtape—people love free shit.

All right, folks, that's all for this morning. Enjoy the terribly recorded Elaine dance video—her dance is making me feel uncomfortable. Stay cool.

The smell of burned glue filled the U Street Music Hall on Monday night. Fallen glasses lined the floor behind the bar. A bottle of Ketel One crashed from the shelf.

"Dude, we just knocked the liquor license off the wall," said DJ Will Eastman, one of the owners of the recently opened club.

Moments later, DJ Jesse Tittsworth, Eastman’s main business partner, was blowing bubbles.

We were there on what otherwise would’ve been a dark night for the club, testing the limits of its sound system by seeing whether it could move physical objects—pieces of paper, stacks of cups, piles of glitter, a rubber ball, a Radio Flyer wagon taken from Washington City Paper’s storage closet. And bubbles. Lots of bubbles. This is what passes for excess in the rarefied sphere of bass-happy audiophiles.

"This is what the First World’s about," said Adam Weiner, a co-owner of Innovative Transducer Implementation who helped install and maintains the music hall’s sound system. "You don’t get to do this in the Third World."

"This is a step away from Caligula right here," said Brian Miller, another U Hall partner, who designed the space.

That the club sports some serious bass—it devotes about 17,500 watts to just the 65Hz-and-below range—is both a source of amusement and a challenge. Much of the DJing equipment now sits on padding; after the club opened last month, DJs noticed that their gear was vibrating across the soundboard. Some of the bartenders complained, too, Miller said, which means they’ll soon be adding some fencing to the bar’s shelves.

But as his Red Stripe danced across the main surface in the DJ booth, Eastman could only smile—a combination of benevolent, almost fatherly, amusement and wicked inspiration.

Early on, Weiner leaned over to hold a tissue to one of the subwoofers that emerges from beneath the venue’s large DJ booth. "It’s OK, I’m already wasted," he said, referring to the most obvious collateral damage of playing with sound for a living—his hearing. "Hold your head up anyway," said Tittsworth.

He hit a series of deep notes in a touchtone program on his laptop, causing the tissue to vibrate before breaking in two. We smelled glue, a sure sign that, mere minutes into our experiment, we had to give the woofers a rest. I asked Weiner and his business partner Bill McClure if they were there to facilitate the evening’s games or make sure Eastman and Tittsworth didn’t blow out the system. They said both.

Tittsworth played a few songs—a new cut from the D.C. DJ duo Nadastrom, and one of his own beats—but mostly released pure, deep bass. The effect was as hard on the ears—those of us not wearing earplugs had to muffle our heads with our hands—as the chest and stomach. "It changes your breathing and everything," Tittsworth said. "That’s fucked up." Sometimes when the bass is pumping, he said, "your eyeballs are being rattled in your skull."

Later, we attempted to knock over cups—easy, depending on the spot on the bar. Glitter wasn’t a problem, either, until Eastman declared that it had gunked up a bubble-blowing contraption that Tittsworth had bought at CVS earlier that night. "We need a gabba gabba public service announcement," Eastman said. "Glitter and bubbles do not mix."

The final test involved a concoction of water and corn syrup that Miller was particularly excited about—he had hoped, earlier in the evening, to place it atop a woofer so that we could see the vibrations move through liquid.

Later, we made Miller’s elixir bubble and ooze on a tipped-over trashcan placed in front of a subwoofer. Tittsworth ran around from behind the DJ booth to see what he had wrought: "Was it like some Terminator 2 shit?"

Photo and video by Ted Scheinman

Tittsworth:

-'Losing my' ...lust for porn. Is that what that R.E.M. song was all about!?

-According to the guard, low pants was started cuz they didnt give belts in prison + u would get shit too big. Baggy bottom prison bait

-The word 'hipster' has similarities to the n word.. neither have much positive meaning or identifiable relevancy left. Y ppl still use it?

Fan Death Records:

-DRUNKDRIVER LIVE IN CHICAGO VIDEO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qExhuRNrnFQ

-NEW TRACK FROM TWIN STUMPS FULL LENGTH OUT APRIL 20TH UP NOW Http://www.myspace.com/fandeathrecords

Thievery Corporation:

-@ThieveryCorpDC's "The Number's Game" will be featured on Sunday's episode of HBO's new series "How To Make It In America" (2/21/10).

-Just announced – @ThieveryCorpDC to perform at Bonnaroo 2010! See myspace.com/bonnaroo for full lineup!

Patrick Kigongo (Ra Ra Rasputin)

-Great Chorus / Shitty Verse : REM "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"

-funky theme song to count duckula.enjoy the throwback kids yo peep the funky theme song http://bit.ly/BXP7u

Hello! Underwhelmed by D.C. music of late? So is the A.V. Club D.C.'s Matthew Borlik, who has penned some New Year's resolutions for the District's music scene. The former Washington City Paper staffer and Q & Not U member writes:

From the early ’90s through the early ’00s, the nation knew a D.C. band when it heard one. Discordant guitars, half-sung/half-shouted vocals, and sociopolitical lyrics were the unmistakable hallmarks of the District’s independent rock scene—and few, if any, other cities did it as well. Since then, however, the local scene has suffered an identity crisis of sorts, during which it has noticeably fallen off the nation’s radar. That’s not to say that D.C. bands’ recent forays into genres such as folk, country, and indie pop haven’t produced respectable results—it’s just that most of those results haven’t garnered a whole lot of attention outside of the city. The days of Fugazi playing in front of thousands of people at the Washington Monument and Dischord Records churning out a handful of angular-guitar-driven albums every year are distant memories at this point—but that doesn’t necessarily mean the D.C. scene can’t rediscover, or re-invent, its musical identity.

He's got a point (even though not everyone thinks D.C. bands should emulate Fugazi). And yes, local acts should tour as much as they can and not move to New York, as Borlik suggests. My sense is this: Clearly, regional scenes become much more exportable when they have a cohesive aesthetic—which is fine, as long as it emerges naturally. Is there a D.C. sound these days? Probably not. But there's enough exciting music coming out of the city—in the first two months of 2010, even—that I can't share Borlik's concern. Bands should sound like themselves, and nothing else.

- More resolutions! D.C. DJ Tittsworth lost 100 pounds in four years, and his "Titts Tips for losing weight (sans marion barry)" are worth perusing. On the skinny jean as motivation:

if you go down a size or two, buy tighter fitting jeans.  not saying you gotta go super skinny and ankle sweat, but at least get that waist tighter and tighter.  it's positive reinforcement to buy smaller and also helps with slipping the pounds back on if you feel uncomfortable the days after pigging out.

- The No Pants Metro Ride is this Sunday (hat tip: We Love DC).

- The correction I was waiting for:

A Jan. 3 Outlook review of Marc Spitz's book "Bowie: A Biography" incorrectly grouped the 1980s British alternative rock band the Smiths with Depeche Mode and Moby, describing them as synth and electro-pop acts. The Smiths were a guitar-based band.

- Rumors! Director Sam Mendes ("American Beauty," "Away We Go") might direct the next James Bond film, Variety reports. In it, one imagines, the superspy portrayed by Daniel Craig would stumble through the antiseptic mundanity of suburbia in a martini haze, unfulfilled by his neighbors' materialism and haunted by the ghost of Paul Newman. Working title: License for Pills.

Image courtesy of Fugazi's MySpace page.