Symposiugh: Peter Marks thinks that the lineup of Arena Stage's conference of theater-world luminaries was pretty damn impressive—or, well, he's pretty sure it would've been, had he been allowed to attend. The critic writes in the Post that, for murky reasons, Arena barred media and the public from attending the gathering. "Certainly, Arena and its [...]
Andrew Noz is on the cover this week with a brilliant, brutal essay about Wale's all-over-the-map career—and his disappointing, much-hyped new album. I lead the arts section with a look at a new building of artist housing in Brookland. Rebecca J. Ritzel likes the class-struggle vibes that abound in Keegan's The Crucible, while Chris Klimek [...]
...but you'll have to wait till tomorrow night to read our review. It's on the cover (!) of this week's Washington City Paper.
Reviews are starting to trickle out. In The Washington Post, Chris Richards praises Wale's big hometown hit from the summer:
“Bait” has become Washington’s latest local anthem, spilling out of car stereos and nightclub [...]
In what was possibly the most glorious landslide victory of all time, Thievery Corporation was voted Best Local Band in Express Night Out's 2011 reader's poll. (Wale came in second; U.S. Royalty, third.)
Here's what else the left-field, utterly unpredictable readers of Express Night Out deemed No. 1:
Best venue: 9:30 Club
Best sports bar and best gay [...]
HuffPost Says Move!: D.C. concert crowds don't dance enough, writes Huffington Post DC blogger Ben E. Kessler. Wait, what? Kessler, whose bio page says he works on food safety policy when not trying to incite mosh pits, says that if "shaking dance floors and balconies isn't in the cards for us just yet, there are [...]
Is pre-post-rock a thing? Because, if it is, D.C. instrumental champs Tone have got it down. The band began in 1991, well before the Explosions In The Sky-style soundtrack-rock that rose to fame in the late '90s and early aughts. Twenty years in, Tone has now played shows with many of the bands it predated. [...]
How to Build a Better Umbrella: Tuesday, it rained. Yesterday, it rained some more. Today, the downpour continues. All this rain got the Phillips Collection' Experiment Station bloggers thinking about a meeting they once had with the Italian artist and designer Vito Acconci, who created something called the Umbruffla, a silken, expansive cocoon that envelops its carrier. [...]
It's still quite possible that Wale is full of shit. And Rick Ross is almost certainly full of shit. But together they might've made the Sleeper Hit of the Summer, at least around the DMV way. A completely unscientific sampling of the WPGC and WKYS playlists* reveals the slinky "That Way" to be inescapable, and [...]
The last time Wale released a summer mixtape to hype a fall album, he had a Lady Gaga cameo. Nowadays he's just grateful for his Twitter fans: The Eleven One Eleven Theory dropped after he clocked his millionth follower. The new mixtape may have crashed HulkShare yesterday, but it's fair to say Wale can't claim the same level of anticipation [...]
Soon after Wale took to Twitter with the news that fans could download his latest mixtape, the download page crashed. The Eleven One Eleven Theory had been uploaded to HulkShare, a site that Jay-Z's Life and Times blog linked to when it debuted the mixtape. The influx of traffic overwhelmed Hulkshare's file servers. Even after Wale tweeted [...]
