Yearly Archives: 2010

I interviewed Philip Glass! And wrote a bunch of other stuff.

A young Chuck Close with one of his many portraits of Philip Glass, from his 1969 photo of the composer.

Man, it is just crazytown that I’m blogging semi-prolifically over at the Washington City Paper’s Arts Desk and forgetting to update my own Internet sock drawer with linkage. Here’s my interview in two parts with the wildly versatile and adventurous composer Philip Glass. I still haven’t transcribed the part where we talk about his film-score work, but I promise I’ll get to it. Movies are always relevant.

Which reminds me: I also blogged about a very funny and inventive critical dissection of Star Trek, the youthful, sexy 2009 version. Always relevant, like I said.

I don’t think this guy has a safe word: Trey Songz’s Passion, Pain & Pleasure Tour

The abz of Songz

In the post-R. Kelly R&B carnality arms race (or is it an abs race?), 25-year-old Peterburg, Va. native Trey Songz is in little danger of being outgunned. He may one day use his limber tenor to map the terrain of other subjects and emotions, but four albums into a career on which he’s cited Kelly as the prime influence, Songz is, to hear him tell it, a man whose devotion to sex is so pure, so singular, so encompassing, “monastic” is the only word.

Last night at a sold-out DAR Constitution Hall, he prayed a high holy Mass.

The 100-minute session opened with “I Invented Sex” and peaked with “The Neighbors Know My Name.” (Not because they accidentally got some of his mail.) In between, Songz issued a more humble declaration of fealty with no, ha, fooled you. He did snap a photo of the audience, telling us, “There is no me without y’all.” Save for some conspicuous pre-recorded backing vocals, his tour with long-lived R&B star Monica was absent big-venue production gimmicks: the gig succeeded entirely on its star’s vocal power, energy and charisma, all boundless, though you wonder whether he has any other hobbies. Truth, his main addiction might be work: His breakthrough album, “Ready,” is barely a year old, but the follow-up, Passion, Pain & Pleasure drops next week.
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All Bite: Scena’s Sink the Belgrano! reviewed

Nothing shores up a foundering head of state’s popularity among the electorate like a quick war, decisively won. The British response to Argentina’s 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands looks from three decades on something like what the Bush Administration promised the seven-plus-year-old war in Iraq would be: The Falklands War lasted only 74 days, and the U.K.’s victory helped propel the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to big electoral gains the following year.

Sink the Belgrano!, a 1986 play by British actor and director Steven Berkoff, is not a cool-headed history of the conflict or anything close. It’s an astringent piece of agitprop condemning what Berkoff sees as a violent overreaction by Thatcher — called “Maggot Scratcher” here, in the plainest example of his appropriation of sing-songy, infantile language — whom the playwright argues rebuffed all attempts at diplomacy, knowing her political aims would be better served by bloodshed. The title refers to an episode a month after the Argentine invasion, wherein the British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror fired upon and destroyed the vessel ARA General Belgrano, killing 323 crewmen.
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Mission: Expendables, Not Accomplished

Haven’t seen it, which, I know, right? I told the City Paper why.

Meanwhile: photo caption contest!

Heartbreaker: Tom Petty at the Lube

When Man of Few Words, Many Songs Tom Petty allowed himself a few words in praise of his since-forever band, The Heartbreakers, last night at — there’s just no way to get around saying this – Jiffy Lube Live, he introduced drummer Steve Ferrone as “the man who gets the job done.”

He could just as easily have been doing something he seems to detest: talking about himself.

Everyone knows you don’t go to Tom Petty for flash or invention. You to him for the thing he has, more than any other rocker of his generation, come to embody: excitement-free dependability. Since 1976, he’s rarely let more than a couple years go by without giving us another song or three that sounds just perfect on the radio of a car with the windows open. (It should’ve been Petty who eventually starting selling pickup trucks, not John Mellencamp, who despite sharing Petty’s greatest-hits approach to live performance, has at various points in his career appeared to suspect he was making art.) Petty has always made writing great — well, greatish — songs look easy. And last Christmas, an expansive box set compiling three decades of concert recordings made a strong case that TP and the HBs have earned a spot in the live rock band pantheon. Continue reading

The other white Parliament-Funkadelic: Arcade Fire at Merriweather, reviewed.

When you fling a bra into the abyss, the abyss flings it back at you.

…where, ah, “the abyss” is the possibly-biggest-selling, certainly-biggest-sounding band in indie rock. Specifically, Arcade Fire. More specifically, Régine Chassagne, singer and co-songwriter and spouse of frontman Win Butler, who, late in Arcade Fire’s ecstatic 95-minute concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion last night, briefly abandoned her post behind the piano to toss that ladies’ garmet (which might actually have been a halter top; it was hard to see) back to its owner. This isn’t 1987 and we’re not Poison, her revolted glare seemed to scold.

Of course, it could very well have been circa-1987 U2, what with the urgent vastness of the music; the related sense of a big, important band grown huge and courting self-importance; and also the lack of any detectable awareness of sex– which is kind of weird, given how driving and propulsive Arcade Fire’s most arresting music is. On a tune like “Rebellion (Lies)”, the dizzying set-closer that invited the bra-throw, all eight musicians on stage were basically playing percussion, and almost all of them were shouting the lyrics whether they had microphones or not. Continue reading

The Importance of Being Prolific

Sara Barker as Algernon / Photo: Ian C. Armstrong

Back to the grind. Here’s my CP review of Scena’s promising but under-rehearsed drag production of The Importance of Being Earnest. That’s Sara Barker as Algernon up there. It’s a fact she was blowing lines left and right at the presser last weekend, but hers was one of my two favorite performances in a show that had more than two strong ones, so.

Lewwwww-seeeeee, I’m ho-ooooooooome! And I made a movie.

So I’ve been blogging for the last month or so for the Washington City Paper, primarily at Fringe & Purge, their Capital Fringe Festival blog, which I had the duty and the privilege of editing this year. I’ve written lots of stuff for them in the past month, some of which I don’t detest at all, that I’ve not linked to from here just because — well, because making one blog worth reading is voraciously time-consuming. Two? Forget it.
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Can Fringe Grow Up?

Behold the marvel that is my first Washington City Paper cover story, all about the Capital Fringe Festival at Five and What, Exactly, That Milestone Means If Indeed It Means Anything, Which I Conclude Upon Some Reflection Than It Does. On the cover is Darrow Montgomery’s fine portrait of CapFringe executive director and co-founder Ms. Julianne Brienza.

Usually when I post a link to something I’ve published elsewhere, I try to put back in some material I had to jettison from the published version of the story. There’s enough leftover here to stock double-CD reissues and “special edition” DVDs until the CapFringe turns ten, because I waaaaay overreported this thing, but happily I will be using all that stuff on CP’s Fringe & Purge blog, which I may already have mentioned that I’m editing.

My heartfelt thanks to the CP editors to helped make this piece sharper and tighter. They really know their stuff, those guys.

You can download a PDF of the whole, glorious package, photos and all, if you really like fringe, or Julianne, or me.

Fringe & Perjury, or Back in Five Minutes (Give or Take Three Weeks)

It’s not you. It’s me.

Look, we both know I’ve never been the most prolific blogger in the knife drawer. Infrequently I’ll feel moved just to write stuff, but most of the time this place is little more than scrapbook full of links to pieces I’ve published elsewhere, sometimes pimped out with bonus content, sometimes not.

I write now to warn you that for at least the next three weeks, my stewardship of this space is all but certain to hit a truly deplorable new depth of negligence. That’s because I’ll be shacked up a few blogs down the block at Fringe & Purge, the Washington City Paper‘s destination for coverage of the fifth annual Capital Fringe Festival, which kicks off — that’s a sports reference, theater-folk — tomorrow. See here, you; I started before I even said. Continue reading

Can’t talk now. Working. Watch this space for announcements.

New Pornographers Night Two Setlist

ITEM! Big changes in the New Pornographers’ setlist between nights one and two at the 9:30 this time, as advertised. Newman kept speaking to someone upfront who had apparently provided his or her own list, from whence, said Newman, he’d culled three or four songs the band wouldn’t have played otherwise, and that they’d likely keep playing. It’s worth noting that over the course of the two nights, we heard seven of Mass Romantic ‘s twelve, wow. Is the New Pornos’ nostalgia phase now upon us? Perhaps. Perhaps not: They played eight from the new Together last night, too.

Last night’s show was about 15 minutes shorter than Tuesday’s, too, owing to less dead time between songs. There was at least as much banter as the first night, but it was faster and funnier. Continue reading

Perfectly Attended: New Pornographers at the 9:30 Club

(Two-thirds of) The New Pornographers. From Canada!

Who was it who said that 90 percent of success in life is showing up? Was that Woody Guthrie? Allen Ginsberg? Vince Lombardi? Brian Eno? T-Pain? It was somebody smart, and he or she was almost certainly discussing a concert by The New Pornographers, Canada’s pop musical Justice League whose legend far eclipses that of any of its individual superheroes (with the eternal exception of the exceptional alt-country chanteuse Neko Case). When the group can field its complete nine-strong roster — a feat they haven’t always managed when playing Our Nation’s Capitol — the results are seldom less then splendid. Continue reading

Yesterday’s Papers: Your spoilerific guide to SotG 2010 (The Year We Make Contact), never mind that it doesn’t get going for another month yet

You ain't got the gumption to use it. But he'll find it.

Summer in our Nation’s Capitol is long and hot and squishy and hot and suffocating and sultry and hot. Also, it’s been known to get a little warm on occasion, those occasions being July and August. But the sticky season is not without its pleasures. Screen on the Green, the beloved outdoor film series on the National Mall, returns next month to showcase another eclectic menu of classic flicks on four consecutive Monday evenings. Continue reading

He Is Marshall: Laurence Fishburne does Thurgood Justice

You could be forgiven for being a little wary of Thurgood, George Stevens, Jr.’s one-man stage biography of the Hon. Thurgood Marshall, as performed by Laurence Fishburne. What’re the odds a grade school-to-grave account of the life of the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, boasting a star of such Zen-like solemnity that you totally believed him about us all being pickled, hairless pod-dwellers plugged unawares inside The Matrix, could be anything more than plodding hagiography? Great for high school history and government classes, but nothing made with such worthy intentions could possibly be any fun. Right?

Sez you. Point one, Fishburne, reprising his role from a Broadway run two summers ago, is as impish and avuncular as he is authoritative. Whether lurching across the stage with on a cane or channeling LBJ’s puffed-up, Lone Star imperiousness, he’s a captivating presence for every second of this 95-minute monologue. Point two, the story of Marshall’s life — one Stevens seems to have taken a strict-constructionist, if anecdotal, approach to interpreting — is simply a hell of a story, so rich in incident and character (and names — his Uncle Fearless gets a lot of play here) and humor and triumph that it seems too good to be true. Continue reading

Conan O’Brien, RAW at DAR

So there was Conan at DAR Constitution Hall last night, dressed in what he said was Eddie Murphy’s catsuit from Raw, possibly signaling his awareness of the perils that await the comic who lets his moment of cultural primacy go to his head. Raw came out in 1988. Eddie Murphy’s last good movie was, I think, Boomerang, from 1992.

Conan is even rocking Eddie’s odd pose from Raw in the first photo there. My phone is to a real camera what I am to a real photographer, but I figured you’d want to see these anyway on your way over to checking out the City Paper’s Arts Desk debrief of the DC stop on Conan’s almost-done Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour. (SPOILER: It was good, but not great, but we liked it anyway.)

This discussion, which I failed to grasp was being “recorded” and would be presented to you, the reader, with minimal editing, stars Benjamin R. Freed and CP arts editor Jonathan L. Fischer and one Christopher T. Klimek, whom I suspect may have been drunk for at least part of it. It’s choppy and discursive and long-winded and confusing, but that’s all part of the choppy, discursive, long-winded fun. Continue reading

With Bells On

Better than Sleigh Bells, not as good as Broken Social Scene. My Click Track review of last night’s Broken Bells gig at the 9:30 Club is here and also here. I regret to inform you there was no sign of Christina Hendricks at the show.

RELATED: I wrote about Gnarls Barkley when they played the 9:30 a couple of summers ago.

Mars on Earth

So I lucked into an advance copy of Stiff author Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Set for publication in August, the book shows us the cosmic lengths to which space agencies must go to replicate off-world conditions here on Earth for the purposes of testing their equipment — and more to the point, the puny, hungry, fragile humans who rely on it to survive in a place nature clearly never meant for us to reach.

I haven’t read any of Roach’s prior books, but it took her about a sentence and a half to seduce me with the humor and sense of wonder she brings to her uncluttered reportage of complex scientific stuff. One chapter talks about an experiment called Mars-500 wherein Moscow’s Institute for Medical and Biological Problems locked would-be astronauts in a mockup spacecraft together for 500 days, the span of time required, using current technology, for a manned ship to journey to the Red Planet and back.

The test subjects faced simulations of the various emergencies they might have to cope with on a real Mars mission, but the primary purpose of the experiment was examine the psychological effects of so long an isolation. An similar experiment the IMBP hosted in 1999-2000, using an eight-member, coed, multinational crew, ended early. There was unwanted French-kissing and, in a separate incident, writes Roach, “a fistfight that left the walls spattered with blood.” Continue reading

Autarky in the E.R.:Gruesome Playground Injuries, Review’d

No time to blog, Dr. Jones; I gotta catch a bus up to New York to reconnect with my NEA theaterfolk.

But: Hey, remember that scene from 1992′s admittedly unmemorable Lethal Weapon 3, wherein Mel Gibson and Rene Russo’s two tough LAPD cops fore-play by comparing their battle scars? My review of Woolly’s Gruesome Playground Injuries, which develops that premise into a full-blown “unsentimental, nonlinear anti-romance” spanning 30 years, is right here.

And now I shall return to collaborating with G-Weld on the Broadway musical adaptation of Die Hard with a Vengeance. Happy Memorial Day, God bless you all, and God bless the United States of America.

Too Much Monkey Business: Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds at DAR Constitution Hall

Matthews, Goodall, and Reynolds at Constituion Hall Thursday night

Fifty years ago, British primatologist Jane Goodall arrived in what is now Tanzania to observe the behavior of chimps in the wild, discovering them to be creatures of far greater intellectual and emotional sophistication than the scientific community had believed. Twenty years ago, Dave Matthews put a band together in Charlottesville, one that became enormously popular while affirming the frat boys who formed his core audience early on are no more sophisticated than anybody thought.

Okay, so it isn’t just frat boys (current and expired) who dig Matthews’s slurry, swampy, rhythm n’ stew: Like it or not, Matthews is pop’s biggest draw of the 21st century by total tickets sold. At DAR Constitution Hall last night, Matthews marshaled his cult for good, performing a career-spanning acoustic-duo gig with frequent sidekick Tim Reynolds to benefit the Jane Goodall Institute’s conservation efforts. Continue reading