CITYPAPER Washington
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Workers’ Fights
Unpaid Wages, Uncompensated injUries, and UnjUst Firings: a look at the margins oF the d.c. labor market 14 by mike paarlberg
photographs by darroW montgomery
loose lips: what’s next For legal pot? 7
Food: where have all the bro bars gone? 23
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SUMMER 2015
INSIDE 14 workers’ fights
Unpaid wages, uncompensated injuries, and unjust firings: A look at the margins of the D.C. labor market By Mike PaarlBerg PhotograPhs By darrow MontgoMery
4 Chatter DistriCt Line
7 Loose Lips: The pot fight has only just begun 10 City Desk: If spring arrives, this should be your next D.C. visit 11 Gear Prudence 12 Savage Love 13 Straight Dope 21 Buy D.C.
D.C. feeD
23 Young & Hungry: Whither the bro bar? 26 Grazer: Our top picks for upcoming restaurants 26 Brew In Town: 21st Amendment Sneak Attack Saison 26 ‘Wiching Hour: A museum cafe gets pulled pork right
arts
31 Galleries: Capps on “Mingering Mike’s Supersonic Greatest Hits” 33 Grazer: D.C. culture’s apocalypse index 33 One Track Mind: Letitia VanSant & the Bonafides’ “Step in Line” 33 One Track Mind: Prinze George’s Maryland pop 34 Theater: Klimek on Back to Methuselah, Part 2 and Kid Victory 36 Speed Reads: Dixon on Robert Christgau’s Going Into the City 37 Discography: Tani on Young Rapids’ Pretty Ugly
City List
39 City Lights: America the booze-iful 39 Music 47 Books 48 Galleries 48 Dance 49 Theater 50 Film
51 showtimes 53 CLassifieDs Diversions
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CHATTER
in which readers share their own experiences with sexual harassment and assault
No Touching! As most of the twitterverse was engaged in
“Would you enjoy being treated like a predator, avoided and ignored? Or vilified by hypocritical, self-entitled women? If not, then being a ‘straight man’ probably isn’t for you.” Well, Straight Man: a woman who has been sexually assaulted in public would probably welcome the opportunity to be avoided and ignored. General Interest. Aaron Wiener’s piece (“Operator Error”) on the D.C. General homeless shelter a year after Relisha Rudd’s disappearance also brought out personal stories. really wrote, “Late payment on Rapid Rehousing happens often and is a real problem…. I know a family that got a rapid rehousing voucher…. The parent paid his portion but the District (probably through TCP, I now realize) was frequently late on their portion. Legal Aid helped get the rapid rehousing paid, but now there are eviction cases on this guy’s record.” stately_wayne summed up reader reaction neatly: “DC must get out of the housing business altogether. It’s not run right and will never be run right.”
llama drama Or
stressed about a dress, our readers were singing the praises of Arts Editor Christina Cauterucci, who stepped away from her regular beat to share the story of her sexual assault (and the Metropolitan Police Department’s fair-handed response) for last week’s cover story, “Call and Response.” R wrote: “What a great piece. Thank you for sharing such a personal and well researched story.” Pat Walsh (@PTRQ), local music lover, tweeted, “Seriously, read that @wcp cover story by @portmantina. Its really great and important.” We’d like to give special attention to those readers who shared their own experiences with harassment and MPD response. Encouraged wrote: “I’m also surprised and impressed at the response you got. When I called 911 about a peeping tom 2 years ago, the responding officers totally agreed that there had been a man crouched in my bushes and peering into my window. They did not seem to think they needed to do anything about it since their arrival scared him away.” brian’s ions suggested that MPD, “due to its institutional homophobia/transphobia,” may have a broader problem: “MPD is not transparent, particularly with anti-LGBT hate crimes. And it appears to be ‘losing’ hate crimes and biased policing cases as HRW discovered regarding their sexual assaults study. It would be great if DC JSC could develop a hate crimes and stalking adjunct advocacy service. The need is great.” But hang on: Amid all this civil discussion, did we escape an interaction with the dreaded Men’s Rights Activists, those
Dude... And finally, what better opportunity to show off one’s creative problem-solving skills, went the readers’ logic this week, than the legalization of pot? Rock has solved the problem: “If the party is big enough and everyone brings two ounces you could just light it in the fireplace.” Rock, you have my email. I’ll wait for the invite. Please also invite the fire de—Emily Q. Hazzard partment, just in case.
bedeviled hegemons whose collective mission is to remind us of their invisible suffering? Were we so lucky that no one chimed in to lament the plight of straight white men? Nope. Alan wrote: “You lost me when you wrote about ‘groups of bros’... Kinda pejorative and biased much?” Think of the bros! A commenter apply named Straight Man joined in.
Department of Corrections. Due to a reporting error, “Call and Response” incorrectly identified the D.C. Office of Victim Services as a branch of MPD. In fact, it is an independent agency that reports to the mayor. Want to see your name in bold on this page? Jump into the comments at washingtoncitypaper.com. Or send letters, gripes, clarification, or priase to mail@washingtoncitypaper.com.
PublISHER: Amy Austin EDItoR: mike mAdden MAnAGInG EDItoRS: emily q. hAzzArd, sArAh Anne hughes ARtS EDItoR: christinA cAuterucci fooD EDItoR: jessicA sidmAn CIty lIGHtS EDItoR: cAroline jones StAff WRItERS: will sommer, AAron wiener StAff PHotoGRAPHER: dArrow montgomery ContRIbutInG WRItERS: john Anderson, mArtin Austermuhle, jonettA rose BArrAs, ericA Bruce, sophiA Bushong, kriston cApps, jeffry cudlin, sAdie dingfelder, mAtt dunn, sArAh godfrey, trey grAhAm, louis jAcoBson, steve kiviAt, chris klimek, ryAn little, christine mAcdonAld, dAve mckennA, BoB mondello, mArcus j. moore, justin moyer, triciA olszewski, mike pAArlBerg, tim regAn, reBeccA j. ritzel, Ally schweitzer, tAmmy tuck, joe wArminsky, michAel j. west, BrAndon wu IntERnS: jAmes constAnt, morgAn hines onlInE DEvEloPER: zAch rAusnitz DIGItAl SAlES MAnAGER: sArA dick buSInESS DEvEloPMEnt ASSoCIAtE: kevin provAnce SAlES MAnAGER: nicholAs diBlAsio SEnIoR ACCount ExECutIvES: melAnie BABB, joe hickling, AliciA merritt ACCount ExECutIvES: lindsAy BowermAn, chelseA estes, mArk kulkosky MARkEtInG AnD PRoMotIonS MAnAGER: stephen BAll SAlES EvEntS MAnAGER: heAther mcAndrews SAlES AnD MARkEtInG ASSoCIAtE: chloe fedynA CREAtIvE DIRECtoR: jAndos rothstein ARt DIRECtoR: lAuren heneghAn CREAtIvE SERvICES MAnAGER: BrAndon yAtes GRAPHIC DESIGnER: lisA deloAch oPERAtIonS DIRECtoR: jeff Boswell SEnIoR AD CooRDInAtoR: jAne mArtinAche DIGItAl AD oPS SPECIAlISt: lori holtz InfoRMAtIon tECHnoloGy DIRECtoR: jim gumm SoutHCoMM: CHIEf ExECutIvE offICER: chris ferrell IntERIM CHIEf fInAnCIAl offICER: glynn riddle ContRollER: todd pAtton CHIEf MARkEtInG offICER: susAn torregrossA CREAtIvE DIRECtoR: heAther pierce DIRECtoR of ContEnt/onlInE DEvEloPMEnt: pAtrick rAins CHIEf tECHnoloGy offICER: mAtt locke CHIEf oPERAtIon offICER/GRouP PublISHER: eric norwood DIRECtoR of DIGItAl SAlES AnD MARkEtInG: dAvid wAlker loCAl ADvERtISInG: wAshington city pAper, (202) 332-2100, Ads@wAshingtoncitypAper.com vol. 35, no. 10, MARCH 6-12 2015 wAshington city pAper is puBlished every week And is locAted At 1400 eye st. nw, suite 900, wAshington, d.c. 20005. cAlendAr suBmissions Are welcomed; they must Be received 10 dAys Before puBlicAtion. u.s. suBscriptions Are AvAilABle for $250 per yeAr. issue will Arrive severAl dAys After puBlicAtion. BAck issues of the pAst five weeks Are AvAilABle At the office for $1 ($5 for older issues). BAck issues Are AvAilABle By mAil for $5. mAke checks pAyABle to wAshington city pAper or cAll for more options. © 2015 All rights reserved. no pArt of this puBlicAtion mAy Be reproduced without the written permission of the editor.
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PEPCO AND EXELON:
Powering a Brighter Future The proposed merger of Pepco and Exelon will bring exciting benefits to families, communities, businesses, our economy, and the District of Columbia, including: • Improved reliability for Pepco customers, with enhanced performance commitments – resulting in fewer and shorter power outages • $33.75 million for the District’s Customer Investment Fund that may be used for bill credits, low income assistance or energy efficiency programs • $51.2 million in projected merger savings over 10 years, which will flow back to Pepco’s D.C. customers through electric rates that are lower than they would be without the merger • $168 million to $260 million in economic benefits to the District • More than 1,500 new jobs in the District and the region • More annual charitable contributions and local community support – exceeding Pepco’s 2013 level of $1.6 million for 10 years following the merger The merger will maintain Pepco’s local presence and local leadership, while bringing together Exelon’s three electric and gas utilities (BGE, ComEd and PECO) and Pepco Holdings’ three electric and gas utilities (Atlantic City Electric, Delmarva Power and Pepco) to create the leading mid-Atlantic electric and gas utility.
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DISTRICTLINE
D.C.’s least popular condo?
washingtoncitypaper.com/go/middlefinger
Loose Lips
Buzzkill say goodbye to the pot consensus. The D.C. Council meeting hadn’t even started yet, and the councilmembers were already bickering. Ignoring a request from the District’s congressional overlords about marijuana, Chairman Phil Mendelson warned, would only “piss them off.” “You pissed them off,” Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans shot back. Welcome to the post-marijuana-legalization District, where the pols are somehow even less mellow. Ahead of legalization last week, everyone—Mayor Muriel Bowser, Attorney General Karl Racine, the Council, and the organizers behind pot-friendly Initiative 71—was publicly in agreement that legalizing the drug was, itself, legal. In the aftermath of congressional threats aimed at blocking legalization, though, one-time allies are falling out over how to treat the drug. The rift could make turning the District’s convoluted marijuana regime into something resembling Colorado or Washington’s tax-and-regulate system even more difficult. First up for District officials: how to respond to Rep. Jason Chaffetz and other congressional Republicans, all of whom are hot for prosecutions. Last week, Chaffetz warned the District that legalizing the drug would violate the federal Anti-Deficiency Act, which forbids spending federal money that hasn’t been appropriated. Thanks to a December rider inserted by Republicans in legislation funding the government until October, the District is forbidden from using funds to legalize the drug (legal opinions from the city’s own lawyers say enacting Initiative 71 was still legal, because it was “enacted” when voters approved the initiative in the previous fiscal year, funding for which wasn’t encumbered by the rider). Chaffetz’s ire cooled considerably after the Department of Justice showed no interest in prosecuting Bowser, Mendelson, or anyone else in the Wilson Building. No one has ever
Darrow Montgomery
By Will Sommer
In the Weed: Legal pot proponent Adam Eidinger threatens “smoke-ins” if D.C. officials cave to congressional pressure. been charged for violating the Anti-Deficiency Act, making perp walks for city officials even less likely to happen. Now that they’ve dodged prosecution for the time being, the mayor and councilmembers have to decide how to respond to Chaffetz’s requests for the names of all city employees who worked on legalization. In
providing names, the District could essentially be handing over a list of potential defendants if a Republican ever becomes U.S. Attorney here (which would, of course, require a Republican to be elected president). Bowser’s spokesman Michael Czin tells LL the mayor is cooperating with Chaffetz’s questions, but won’t elaborate further.
The Council, being the Council, can’t be so obscure. When Mendelson suggested providing staffers’ names to Chaffetz at Tuesday’s Council breakfast, councilmembers turned on their titular leader like bank robbers who had been found out. Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander urged her colleagues to “forget Congress,” while Evans urged Mendelson to not
washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 7
DISTRICTLINE give in to Chaffetz. “Phil, you started down this road,” Evans said. “I didn’t.” Chaffetz’s office didn’t have a comment on the councilmembers plotting to ignore him. It’s not decided yet exactly what they’ll do, but Mendelson favors just sending in the names of councilmembers and staffers who were at the dais during an informal meeting on legalization shortly before the initiative took effect. Councilmembers may be divided on whether to give up their staffers to Congress, but they’re all in agreement on pot clubs. Lawmakers voted unanimously earlier this week on legislation from Bowser to ban marijuana use in clubs that require paid membership, which could have exploited a loophole in Initiative 71 to allow semi-public use of the drug, instead of just in private homes. All of that isn’t sitting well with Bowser’s erstwhile allies in the D.C. Cannabis Campaign, which put Initiative 71 on the ballot. Cannabis Campaign leader Adam Eidinger tells LL that Bowser’s bill amounts to a “a smack in the face.” (Initiative backers in the
Drug Policy Alliance agree, and sent councilmembers a letter saying the club bill would violate the spirit of Initiative 71.) There was a time that Eidinger and Bowser’s mutual vibe was much more Cheech and Chong. An admiring Washington Post story last week laid out Bowser’s plan, hatched in late March 2014 as she cruised towards a primary victory over Vince Gray, to keep marijuana’s more outre supporters quiet as she legalized the drug. Bowser promised to back the initiative; in exchange, activists would hold off on public smoke-ins and other kinds of antics that would set off alarms in Congress. Now Eidinger thinks there’s a less savory deal afoot, accusing Bowser of using private pot clubs to negotiate with congressional Republicans. Eidinger is also disappointed in “so-called allies” like At-Large Councilmember David Grosso, who unsuccessfully pushed his own legalization bill before the initiative passed. Eidinger’s response: the dreaded smoke-ins. “4/20 [April 20], it’s on,” Eidinger says. “You want smoke-ins across the city? We’ll
Are ALCOHOL and ANXIETY taking over your life?
bring them. I have friends all across America who would love to come here and organize a smoke-in.” Eidinger isn’t kidding around. This guy has taken to wearing a red “Phrygian” cap around, as some sort of statement about liberty. The last time a political activist wore one of those, they were operating a guillotine. All the fracas wouldn’t amount to much outside of the Wilson Building, except the District still has more work to do on marijuana. As it stands, possessing, growing and sharing certain amounts of marijuana is legal, but selling it isn’t. Councilmembers want to regulate (and tax) sales, but for now, the rider makes that impossible. The District could have a way around the restrictions, though, courtesy of the D.C. Appleseed think tank. Appleseed, which specializes in thinking up creative ways around congressional impositions, cooked up a scheme to keep the District government running during 2013’s federal government shutdown. Now it’s got a similar plan for pot. Here’s how Walter Smith, Appleseed’s executive director, explains the idea: The
Participants will: • Stay at the Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, for about five weeks • Undergo detoxification (if needed) and receive alcohol treatment • Complete questionnaires, have blood drawn, and have an MRIbrain scan
Got a tip for LL? Send suggestions to lips@washingtoncitypaper.com. Or call (202) 650-6925.
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federal “cromnibus” appropriations law forbids the District from spending 2015 funds on legalization. But it doesn’t forbid the District from spending funds appropriated in previous years. The District happens to have hundreds of millions of dollars that fit that description in the contingency fund, which previously kept the District afloat during the shutdown. All the District needs to do, Smith says, is decide that taxing and regulating marijuana amounts to an unexpected emergency. Then they can tap those funds to cover things like Council hearings and police training. For now, according to Grosso, the Council’s marijuana energies are too focused on responding to Chaffetz to take up the Appleseed plan. As long as the District keeps good books on how it spends the contingency funds, though, Smith says the process shouldn’t be complicated. It might be the only part of the District’s approach to legalization that isn’t. CP
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DISTRICTLINE City Desk
Tomorrow’s history today: This was the week you started following the Nationals’ spring training instead of the Wizards’ losing streak.
Spring Back
When winter finally decides it’s done dumping ice and snow on D.C., residents will once again be able to venture outdoors to celebrate nature’s ceasefire. Consider a springtime visit to the National Arboretum, which covers more than 400 acres of federally owned land near Trinidad. While the “living museum” is one of the most beautiful public spaces in D.C., it’s also one of the least-known, due in part to its off-the-touristpath location and a lack of public transit options. While sequestration reduced its hours in May 2013, the Arboretum appears poised for renewal in 2015. —Sarah Anne Hughes
Hours For the public, no cut stings quite as much as the reduction in days open, from seven to four (Friday through Monday). “It’s been really hard to see all these faces turned away,” says National Arboretum Interpretive Specialist Nancy Luria. The hope, she says, is to restore the hours by spring, but there’s no guarantee that goal will be reached. For Tom Costello, the new executive director of Friends of the National Arboretum, it’s priority No. 1.
Events Each new season at the Arboretum brings the reawakening of different plants—March brings the blooming of Japanese andromeda, daffodils, and woodland wildflowers; April sees the Arboretum’s famed azalea collection come back to life. As visitors head to the Tidal Basin at the end of this month and beginning of April to visit the blooming Yoshino cherry trees, the National Arboretum will again offer a self-guided tour of its 40 types of flowering cherries. April will also feature azalea tours and the annual Garden Fair and Plant Sale.
Photos courtesy DC Gardens/dcgardens.com/national-arboretum/
Campaigns Local gardening writers and enthusiasts this month launched DC Gardens, a media campaign to highlight and raise awareness about area gardens. “It breaks your heart… to find out how many people don’t know it’s there,” Susan Harris, a retired garden writer, says of the Arboretum. The group is trying to raise $25,000 through IndieGogo for its outreach efforts. At the moment, FONA is working to build financial support for the Arboretum “in a way that we can assure that, once we’re open, we’re not going to close again,” says Costello. “The job is to bring this to the awareness of those people who are and can be enthusiastic about it, but that takes a little time.”
Clockwise from top: Magnolias; Glenn Dale azaleas; herb garden with National Capitol Columns in background. 10 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
1000 BLOCK OF 16TH STREET NW, FEB. 19. BY DARROW MONTGOMERY
BOSS DOES BRUNCH Featuring
Gear Prudence: Occasionally when I’m driving along some of the streets that feature the city’s finest bike lanes (L, M, and 15th), I see cyclists not using them and on the open road with cars. When biking, I always go out of my way to get to the safety of a bike lane. I’ve racked my brain trying to understand their motivation for avoiding the lanes and riding with traffic, but I just don’t get it! What gives? —No Obvious Logical Answer, Needs Explanation Dear NOLANE: You haven’t really biked in D.C. until you’ve been told by a ragey driver to “GET IN THE BIKE LANE!� Even after the shouter has been met with “THERE’S NOT EVEN A BIKE LANE HERE!�, there’s typically exasperation and honking and the exchanging of middle fingers and hopefully nothing worse. When there is a bike lane present and a cyclist isn’t in it, it can be baffling. But there are reasons. The big obvious reasons for temporarily riding outside a bike lane are big and obvious: bike lanes attract obstructive detritus (construction equipment, dumpsters, delivery vans, wrong-way cyclists, wayward pedestrians). Some people on bikes, rather than contend with these nuisances, simply choose to bypass them by moving into a general lane. The same occurs when avoiding the potholes, metal grates, ice, steel plates, flotsam, jetsam, and other hazards that can lead to suboptimal or dangerous cycling. Another common reason: the cyclist is preparing to make a turn at an upcoming intersection that’s on the other side of the street. There are others, however, who eschew bike lanes not from temporary necessity, but a conscious choice. Justifications include: “I ride fast and can keep up with cars�; “Bike lanes, as designed, are unsafe, and it’s safer and predictable to avoid them�; “Bike lanes relegate bicyclists to a second-class status and I deserve as full rights to the road�; and “An evil witch cursed me and if I ride in the bike lane, I’ll turn back into a toad.� Under District law, the presence of a bike lane doesn’t mandate any cyclist to ride in it, and while this might irk or confuse observers, where to ride is a matter of personal preference.That said, I would contend that the overwhelming majority of city cyclists prefer bike lanes, always try to ride in them, and desperately —GP want more and better ones. Gear Prudence is Brian McEntee, who blogs at talesfromthesharrows.blogspot.com and tweets at @sharrowsdc. Got a question about bicycling? Email gearprudence@washcp.com.
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for the Economy II program. To apply, schedule an ✓ No other working telephone service at the same location appointment with and the rates Washington, DC Lifeline Program byeligibility, are as set forth in federal and in Verizon’s tariffs on file with the Public * Full terms for these services, including terms of ✓ No additional phone lines calling 1-800-253-0846. Households which one or more Rates as stated here are effective as of September 1, 2011. But, the rates and other terms are Service Commission of the District ofinColumbia. ✓ No Foreign Exchange or Foreign Zone service individuals aretoreceiving subject change in benefits the future.from one of the following ✓ No bundles or packages public assistance programs or have an annual income that is 150% or below the Federal Poverty Guideline may ✓ No outstanding unpaid final bills be eligible. ✓ Bill name must match eligible participant Restrictions: ✓ Food stamps Eligibility: ✓ No separate Lifeline discount on cellular or wireless ďƒź No other working telephone service at ✓ Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) phone service DistrictSecurity residents who have been certified by the the same ✓ Supplemental Income ✓ Business lines are notlocation eligible District Department of the Environment’s Energy ✓ Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) ďƒźnumber No additional phone lines ✓ Phone must match eligible participant as income(Section eligible8)may apply for the ✓ FederalOffice Public(DDOE) Housing Assistance ďƒź No Foreign Exchange or Foreign Zone ✓ Must be a current Verizon customer or establish new Economy II program this program. To apply, ✓ Medicaid service service with Verizon schedule an appointment with DDOE by calling 311. ✓ National School Lunch Programs (Free Lunch Program) ďƒź No bundles or packages Households in which one or more individuals are ďƒź No outstanding unpaid final bills receiving benefits from one of the following public ďƒź Bill name must match eligible participant assistance programs may be income eligible. ďƒź No separate Lifeline discount on cellular
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SAVAGELOVE wife issues. lack of intimacy. cuckold, etc. —need help While I typically encourage people to keep their questions brief, it is possible to be too brief, NH. But I’ve gotten so many questions from wannabe cuckolds with wife issues over the years that I’m going to hazard a series of guesses and take a shot at advising you… I’m guessing you’re a straight guy and you’re interested in cuckolding—the kink where the wife sleeps with other men, and either she tells the husband about her adventures or she “forces” him to watch her with other men. Cuckolding can involve elements of humiliation and/or degradation, and in some cases includes “forced bi” interactions between the cuckolded husband and the men his wife “cheats” on him with. And I’m also guessing you told the wife about your interest in cuckolding and she wasn’t interested and you wound up arguing about it, NH, and now your sex life is in the toilet, aka “lack of intimacy.” So what do you do now? You drop it, NH, as cuckolding—which is a big ask for the wife (the sexual and emotional risks fall on her)— is a kink that both partners have to be equally excited about exploring. If she doesn’t want to go there, NH, then you’re not going there. Not getting to explore cuckolding—and dropping the subject—is the price of admission you’ll have to pay to revive your sex life. And if restoring your sex life isn’t incentive enough to drop the subject, NH, this Savage Love reader’s experience might inspire you to drop it: “My husband, almost exactly 10 years older than me, confessed a cuckold fetish to me shortly before our fifth anniversary,” a happily married straight lady wrote (her letter appeared in “Meet the Monogamish,” January 4, 2012). “I said no, but a seed was planted: Whenever I would develop a crush on another man, it would occur to me that I could sleep with him if I wanted to.” She eventually met someone she want-
Not getting to explore cuckolding— and dropping the subject—is the price of admission you’ll have to pay to revive your sex life.
ed to sleep with and went back to her husband—five years later—to ask if he was still interested in cuckolding. He was—and guess what? He’s a cuckold now. I had to run an edited version of her letter, so this bit didn’t make it into the column, but the only reason this woman wound up exploring cuckolding was because her husband respected her initial “no” and wasn’t pressuring her to reconsider. Because she didn’t feel like he was miserably unhappy with the status quo—a strictly monogamous status quo—and because she didn’t feel like he would blow up if she got cold feet, she felt secure enough to go there. So shut the fuck up, NH, and you may —Dan eventually get what you want. My boyfriend and I have been together three years. We plan to start a family, we are very happy together, we go on many adventures together—all that good stuff. For the past year or so, I feel like I’ve been losing my sex drive. Not just toward him but in general. I should mention that I’m 30 and he’s 25, but our age gap has always been a nonissue. I have a stressful job and am often too tired to have sex on weeknights, so we’ve pretty much gone down to having sex once a week. He has said this devastates him. He feels like I’m not attracted to him because he always initiates, and he is worried about our future sex life. I used to deny there was a problem and assure him, “No,
we’re fine, I’m just tired,” etc. But I admit it’s a problem. I’ve had more than a few uncomfortable “maintenance sex” sessions wherein I sex him to make him happy, and then I wind up mad at myself for being a faker and feel resentful toward him for being so horny. I’ve recently been coming to the conclusion that he’s right: It will be bad for our future if our sexual needs are so different. Yet I don’t want to let him go because of this. I love him madly. I’m also a CUDDLE ADDICT. In my fantasy world, we cuddle all the time, we have amazing sex only when we’re worked up, and my vibrator takes care of me more often than his cock (this is already the case generally). But I don’t view this lack of sex as a negative thing. I just don’t make sex as much of a priority as he does. I could see looking the other way if he needs to get his sexual needs met by someone else or with a professional, but it makes me nervous, mostly because I’d be devastated if he fell in love with someone else. I’m not polyamorous, as so many Seattleites are, but I’m open-minded. —Sexual Needs Undermining Good Girl’s Loving Expectations Barring a medical issue or a common-sense issue—get your hormone levels checked, try to incorporate your vibrator into the sex you’re having with your boyfriend, ponder the possibility that you fall somewhere on the asexual spectrum and perhaps marrying a sexual isn’t the greatest idea (particularly if you can’t see yourself opening up the relationship)—this sounds like just another average, ordinary case of mismatched libidos. My advice: Break up now, before you have children, before his feelings of rejection (already at devastating levels) and your feelings of resentment (at having to go through the motions) metastasize into an explosive case of mutual loathing. Thanks for HUMP! I’ve been in a steady relationship with my boyfriend for five years, and since year two, when we got pregnant despite using a condom, we’ve had sex maybe five times. Three
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of those times were in the year after the pregnancy, then once on Valentine’s Day last year and again last night after seeing HUMP! We’ve been in couples counseling for six weeks, and therapy laid a foundation for becoming intimate again. But things have been so awkward for so long that it just seemed impossible. But something clicked for us at HUMP! It’s like we both seemed to realize that people have sex in all shapes and sizes and methods and that you can dive in. At a certain point, you just have to dive right in. You have always been a sex-positive force in my life— thanks for the reminder and bringing SF some —SF HUMP!er excellent entertainment! Thanks for the lovely note, SFH, and I’m thrilled HUMP! provided you and your boyfriend with the goose/spark/inspiration you needed to dive back in. But you two did the heavy lifting—getting counseling, hanging in there, keeping those lines of communication open—and you two deserve the credit, not my silly little porn festival. Now keep diving in! And remember: If fear of pregnancy is a boner-killer/pussy-parcher, and if more reliable forms of birth control don’t work for you, there are plenty of non-PIV options that (1) are tons of fun, (2) count as sex, from mutual masturbation to fantasy play to oral and anal play/sex, and (3) present no risk of pregnancy. So even if you find yourselves gripped by fear again, SFH, keep having sex. HUMP! is the Pacific Northwest’s biggest, best, and only amateur-porn film festival. It’s in its 11th year, and for the second time ever, HUMP! is touring the country. HUMP! features hardcore, softcore, erotica, animation, and musicals, and HUMP! is straight, gay, queer, kinky, vanilla, cis, and trans—and, as SFH’s experience shows, HUMP! also features inspiration. To find out if HUMP! is coming to your town, go to HUMPtour.com. —Dan Send your Savage Love questions to mail@savagelove.net.
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THESTRAIGHTDOPE Experience tells me, Craig, that questions like these tend to arise while under a certain kind of influence. In case your attention span is currently as short as I suspect, let’s just say you’re onto something: what we think of as the present doesn’t really exist, so it’s impossible for us to live in it. Grab some munchies and stay focused, though, and we’ll discuss further. Let’s start with physiology. Studies suggest that for us to simply notice something in our field of vision and shift our eyes toward it takes at minimum a tenth of a second. If lightning strikes 100 feet away—a near-definitional example of something that seems to happen “right now”—the bolt will already have changed shape or disappeared by the time you register it and interpret what you’ve seen. The sensory input that forms our consciousness is itself shaped by the limits of our neural hardware, meaning that what we experience as the present is actually the very recent past. Your next question is probably: who cares? Our consciousness can arbitrarily define the present as being a very short time in the past and leave it at that. And essentially this is what we do semantically, too—“the present” is a meaningful term to us, even though the thing it refers to isn’t something we can actually perceive. Both Aristotle and Saint Augustine saw the present as no more than a single mathematical point, of zero size and duration, separating the past from the future. Philosophy students will be relieved to learn that I concur. The more interesting part of your question is how and why we can even contemplate the past and the future. This capacity for so-called mental time-travel is considered to be one of the hallmarks of human intelligence. Animals generally react via instinct. After some experience they can develop behaviors—recognizing a person, playing fetch—that seem to indicate they remember prior experiences. But that’s a long way from recalling specifics of the past. While it’s obviously very difficult to tell what goes on in, e.g., a cat’s brain (it appears to usually be some variant of “Fuck you”), humans, as far as we know, are the only animals able to retain literally useless information—knowing the state capitals or the lyrics to “Shake It Off” can’t confer much survival advantage. More crucially, it may well be that only humans have episodic memory—i.e., reconstructed knowledge of past events based on one’s own perceptions. The same holds true for the future: natural selection can result in animal behaviors that appear predictive, but really represent the
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It’s pretty easy for me to reflect on the past or dream about the future, but what is the present? How does the human brain perceive the length of the present? Do we live only in the present, or is part of us always in the past and part in the future? —Craig Schneider
high survival rate of animals that made similar decisions in generations past. OK, there’s weak evidence showing scrub jays, monkeys, and rats have some ability to assess the future, but (a) there’s weak evidence showing a lot of things, and (b) several studies have also reported that apes do unexpectedly poorly in tasks requiring foresight. From what we can tell, the ability to perform “future simulations”— predictive judgments about future outcomes based on hypothetical situations created in our own brains—is a talent exclusive to humanity. I may like both ketchup and ice cream, but I can guess that a ketchup-flavored ice cream startup won’t get much funding. Let’s see a scrub jay do that. Various blobby pictures of brains have indicated that the region responsible for prediction is called the prefrontal cortex. Injury victims who sustain damage to this region may suffer the Oliver Sacksian fate of being “locked in the present.” If asked what they’re doing tomorrow, these patients draw a complete blank— the concept of “tomorrow” is no longer within their comprehension. Our vision of the future is also heavily influenced by our recall of the past; research has found links between episodic memory and foresight. The hippocampus has been shown to help us create and store mental maps of our environment, and these maps of the past are later reconstructed to make predictions for the future. Amnesiac patients therefore not only have trouble remembering the past, but also struggle to predict simple future outcomes as well. The concept of the future is advanced enough that even humans with healthy brains don’t acquire it until age three or four, and some studies suggest it doesn’t fully develop until age 25, which may explain so many young adults’ willingness to take on debt to get a journalism degree. Even in maturity we have confounding tendencies—for one thing, humans tend to be overly optimistic. People suffering from depression, numerous researchers have reported, aren’t actually pessimistic in their predictions, just accurate. J-school students, stoners—none of us are particularly good at fortune-telling. But our ability to imagine the future, even incorrectly, is what makes us human. The present is just the pause while we decide what to do next. —Cecil Adams Have something you need to get straight? Take it up with Cecil at straightdope.com.
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workers’ fights Unpaid wages, Uncompensated injUries, and UnjUst firings: a look at the margins of the d.c. labor market by mike paarlberg
photographs by darrow montgomery
*some workers’ names have been changed and, except in settled court cases, employers have not been identified to protect workers from retaliation. 14 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
carlos* has been ripped off, again. he’s a day laborer who, along with dozens of other day laborers, gets work hanging out most mornings at the home depot on rhode island avenue ne, waiting for contractors in pickup trucks to come hire him. he may get a day’s work, sometimes a week or more, but he doesn’t always get paid in the end. it’s a regular enough occurrence that it doesn’t faze him. this time, he’s come by the workers’ rights clinic, a weekly legal clinic for lowwage workers with workrelated problems, run by the d.c. employment justice center out of bread for the city in shaw on wednesday evenings. i’m interviewing him about the contractor who hired him for a twoday drywall job at a private home in maryland, promising to pay him after the job was done, then never showed up with his money. “yeah, my buddies told me not to work for this guy because he doesn’t pay,” says carlos. “oh,” i say. “you mean he’s known to pay low wages?”
washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 15
“No,” says Carlos, laughing. “I mean he doesn’t pay his workers at all. Ever.” “Oh,” I say. “Maybe you should have listened to your friends.” “Yeah, maybe I should have!” There’s not much we can do in a situation like this. If a worker like Carlos manages to get a full name and contact information, ideally a business address, he can file a complaint with the D.C. Department of Employment Service’s division of wage and hour compliance, which assigns an investigator to the case. Technically, an employer who engages in wage theft can be held liable for up to four times the wages owed the worker, plus any legal fees, and could even do some jail time. In practice, the best the worker can hope for is to recover the wages he’s owed if the investigator manages to track down the contractor, schedules a “fact-finding conference” with both parties, and rules in his favor. The process can be lengthy and obscure, and cases get backlogged. In one case cited by the EJC, the investigator failed to issue a ruling because the employer, a restaurant owner, did not show up to the conference and refused to take the investigator’s calls. In another, a worker named Eliseo Hernandez, who worked for Gryphon Tile Installers, had his case closed by DOES when the owner agreed to pay him the $2,500 he was owed, though Hernandez never received the money. The investigator informed him the check had been cashed, and it was up to Hernandez to investigate what had happened. Hernandez later told a D.C. Council hearing that he went to Middletown, Va., where the business was based, enlisting police help, and ultimately learned from a Middletown detective that the owner had cashed the check himself, claiming he was going to pay Hernandez in cash. Two years and a lawsuit later, Hernandez received $1,300—barely half of what he was owed. More often than not, the worker gets nothing. In the often shady world of day labor, workers don’t work for the same contractor for more than a few days at a time. Contractors often run their businesses out of their homes, don’t give out their names or addresses, and sometimes vanish entirely. A typical intake interview at the Wednesday night clinic goes something like this: “This contractor hired me to work on a patio for a week and told me he’d send me a check when we finished and he never did!” “OK, what’s the contractor’s name and how do we find him?” “His name is Dave, and he drives a red pickup.” “OK, where was the house where you worked on the patio?” “I don’t know, Dave would drive us there.” Outside the Home Depot, Inocente Maldonado, a day laborer who says he left medical school in Guatemala to work in the U.S. and support his family back home, talks about the last time he got ripped off. A contractor hired him to clean gutters at a house in Anacostia, promising him $95 for the day. He dropped off Maldonado at the house and never picked
a contractor hired him to clean gUtters at a hoUse in anacostia, promising him $95 for the day. he dropped off maldonado at the hoUse and never picked him Up again. the homeowner told maldonado it wasn’t her problem. him up again. The homeowner told Maldonado it wasn’t her problem. “For just a hundred bucks, the police don’t want to get involved,” he says. “Neither do lawyers.” Going through the process to try to collect the $95 owed him would involve losing a day’s work, and thus cost more. “And the contractors know it.” Arturo Griffiths, a day-labor organizer, adds, “There are a lot of contractors coming here looking for people to work for free.” In and around the District, a number of groups are organizing to improve the situation of these workers. Trabajadores Unidos de D.C., a group Griffiths leads that formed out of D.C. Jobs with Justice’s Day Laborer Project, visits sites where day laborers gather like the Home Depot, the Mount Pleasant 7Eleven, and outside homeless shelters, helping them apply for visas and drivers’ licenses. Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor has a Day Laborer Exchange Program in which students offer workers crash courses in labor rights and basic English. Carecen, the Central American Resource Center, offers legal aid in immigra-
16 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
tion and housing matters. The National Day Labor Organizing Network agitates on labor and immigration issues nationwide, pushing for the establishment of worker centers. These are established hiring halls based on a model in which day laborers can be matched with registered employers based on job skills, both parties agree to wages, and give evaluations of each other after the job. Casa de Maryland, the region’s largest Latino services and advocacy organization, runs five such centers—in Silver Spring, Wheaton, Rockville, Hyattsville, and Baltimore—but none in D.C. As the Washington Post has reported, a campaign to found one at the Home Depot failed in 2007 when neighbors complained about the nuisance of day laborers loitering, sleeping, and sometimes urinating in public, and balked at the prospect of spending tax dollars on undocumented immigrants. Police cited racial tensions in the area between neighbors, mostly black, and day laborers, mostly Latino. D.C.’s Latino population grew 22 percent in the decade between 2000 and 2010, according to the census, and while the largest concentration of Latino residents
remains in Ward 1, as D.C.’s Latino community grows, it has shifted to other parts of the District. “The don’t want us here,” says Griffiths, referring to the neighbors by the Home Depot. But he says racial mistrust goes both ways. A lot of the contractors who come to pick up day laborers are Latinos themselves, and don’t like to hire the minority of day laborers who are black. “They say, ‘Our ancestors built the Capitol and now we can’t even get a day’s work here!’ They have a point.” In D.C., the Employment Justice Center is the main recourse for workers who have been ripped off, injured, harassed, or otherwise abused on the job. I’ve been volunteering at their Workers’ Rights Clinic for the past 10 years. I started going as a way to keep up my Spanish—perhaps half of the clients are immigrants from Central America, both authorized and unauthorized. It’s a depressing window into the kind of things that workers in many sectors of the economy—particularly construction, landscaping, cleaning, restaurant, retail, and domestic work—should be able to count on but can’t. Things like getting paid minimum wage. Like getting overtime when you work overtime. Like not being groped by your boss. Like not being fired when you complain about being groped by your boss. Like not being severely injured by falling objects then getting stuck with the hospital bill because the company claims it happened outside of work. This isn’t to say workers never get what they’re owed. But for many, the odds are stacked against them. The EJC boasts a success record of winning $803,000 in wages and benefits for workers in 2014, mostly for people who visited its two Bread for the
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City-based clinics, the one in Shaw and another on Good Hope Road SE, and a third in Prince George’s County. That’s in addition to unquantifiable benefits like getting health insurance, getting unemployment insurance if they qualify (if they’re undocumented, they don’t), or getting their jobs back after being fired in the rare case when that’s possible. Next to the anonymous deadbeat contractors, wrongful dismissal cases are the most frustrating because, most of the time, there’s nothing to be done. “I was fired for no good reason,” or even “I was fired for something I didn’t do” falls into the very broad can’t-helpyou category of at-will employment: Under U.S. law, you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all. You can work someplace for 30 years and be fired one day if your boss wakes up and decides he doesn’t like the way you dress, the color of your eyes, or the things you do outside of work (there are documented cases of workers being fired for smoking, drinking, and cross-dressing at home, outside of work hours, because their bosses considered such behavior immoral). In one common scenario, workers get fired after being accused of stealing; even if they can prove they didn’t steal, they still can’t legally get their job back. This is often confounding to immigrant workers who come from countries with stronger labor laws than the U.S., which is to say, nearly any other country in the world. In El Salvador, where a great many of the EJC’s clients are from, workers are protected from losing their jobs on the basis of political beliefs or party affiliation. Not here: If your boss is a Democrat and finds out you are a Republican, she can fire you for that. In another case, a janitor had come in after being fired because she had walked in on her boss having sex with one of her coworkers, on the job. The only notable exceptions to at-will dismissal—apart from union contracts, which cover a dwindling number of workers—are certain types of discrimination, such as age, race, gender, religion, and nationality (sexual orientation only counts in some states, so if you live in Virginia, you can be fired for being gay, though not in D.C. or Maryland). But discrimination is notoriously difficult to prove, since an employer can easily come up with some other reason they fired someone. Only one case I recall was ever so straightforward: a day laborer who had been told “I’m letting you go because you’re Mexican.” My jaw dropped: He actually said that? This contractor had to be particularly dumb, because all he had to say was “I’m letting you go.” Lawyers fantasize about cases like this, as they’re about the only ones that result in an easy settlement. Often discrimination takes place within immigrant groups based on patterns of discrimination at home: Many of the employers exploiting immigrant workers are other immigrants, albeit those who have papers, have been here longer, and speak English. Two Guatemalan waiters at a Mexican restaurant in the District came to the clinic because they learned that the Mexican owners were paying the Mexican waitstaff one wage and the
“in d.c., we have a lot of good laws, bUt they’re not implemented, and immigrants don’t know aboUt them.” Guatemalan waitstaff different, lower wage, for the exact same work. There are other types of cases, too. Workplace injuries are common in construction and cleaning. Workers come in with mangled hands, scars, and burns; one worker who came in when I was doing interviews said she had a miscarriage from being forced to carry heavy loads of cleaning supplies while pregnant. Construction workers have all sorts of heavy objects fall on their heads—tools, building materials, walls, and in several cases, icicles—and they’re not always provided helmets. Employers are legally required to pay workers’ compensation for injuries suffered on the job, out of an insurance fund. In many cases, however, smaller or informal employers—think “Dave” and his red pickup—don’t pay into such a fund, and claim the injury took place outside of work so the employer isn’t liable. Often the workers don’t know they have a right to compensation, anyway. Domestic slavery also tends to pop up, given D.C.’s magnet status for international elites. In these cases, the client is someone brought to the U.S. by her employer, usually someone who works for an embassy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or some
18 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
similar institution, to work as a live-in housekeeper, cook, and nanny. Upon arriving, her employer (the clients are always women) confiscates her passport and tells her if she leaves the house, she’ll be deported. Given the high potential for abuse and blacklisting, and the fact that many employers have diplomatic immunity, options for restitution are limited. One client had worked 14-hour days for a diplomat, for what came out to around $2 an hour. She was uninterested in the difference between the minimum wage and what she was owed, and simply wanted help returning to her home country. One advocacy group, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, organizes rescues in which a large group of activists, ideally with press in tow, shows up at the employer’s house unannounced and whisks away the domestic worker with her bags packed; the public shaming is a defensive measure to ward off retaliation. In more extreme cases, workers are victims of violent crimes. Two workers I interviewed in separate cases had been raped by their employers; both came with male relatives, who told the story, as the victims didn’t want to speak about it themselves. In both cases, we could only tell them to go to the police, but
they were obviously reluctant to do so because of their immigration status, something their bosses clearly knew as well. Fear of deportation is a major hurdle for many immigrant workers, even though employment laws like minimum wage, overtime, and workers compensation apply to all workers, legal or otherwise, and D.C. has been a “sanctuary city” for undocumented immigrants since 2011, when then-Mayor Vince Gray signed an executive order banning D.C. police from asking about immigration status in routine stops or for minor crimes (formalizing an already standard practice in the District for decades). But the most depressingly common type of case is wage theft. This can take various forms: paying less than minimum wage, paying straight time instead of time-and-a-half for overtime, improperly classifying employees as exempt managers or independent contractors (who aren’t subject to minimum wage and overtime protections), or simply not paying them at all. A 2009 nationwide survey by the National Employment Law Project found that 68 percent of low-wage workers had experienced some form of wage theft, losing on average 15 percent of their annual income. The EJC was the driving force behind a bill the D.C. Council passed last year that increased penalties on scofflaw employers and required them to provide written notice to employees stating their rate of pay and regular payday. With the wage theft bill, as with 2014’s minimum wage hike and 2008’s paid sick leave bill, D.C. reflects a general trend of labor advocates pushing for protections at the
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state and local level in the face of federal inaction, after even relatively modest bills have failed to move through Congress. At the Home Depot, Griffiths notes that contractors don’t abide by the provisions in the wage theft bill, such as providing notice and identification before hires: “In D.C., we have a lot of good laws, but they’re not implemented, and immigrants don’t know about them.” And even in cases where the employer is in clear violation of the law, plenty of workers are cowed by the threat of retaliation. Danny Felix, who worked as a driver for Smooth Ride, a shuttle service contracted by Amtrak, testified before the Council in favor of the wage theft bill at a public hearing last March. After not being paid overtime, Felix had filed a complaint with the D.C. Office of Wage-Hour in 2012, which ruled in his favor a year later. After the ruling, Felix testified that his employer held a conference call with all employees, announcing that someone had filed a claim against the company for nonpayment of overtime. “He said he felt betrayed,” said Felix, “and then he ended the call by stating, ‘Anyone who thinks they’re anonymous is not always anonymous.’” Subsequently, Felix’s boss switched him to a night shift, began to withhold 10 to 13 hours’ pay each pay period, and ultimately fired him. Employers, for their part, question the scope of the problem and the appropriateness of a legislative response. Jacqueline Tully, an attorney with Jackson Lewis, a law firm that represents employers, argues that “we don’t see widespread underpayment of wages” among employers, and characterizes the Wage Theft Prevention Act as one of a “majority of rules that address a minority of cases.” “Obviously employers should pay employees,” says Tully, “but the larger effect of some of these rules and regulations can put a damper on the business a business needs to do”—and require beefing up HR and legal activities. Specifically, the law’s written wage notice provision can be a burden, she says, on companies with thousands of employees, each of whom have to countersign any changes in their salaries. (Most of the shady employers that come up in clinic cases don’t have thousands of employees or hire law firms like Jackson Lewis.) And according to her, one of the most common forms of wage theft, nonpayment of overtime, is the product of the legal fuzziness over who counts as exempt that traces back to laws that were written in the 1930s with anachronistic references to jobs like corset-makers, which inevitably produces a lot of litigation (and, in turn, drums up business for labor- and management-side law firms alike). From a worker’s perspective, Tully allows, whether or not wage theft is a matter of a few bad apples doesn’t much matter if you’ve been ripped off by one of them. And the maddening thing is that a lot of the abuses that come up in cases are already illegal. It’s illegal to discriminate against workers for race or nationality, to retaliate against a worker for filing a complaint, to deny someone workers’ compensation. And it’s certainly illegal, un-
after not being paid overtime, danny felix filed a complaint. his boss switched him to a night shift, began to withhold 10 to 13 hoUrs’ pay each pay period, and Ultimately fired him. der contract law, not to pay them. Employers know this. But discrimination and retaliation are difficult to prove, with the burden on the worker. In cases of theft, many workers are paid in cash and don’t have pay stubs, written schedules, employee handbooks, or any evidence to support their case. “Contracts” are verbal agreements, and witnesses to back up workers’ accounts are scared to come forward, living hand to mouth on a job they can’t afford to lose. Subcontractors who fail to pay employees blame contractors who fail to pay them. Local agencies don’t have enough investigators and translators, and cases back up or are dropped. Even if workers manage to get a payout, it might not be for years, and they reasonably figure it’s not worth the trouble. And for every one worker who even tries to assert her rights, there are dozens who don’t bother. For a shady employer, paying out one settlement—often simply the amount owed in the first place—is a reasonable cost of doing business if he gets to continue ripping off he 20 others who don’t come forward. The EJC’s legal clinic is one of a patchwork of approaches to address worker abuse, one that includes direct legal services, petition
20 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
drives and demonstrations, worker centers, worker organizing, and agitation for legislative reform. Sometimes, there will be a classaction lawsuit, such as the one in 2010 against Epicurean, a restaurant on Georgetown University’s campus that had been failing to pay them overtime. After securing legal representation by James & Hoffman, the workers received full damages. These settlements are the equivalent of winning the lottery, however: for the workers lucky enough to secure pro bono representation and see a case through, it’s a big win, and the idea is that the lawsuits scare other employers straight by making examples out of the bad ones. But after seeing the same types of cases at every weekly clinic, the make-anexample route seems to have a limited impact for systematic change: Even if one shady employer cleans up or goes out of business, there are always others. Chicago labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan has written about the rise of the much-maligned litigation culture (of which he is a part) as a product of the decades-long breakdown of the institutions that used to set labor standards for all workers: unions and the state. “As the
state collapses and becomes more arbitrary in the enforcement of the law, all of us are more in need of tort (i.e. ‘trial’) lawyers,” he writes in The Rule of Law in Shambles. Congress cuts budgets for the agencies responsible for enforcing the law—OSHA, ERISA, the Department of Labor’s Wage-Hour Division—so it’s up to groups like the EJC, NDLON, and Trabajadores Unidos to bring scofflaw bosses to justice. And they have to pick their targets. When enforcement is outsourced to vigilantes, it becomes non-systematic, and a lot of workers fall through the cracks, particularly those who don’t earn very much, don’t speak the language, and don’t know their rights. It’s not only a matter of resources but of priorities, too. Although D.C.’s Department of Employment Services had its budget go up by $350,000 in the last fiscal year, several positions remain vacant. D.C.’s Office of Wage-Hour has two Spanish-speaking intake interviewers on staff; on any given Wednesday, there will be four or five times as many who volunteer at the workers’ rights clinic. DOES’ latest performance oversight report to the Council lists, under “number of employees who collected all compensation owed” under the Wage Payment Act to be zero in 2012, 2013, and 2014, which is curious given that the number of employees owed compensation ranges from 200 to 400 over those three years, and they did, in fact, collect several thousand dollars each year. Which side of the District’s border you happened to work on can also significantly affect the remedies available to you. In contrast to D.C., Maryland’s Department of Labor imposes administrative penalties and collects damages regularly, and the Maryland attorney general’s office helps workers bring civil suits against employers who don’t pay. And under a 2013 Maryland law, workers there can place a lien on the personal property of employers to collect wages owed to them. Sometimes getting an employer to pay up can be as simple as calling them. (As an alternative to the investigation process, the EJC sometimes sends demand letters directly to deadbeat employers, written in clients’ names, but with enough legal citations to, they hope, scare them into paying.) “Hey,” I will say, in English. “I’m Jorge’s friend, and we were just wondering when you were planning to pay him the $500 you owe him as per Title 32, chapter 13 of the D.C. Code, payment of wages upon discharge or termination.” “Oh you know what,” the boss will say, “I was just writing Jorge a check right now.” Not everyone can spout legalese to collect the wages and benefits they earned, nor should they have to. But there isn’t much of an alternative. Much as Americans profess to hate trial lawyers, they seem to hate unions and government regulation more. And for employers who rip off workers, the occasional settlement payout is a lot cheaper than a collective bargaining agreement or rigorous enforcement of the law. One can dream of the day that groups like the EJC no longer have to exist, but for the foreseeable future, CP that’s an unlikely scenario.
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YOUNG & HUNGRY
Brohibition
With McFadden’s and Rhino Bar gone, where will college kids party? On a recent Saturday night at Georgetown’s Rhino Bar & Pumphouse, the crowd is drunk, loud, and overwhelmingly young. From my position at the far left corner of the upstairs dance floor, the scene resembles an abstract painting. Pastel polos and oxfords are the uniform of choice for the men of Rhino, and they swirl against the bright, skintight dresses of their grinding partners. The revelry is tinged with a bit of melancholy for the mostly college crowd. It was one of their last nights at Rhino, which closed Feb. 28. Its space has housed watering holes since 1952: first Shamrock, then Winston’s Bar, and, since 1998, Rhino. According to manager George Kennedy, the bar isn’t renewing its lease at the end of February due to rising rent. “I don’t know what we’re going to do when it finally closes,” says Jeff, a Georgetown sophomore swigging Coors Light, Last Call: Rhino Bar’s couches have seen their last drunken makeout session. who didn’t want to share his last name because he was drinking underage. Jeff admits that had been open for decades—both shuttered in the last two he got into the bar using a fake ID—and that most of his com- years. Those college campuses are now left without their panions did, too. “There’s no other bar in the neighborhood signature purveyors of cheap beer, top 40 hits, and darkthat’s as easy with IDs,” he says. “Rhino’s awesome, because ened hookup spaces. Georgetown has long been a tony neighborhood with you can leave a party, come here, and know that almost all high-end retailers like J. Crew and Brooks Brothers, but the your friends can get in.” It’s not the only undergrad bar disappearing from the new crop of restaurants and bars opening there—Chez Billy District’s college neighborhoods. McFadden’s, a favor- Sud, El Centro D.F.—are more likely to serve $12 cocktails ite of George Washington University students, closed for than $2 Natty Lights. While neighbors may see the loss of good in December after five patrons were stabbed inside destinations for debaucherous nightlife as cause for celebrathe overcrowded establishment. Meanwhile, Chadwicks tion, students are asking: Where will we go now? and Third Edition—student standbys in Georgetown that One establishment is looking to take the place of Rhi-
Photos by Darrow Montgomery
By James Constant
no Bar and its ilk in an unlikely place: on campus. Bulldog Tavern, run by the Bon Appétit food service company (which operates dining halls at American University and other colleges around the country), opened inside Georgetown’s new student center last November as part of a broader effort by the university’s administration to get students drinking on campus instead of off. Georgetown, where I’m currently a junior, is the only university within the District’s boundaries to have a bar on-campus. “I’m not going to be the one to say that there’s a major conspiracy with the members of the Advisory Neighborhood Commision to close local bars and thereby force student life on campus… but yeah, there’s pressure,” says Trevor Tezel, the president of the Georgetown University Student Association. “The individuals who run the Georgetown Business Improvement District, who are seeking to increase the economic output of the Georgetown district, are some of the same ones who would be happy if there were fewer bars and opportunities for students to be traipsing through west Georgetown.” Bulldog Tavern’s opening coincides with a general loosening of Georgetown’s restrictions on student drinking. In April 2013, a one-keg limit for parties on campus was lifted. That fall, a pilot policy was introduced that permitted students to drink openly in certain areas of campus without the risk of public safety officers checking their IDs. Now that policy has taken effect across many of the university’s most heavily trafficked areas. Citations for drinking issued by Georgetown’s Department of Public Safety decreased dramatically, dropping from 444 in 2010 to 221 in 2013, the last year on record. Jeanne Lord, Georgetown’s dean of students, says the changes to the way the university approached drinking were related to its 2020 Campus Plan, which includes a commitment to house 90 percent of students on campus by 2020. “These recent policy changes are all part of the University’s efforts to enhance social life on campus as we move toward a more residential community,” Lord says. But Bulldog Tavern is no Rhino Bar, despite the fact that it’s open until 3 a.m. on weekend nights. “We’re not a dance party or, like, get crazy and throw up on your buddy’s shoes vibe going on here,” says Derek Nottingham, the tavern’s general manager. “We’re trying to get live music, trivia nights, give specials to student groups to get the late night thing going, though.” Pulling the chairs away to make a dancefloor, though, is decidedly out of the queswashingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 23
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tion: Bulldog Tavern is gunning for the relaxed crowd that would usually show up to The Tombs, Georgetown’s iconic just-off-campus bar, which is a favorite study spot for seniors. Students aren’t exactly enamored with the university’s attempt to push their nightlife on campus. “There’s not too much drinking, and most of the time I go people are just e a t i n g, ” s ay s Where will Georgetown students play Big Buck Hunter now? Georgetown senior Claire Zeng, who doesn’t see Bull-dog Tav- taken the place of McFadden’s. GW kids are ern pulling in the same crowd as a little scattered.” Rhino did. “There’s no raucous drunk dancStaff at Sign of the Whale and Foggy Boting or DFMOs [dance-floor makeouts], tom’s 51st State Tavern, another place which, of course, are at any bar that anyone where students are now heading, say they’ve noticed a bit more business since McFadden’s wants to go to.” While Georgetown loosens campus closed. But both bars are small, and neither drinking policies, GW has recently tough- are quite the same as Rhino or McFadden’s, ened up its own. Every year since 2009, the which drew crowds with their expansive, number of citations issued has increased, club-like dance floors. They were places to and the jump between 2012 and 2013, the get wasted and make out with people you’d last year on record, was 48 percent, the seen once or twice in Sociology lectures. The biggest yet recorded in the university’s noisy, crowded atmosphere was the point— it cut down on conversation. crime stats. Lewis Leone, a member of Georgetown’s Students there don’t have a campus bar trying to lure them in now that McFadden’s chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, is is gone. But getting in there was never so seeing more juniors and seniors go to Adams easy for underage drinkers, anyway (though Morgan and U Street NW now, with Madone of the patrons stabbed in December was am’s Organ, Brixton, and El Rey proving 20). “If you had, say, an amazing, really legit particularly popular. Georgetown options fake, then maybe you would try it there, but are too limited. After all, only six establishotherwise I wouldn’t have risked it,” says ments have “tavern” liquor licenses in the GW junior Kayleigh Young. “I didn’t even neighborhood, and almost none of them are try until I had a real ID, so went there for my of the same breed as Rhino, with its sticky 21st birthday.” floors, $10 pitchers, and 25-cent wings on Dupont’s Sign of the Whale has ascend- Monday nights. ed as a new bar of choice for the fratty, hard“It’s basically what you would imagine if partying GW set, Young says. The bar of- you think of a fratty bar, and I’ve definitefers similar deals to the ones McFadden’s did ly seen a lot of kids act like assholes,” Le(win a happy hour in a contest, and all your one says. “What Rhino offered, though, was friends drink free). stability. I know I can catch some people I “McFadden’s was great, really, for one know there. Now that it’s going away, I don’t reason—it was huge, and you would just think anything in Georgetown is going to CP run into all sorts of people you knew,” take its place.” says GW senior Marissa Steinberg. “I’ve been going to Sign of the Whale and some Eatery tips? Food pursuits? Send suggestions to bars in Dupont more now, but nothing has hungry@washingtoncitypaper.com.
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DCFEED
what we ate last week:
Spinach pasta with lamb shank sugo, $17, The Red Hen. Satisfaction level: 5 out of 5
what we’ll eat next week:
“Miso porky” ramen, $14, Yona pop-up at G. Excitement level: 4 out of 5
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Three new restaurants opened (or will be opening) this week: a Capitol Hill hub for American classics and cocktails, a Ballston Spanish spot foregoing tapas, and a subterranean bar on 14th Street NW with smoked meats and live music. If you’re having trouble keeping track of the ever expanding roster of openings, here’s a cheat sheet to the newest places to eat and drink. —Jessica Sidman
1 3
2 1 SOTTO
2 SER
1610 14th St. NW The name: It means “below” in Italian. It’s located below sister Italian restaurant Ghibellina, after all. The food: Smoked meats, vegetable sides, and state fair-inspired snacks and desserts The drinks: Twists on classic cocktails, including an ode to Duke Ellington The look: Mostly metal, wood, brick, and concrete with a bar made from the trunk of a single tree, upscaled communal picnic tables, huge booths, and padded restroom entrances Noteworthy: In tribute to its predecessor, jazz club HR-57, the bar will host nightly live music from solo artists or small groups performing jazz, soul, blues, and go-go.
1110 N. Glebe Road, Arlington The name: It stands for Simple Easy Real. The food: Spanish but not tapas. Sandwiches are available for lunch. The drinks: Mostly Spanish wines, mostly local beers, sherry, sangria, coffee cocktails The look: Bright and colorful with full-length windows wrapping around the dining room, bright yellow banquettes and bar stools, Mediterranean blue and coral accents, and family photos on the walls Noteworthy: For around $100, diners can try baby eels. Known as “Spanish caviar,” the eels come live from Maine or frozen from Spain, depending on the season. The delicacy is prepared simply with olive oil and garlic.
3 STaNTON & GREENE
The Sandwich: The Mr. Chips
319 Pennsylvania Ave. SE The name: It’s short for Edwin M. Stanton (Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War and the namesake of a nearby park) and Nathanael Greene (an American Revolutionary War general whose statue is in the middle of that park). The food: Updated takes on classic dishes like oysters Rockefeller, steak tartare, chopped salad, and the French dip sandwich The drinks: Remixed classic cocktails that pay homage to local historical figures (think L’Enfant Martini) The look: The bright and airy restaurant couldn’t look more different from its dimly lit predecessor, Pour House. The design takes inspiration from American bistros of the 1930s and ’40s with leather booths and crackled porcelain wall tiles (the same that are used in the New York subway system). Noteworthy: Co-owner August Paro is a former TV and commercial set designer who once helped build an entire Western town— storefronts, houses, saloons—for CBS’s Harts of the West starring Beau Bridges. He’s put his skills to use by designing Stanton & Greene’s two bars and other decor.
Where: Dirty South Deli at the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Mezzanine Cafe, 1250 New York Ave. NW (and on its food truck)
brew in town
21st Amendment Sneak Attack Saison Where in Town: Morris Miller Wine & Spirits, 7804 Alaska Ave. NW Price: $9.99/six-pack The War on Winter 21st Amendment’s American historythemed labels have never been more eye-catching than this: George Washington and his crew crossing the frigid Delaware River with a boatful of beer
ready for a beach party. Their surprise assault is not on Redcoats, but winter itself. Their main weapon? Summertime fun. Granted, a shirtless, beer-bellied founding father is not exactly appetizing, but Sneak Attack’s label had me at “winter saison.” The phrase is an oxymoron—farmhouse ales tend to be associated with warm weather. But that’s the point. The San Francisco-based brewery’s late-winter seasonal offers a surprising, but welcome, alternative to the dark, strong brews that crowd the shelves in cold months. Let’s Spice Things Up 21st Amendment’s brewing team experimented with ingredients ranging from dande-
26 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
THE’WICHINGHOUR
lions to black pepper before landing on organic green cardamom pods as a perfect accent to the natural spice and fruit characters of the beer’s Belgian saison yeast. Subtle aromas of lemon zest, hay, and pepper prepare the way for the brew’s bold flavor: a sharp citrus zing and pronounced cardamom, clove, and peppery spiciness balanced by just the right amount of sweet, bready malt. Light-bodied, Sneak Attack lacks the depth of traditional farmhouse ales from Europe. But each sip finishes satisfyingly dry, followed by a soothing warmth despite the beer’s quaffable 6.2 percent alcohol. It’s just the thing to help General Washington conquer the cold—and —Tammy Tuck maybe you, too.
Price: $12 including one side Bread: Brioche bun Stuffings: Chopped pork, bread and butter jalapeños, Manchego cheese, cilantro, citrus mayo Thickness: 4 inches Pros: The juicy pulled pork piled high on the bun deserves the majority of the eater’s attention, but it’s the accompaniments that turn the meat and bread combo into something beyond the sum of its parts. The Manchego adds a rich, nutty flavor, while the light citrus mayo and cilantro deliver some tang and lightness. Pickling tones down the jalapeños’ assaulting heat, and a pleasant smokiness remains. Cons: Meat this moist will weaken even the toughest bread, so it’s not surprising that the bottom of the brioche bun gets a little gummy as you eat. Toasting it lightly might help, but it’s not absolutely necessary, since the sandwich is pretty much perfect. Sloppiness level (1 to 5): 5. Brioche is already soft and adding wet, precariously balanced ingredients to it turns this sandwich into a big mess. Grab a fork to reassemble the sandwich as you eat it. Overall score (1 to 5): 5. The mix of hard cheese, smoky pickled peppers, and drippy pulled pork come together with the harmony of peanut butter and jelly. The team from Dirty South Deli fine-tuned the salty, sour, and sweet elements to create a weird, messy, memorable bite. —Caroline Jones
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NOW THRU MARCH 24 A three-week, multidisciplinary, international festival showcasing the many cultures of Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking peoples, and their impact around the world
HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE: PICASSO CERAMIST AND THE MEDITERRANEAN
Exclusive U.S. exhibition!
Now thru Mar. 22 | Atrium & Atrium Foyers
GRUPO CORPO (BRAZIL)
Mar. 6 & 7 | Eisenhower Theater
BUIKA (SPAIN) WITH IVÁN “MELON” LEWIS & CONTINUUM QUARTET (CUBA)
Mar. 8 | Concert Hall
COMPAÑÍA MARÍA PAGÉS (SPAIN)
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30 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
Utopía
Mar. 11 & 12 | Eisenhower Theater
EUGENIA LEÓN (MEXICO)
Eugenia León y Las Voces de Mujeres, Voces del Pueblo
Mar. 14 & 15 | Eisenhower Theater
CARMEN SOUZA (CAPE VERDE)
Live at Lagny Jazz Festival Tour
Mar. 16 | Eisenhower Theater Plus, more dance, music, theater, literature panels, forums, installations, and culinary offerings. IBERIAN SUITE: global arts remix is curated by Alicia Adams, Vice President of International Programming
Tickets on sale now!
(202) 467-4600 kennedy-center.org Tickets also available at the Box Office | Groups (202) 416-8400
For complete festival information, visit KENNEDY-CENTER.ORG/IBERIA IBERIAN SUITE: global arts remix Presented in cooperation with the governments of Portugal and Spain Presenting Underwriter HRH Foundation Festival Benefactors include the Portuguese Secretary of State for Culture, Ambassador Elizabeth F. Bagley, Natalia and Carlos Bulgheroni, Amalia Perea Mahoney and William Mahoney, and David and Alice Rubenstein Major Sponsors include Arte Institute, Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Camões – Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua, EDP, Fundação Luso-Americana, Marca España, SPAIN arts & culture, ThinkFoodGroup, and Wines of Portugal
CPARTS
Makeshift Shelters makes neo-emo sound cool again. washingtoncitypaper.com/go/makeshift
Galleries
He’s the Realest
Mingering Mike didn’t reach soul superstardom, but he was a bona fide artist.
Left: “AAGA/ Ming/War Production: Mingering Mike the Big ‘D’ & the Colts Band ‘Super Gold’ Greatest Hits” by Mingering Mike (1970) Right: “3 Foot Steps: A Love Song for Minger/A Brand New Key” by Mingering Mike (1972)
“Mingering Mike’s Supersonic Greatest Hits” At the Smithsonian American Art Museum to Aug. 2 By Kriston Capps Imagine that Mingering Mike’s career had gone another way. He was served draft papers in 1970; as a conscript, he might have found his fate in Vietnam or Cambodia, a world away. Instead, he went underground and stayed there, making his records until 1977, when President Jimmy Carter issued a pardon to the hundreds of thousands of men who evaded the draft. Mingering Mike the artist could retire. Mingering Mike the man could get a job.
Mingering Mike certainly imagined that other path he might have taken. The cover of “Home Coming/‘But When You Drink’” (1972) shows a soldier (himself in all likelihood) returning from war, stepping off the bus with a standard military-issue duffel in tow. Maybe this “album” was Mingering Mike’s tribute to Marvin Gaye’s classic 1971 album about a returning Vietnam veteran, What’s Going On. Or maybe picturing himself as a servicemember was his own way of processing the stress of dodging the draft during our warrantless war. “Mingering Mike’s Supersonic Greatest Hits,” now on view in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is not just an exhibit that showcases how an imaginative craft career by a reclusive D.C. artist entered into the collection of the national treasury. (Although it is primarily that.) “Supersonic Greatest
Hits” tells a story about music, ambition, imitation, and the black experience, an intersection the likes of which the Smithsonian almost never covers—except through American Art’s vernacular collection. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., the man who goes by the name Mingering Mike started making records in his teens in the 1960s. Some of these were honest-to-goodness reel-to-reel recordings, but many, many more—scores of fantastical albums and singles, produced via some three-dozen different record labels—were fabrications. Dori Hadar, a record-digger and DJ, discovered a haul of these hand-painted cardboard vinyl records, tucked into hand-drawn sleeves, at a flea market near the D.C. Jail in 2003. They’d been missing for years and presumed lost to time. washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 31
CPARTS Continued
Once Hadar tracked down the secretive artist, the rest was history, thanks to D.C. art dealer George Hemphill and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Mingering Mike’s Supersonic Greatest Hits” isn’t a departure from what we’ve seen from the artist since his discovery (rediscovery?) more than a decade ago; he’s shown this work at Hemphill Fine Arts, where he most recently exhibited portraits of every member of the D.C. Council in 2013. And Hadar’s 2007 book, Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar, might as well serve as the catalog to the Smithsonian show. (Browsing through the museum bookstore, it more or less does.) Whole essays and lectures serve as explainers for Mingering Mike’s musical cues, especially the Stax and Motown soul albums he adored, but what the American Art Museum brings to Mingering Mike studies is a visual-art framework. Seeing the collection—“3 Footsteps Away From the Altar,” “Minger’s Gold Supersonic Greatest Hits,” “Can Mingering Mike Stevens Really Sing,” and dozens more “legendary” recordings from a career that never happened—in the same building as James Hampton’s near-compulsive, aluminum foil-made “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly” is proof positive that Mingering Mike’s work found the right home. Imagine that Mingering Mike’s career had gone still an-
“The Mingering Mike Show Live from the Howard Theater” by Mingering Mike (1969) other away. Imagine if the National Gallery of Art or the Museum of Modern Art had devoted resources over the
last century to procuring vernacular art, also known as folk, visionary, self-taught, craft, and outsider work. Today, those museums might have better records for showing works by black and brown artists, by regional artists, by women artists, by poorer artists, by neuroatypical artists. Hampton and Mingering Mike might have been celebrated at the height of their production. Instead, we are lucky to have their works at all. What if the outsider works had been brought inside? That’s the alternative art history proffered by the American Art Museum’s overarching emphasis on folk art in its collections. Peel away the museum’s modest holdings of post-war art (pedigreed art, elite art, MFA-required art) and what you get is an institution entirely devoted to this alternative history. A far more representative American history. Mingering Mike’s albums add to American Art’s holdings of folk jewelry, religious iconography, decorative arts, Works Progress Administration murals, Indian paintings, and other artifacts to help tell a story about the America that canonical art history either disdains or ignores. Mingering Mike’s fake records are the realest—no question—but it takes the right museum setting to make room for his rightful CP place in art history. 8th and F streets NW. Free. (202) 633-7970. americanart.si.edu.
VISIT US AT CFA.GMU.EDU
Danú 20th Anniversary Tour FRIDAY, MARCH 6 AT 8 P.M. To celebrate 20 years of spirited music-making, this awardwinning band from the Emerald Isle, along with two of its former band mates, returns to the CFA stage to perform a glorious blend of ancient Irish music and fresh new songs. “Impressive, immersive…and unmistakably Irish.” (Strings Magazine) $46, $39, $28 ff
DIRECT FROM BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
Tango Buenos Aires Song of Eva Perón
SATURDAY, MARCH 7 AT 8 P.M. Warm up your winter with some sizzling Tango! It’s in the 70’s and 80’s in Buenos Aires this month, so come share some of that heat with Tango Buenos Aires, one of Argentina’s great tango companies. With their graceful skill and “sometimes playful, sometimes dramatic … sensual couplings” (The Washington Post), Eva Perón’s story has never been so passionately told! $48, $41, $29
Virginia Opera La Traviata SATURDAY, MARCH 21 AT 8 P.M. SUNDAY, MARCH 22 AT 2 P.M. “The Fallen Woman.” One of the most dearly loved operas, Verdi’s is an age-old tale of true love and sacrifice, set to gorgeous music. Violetta, the most desirable courtesan in Paris, falls in love with Alfredo and gives up her glamorous life for him. But, Alfredo’s father objects – her “past” is ruining the family name, so Violetta selflessly leaves Alfredo. Alfredo is angry and bereft. How will it all turn out? Sung in Italian with English supertitles. Saturday – $86, $72, $44; Sunday – $98, $80, $48
ff = Family Friendly performances that are most suitable for families with younger children
TICKETS 888-945-2468 OR CFA.GMU.EDU 32 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
Located on the Fairfax campus, six miles west of Beltway exit 54 at the intersection of Braddock Road and Rt. 123.
CPARTS Arts Desk
“We’re in the most ratchet period of R&B music ever...Far too many times, we accept what we shouldn’t instead of fighting for what we deserve.” - raheem Devaughn washingtoncitypaper.com/go/devaughn
ApocAlypse Index
One trAck MinD
Charting D.C.’s Cultural vitality, a week at a time Angel choir
SAd trombone A new indie movie theater is set to open in Mount Pleasant this summer.
Letitia VanSant and the Bonafides
Parts and Labor Standout Track: No. 1, “Step in Line,” an aching, banjo-led ballad from Letitia VanSant and the Bonafides’ first full-length LP, Parts and Labor, which dropped last month. The track oozes bluegrass humility, a trait the band—singer/songwriter Sandy Robson, guitarist David McKindley-Ward, drummer Will McKindley-Ward, and bassist Tom Liddle—uses to spin tales about today’s workobsessed culture. “Nearly all of the songs on this album, in various ways, say that our lives and communities are meant to be more than parts and labor to the machine of our economy,” Robson says. Musical Motivation: Robson, a longtime social justice advocate, penned the beginnings of “Step in Line” while living in Baltimore and enduring a daily commute to D.C. on the MARC train. She latched onto the universality of her dilemma: “How can our society set its priorities straight and allow people to spend time on the things that are most important, like spending time with family?” Train Spotting: The nostalgic sound of “Step in Line” is rooted in Robson’s passion for humble artistry. “I wrote this song when I had recently fallen in love with old-time music,” she says, “which involves so much less ego than other kinds of music, and is much more focused on the community and the joy of playing.” That classic Americana influence is especially evident in the song’s strummy instrumentation. “It seemed like the frailing rhythm fit the sound of the train.” —Carey Hodges Listen to “Step in Line” at washingtoncitypaper. com/go/stepinline.
SiriusXM host Joe Madison raised more than $150k for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in a world recordbreaking 52-hour radio marathon.
Despite premature announcements of its death, Filmfest DC is back this year.
Christoph Eschenbach will step down as the National Symphony Orchestra’s director.
Patty Boom Boom has closed to make room for a new “speakeasy.”
UMD’s student radio station played Smash Mouth’s “All Star” for 24 hours straight.
Coup Sauvage & The Snips released “Requiem For A Mountaintop,” a house-beat tribute to people of color who’ve lost their lives to police violence.
Rams Head Live! owner Kyle Muehlhauser allegedly installed a secret video camera in the women’s bathroom at his tavern in Savage, Md.
House of Cards is back, and everyone (?) is mad that its newsroom scenes were filmed at the Baltimore Sun, not Washington City Paper.
at the University of Maryland, College Park. The song—from the band’s new self-titled EP—is suited for the sunny beaches of Los Angeles, and it’s an innocent ode to perseverance: Prinze George doesn’t know what’s next, but its members will be alright. “We don’t know where we’ll be,” the chorus goes, “but no one outlasts the dreamers.”
Prinze George Prinze George
Standout Track: No. 3, “We Are Dreamers,” a rollicking synth-pop track from Prinze George, a rising trio composed of Naomi Almquist, Kenny Grimm, and Isabelle De Leon. They’re from Prince George’s and Montgomery counties and met as students
Musical Motivation: Guest vocalist Misun Wojcik—a Hyattsville native—helped shape the track’s direction. The members of Prinze George met Wojcik two years ago after her show at DC9 and began writing together. “[‘Dreamers’] was one of the first songs we wrote,” Almquist says. Wojcik wrote her verse first; Almquist wrote the hook almost a year later. “I just couldn’t get it right for a while,” says Almquist, who has a background in folk and rock music. “In the beginning, I was really uncomfortable converting to pop. I was hav-
ing trouble hearing melodies from a computer track. Misun was a big inspiration.” Big Plans: Like many aspiring musicians, the members of Prinze George want to live off their art. “The end goal is to be full-time musicians, absolutely,” Almquist says. “At this point, we’ve all invested a lot of time and energy and money into making music.” Prinze George’s song “Victor,” was featured in the German movie Honig Im Kopf; another track from the EP, “Upswing,” got serious traction online. “We’re trying to keep it as organic as possible,” Grimm says. “I know there’s gonna be a time where we’ll want to sign with a label, but for now, we’re just trying to connect as di—Marcus J. Moore rectly as possible.” Listen to “We Are Dreamers” at washingtoncitypaper.com/go/wearedreamers. Prinze George plays the Rock & Roll Hotel on March 6.
washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 33
TheaTer
Past and Pending
Beard-stroking men contemplate time and a young man grapples with his abduction through song. Back to Methuselah, Part 2: The Thing Happens and The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman By George Bernard Shaw Directed by Bill Largess At the Undercroft Theatre at Mt. Vernon United Methodist Church to March 15 Kid Victory Story by John Kander and Greg Pierce Music by John Kander Book and Lyrics by Greg Pierce Directed by Liesl Tommy At Signature Theatre to March 22
president’s unflappable Chinese counselor, Confucius. Yeh, a solid comic actor, is AsianAmerican. Laura Giannarelli, who plays the Minister of Health—a “negress” in Shaw’s text, which includes a rant against “the vulgar color prejudice that disparages her great ability”—is white. The dense plot concerns the revelation that the Archbishop of York (sturdy WSG regular Brit Herring) is nearly 300 years old, despite looking like a fit fortysomething. Three centuries is the age to which we must aspire if the human race is ever to become civilized, he argues. The sputtering Accountant General (Michael Avolio) is less amazed by this physiolog-
By Chris Klimek Washington Stage Guild’s three-part presentation of George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah is one of only a handful of professional stagings the witheringly long, dauntingly strange “metabiological pentateuch”—five plays set over a period of 36,000 years—has ever had. Shaw is WSG’s patron saint, and there’s something admirably perverse about the 29-year-old outfit’s nerdy completism, given that Shaw himself regarded Methuselah onstage as a commercially hopeless enterprise. (He expected his audience to buy the script, first published in 1922, which they did.) WSG performed the first third a year ago, and has the conclusion on deck for early 2016. The current, middle installment consists of two beard-stroking comedies with a common cast, The Thing Happens and The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman. Let it never be said that Mr. Shaw, the novelist-turned-critic-turnedplaywright responsible for The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles and The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, didn’t have a knack for titles. This pair would work just as well on the radio. (Indeed, the BBC did a radio adaptation of the whole, five-part deal as recently as 1958.) Shirong Gu’s set design is minimal. It’s most memorable element is a brain in a jar that WSG has had at least since its 2011 production of Shaw’s futuristic The Apple Cart. That pickled brain returns in The Thing Happens, which takes place in 2170. The British Empire is still an empire, but it’s based in Baghdad now. It has an elected figurehead—the red-faced Conrad Feininger, who somehow brings whimsy and gravitas to every role—but all the important decisions are made by hired advisors from China or Africa, as Britons have been deemed too immature to govern. Jacob Yeh plays the
sible for him to be understood. The voracious mutability of language is a reliable source of comedy in time-travel stories. It also explains why a lot Shaw’s jokes don’t exactly kill anymore. (Plenty still do, but not so much the ones in Back to Methuselah.) WSC founder Bill Largess and his company of regulars (only Yeh and Schmalzle are new to the troupe) have taken an earnest, honorable swing at reanimating Shaw’s clunky philosophical treatise on humankind’s destiny and folly—or the 40 percent of it included in Part 2, anyway. For all its grand concepts, the production is at its most involving when its focus shrinks to two people whose Your Jokes Are So Old: Time has not been kind to most of the humor in Methuselah.
ical miracle than alarmed that its beneficiary has overdrawn his government pension five or sixfold. (This is a society with a retirement age of 40, which sounds pretty good until you realize it’s also one wherein the men have rediscovered leggings.) “You do not comprehend the relationship between income and production,” the Archbishop chides the bean-counter. Zing! This is Rand Paul’s favorite Shaw. Part 2’s part two, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, unfolds in 3000 A.D. Vincent Clark plays the “elderly” gentleman of about 65, whom the secret of longevity has eluded. Lost in a colony of benevolent long-livers— more evolved humans represented by Stephanie Schmalzle’s Zoo, a chirpy adolescent of 56 assigned to be his chaperone—the gentleman finds that his reliance on idioms that the long-lived have abandoned, and his outmoded notions of propriety, make it nearly impos-
34 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
common tongue has been made foreign by the passage of time. That’s a problem artists trying to wring laughs from a century-old futuristic satire can easily understand. If Back to Methuselah, Part 2 sounds like a tough sell from a famous brand, try Kid Victory, a world premiere musical about abduction, captivity, and kid-rape from veteran composer John Kander. The 87-yearold Tony, Emmy, and Grammy winner is famous for Cabaret and Chicago, among the many other shows he created with Fred Ebb, who died in 2004. Kid Victory is the second on which Kander has collaborated with Greg Pierce, a playwright and short-story writer 51 years his junior. The result is a grim but surprisingly substantial drama too frequently interrupted by mediocre songs that don’t reveal character
or advance the story. One of them is called “Lawn.” Another one is “You Are the Marble.” Performed sans intermission, Kid Victory clocks in at a hair under two hours. Cutting a half-dozen of its 17 numbers, particularly the deadweight ones with which the show is regrettably front-loaded, would help. This is not a world in which you’ll want to linger, despite the strength of the book and the performances—particularly an extraordinary turn from Jake Winn, the youthful-looking Tisch school graduate in the title role. Winn’s Luke is a shy, slight 17-year-old trying to reacclimate to life in his Kansas town after his abduction and prolonged captivity. His harrowing ordeal, the specifics of which are revealed only gradually, have left him even more alienated from his parents, his girlfriend, and their friends from church than he was already. The show is not kind in its depiction of Christians, whom it implies made Luke vulnerable through their intolerance. But Luke, like the show around him, never gives them a chance to accept him. As Emily, a genial hippie who hires Luke to help out at her failing garden-supply store, Sarah Litzsinger contributes some desperately needed humor (and gets two of the better songs, “People Like Us” and “The Last Thing He Needs”). Luke’s shrill mother—who’s just “Mom” in the script, for all of Christiane Noll’s efforts to give her an inner life—is instantly suspicious. “Help Me Understand,” sung by Bobby Smith in his one scene as the police detective trying to locate Luke’s attacker, is another missed opportunity, stopping the plot for three minutes without telling us anything about the guy singing it. Luke’s fraught attempt at consensual sex, via a Grindr-like app called Matchstick, tees up a tap-dancing number called “Matchstick Men.” In its sheer incongruity, it offers a peek into Luke’s fragmented brain, something too few of these songs do, but it still feels tasteless. I don’t know enough about tap dancing to know whether trying to use it to express the overwhelming and contradictory emotions of an abduction and serial-rape survivor is an inherently stupid idea, but I have my suspicions. Seen in flashback, Luke’s budding friendship with his eventual abductor (Jeffry Denman, doing strong work in a loathsome part) is frighteningly believable. Pierce and Kander’s sensitivity to the way in which victims of sexual abuse can be made to feel responsible for their own suffering is the fulcrum of insight that makes Kid Victory as tough to dismiss as it is to recommend. This story is nothing to sing about, but that CP doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be told. Washington Stage Guild, 900 Massachusetts Ave. NW. $40-50. (240) 582-0050. stageguild.org. Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. $29-94. (703) 820-9771. signaturetheatre.org.
LIVE On the Weinberg Stage
< The Steel Wheels
Americana Festival March 27 & 28, 2015
Delta Rae
g
g
TICKETS
7:30pm
The Steel Wheels
Nora Jane Struthers & The Party Line Knox Hamilton g Big Hoax g The Hello Strangers
$27.50 each day $46.00 both days
With food by Chef Bryan Voltaggio and a selection of American spirits, it’s all the excitement of an outdoor festival—minus the bugs!
WeinbergCenter.org • 301.600.2828 • Hotel packages available.
soon March 10 – April 26
Photo of Jessica Hershberg and Alex Brightman by Christopher Mueller.
a world premiere musical
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washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 35
BooksSpeed ReadS A Few Good Mentors Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man By Robert Christgau Dey Street Books, 367 pp., $27.99
Pencil test. Brainpan noise. Pufferfish. Of all the cockeyed locutions of David Carr, my favorite was “the really big typewriter.” As in, what editors get to pound away
on, each key a different writer. It was a classic Carr metaphor, wonky and outsized, its power fantasy—Carr would describe himself as a “Clydesdale typist”—undercut by ungainly comedy. And it was both diagnostic and therapeutic. When Carr, then editor of Washington City Paper, asked how he could get me to write more, my answer was to the point: Give me a job. But City Paper didn’t hire full-time arts writers, so in October 1995, he handed me the section as editor. And now he was trying to get me to understand that perhaps every hole in the paper wasn’t best patched by yet another piece I’d written myself. It’s some cruel kismet that Carr’s death on Feb. 12 fell less than two weeks before the publication of Going into the City, a fond, proud, and perceptive memoir by Robert Christgau, a foundational figure in alternative journalism during his decades at the Village Voice, the wryly (and tipsily, it turns out) self-anointed Dean of American Rock Critics. When, in the days after Carr’s death, old friends and colleagues offered their reminiscences, the undertow was powerful. I felt as if I’d been wormholed back to the home planet and offered a map from which an entire hemisphere had been torn away. During my time with Carr, I’d been young and anxious and bad at taking advice. Like many novice writers, I was too enamored of cutting capers on the
Cristina Pato
page. I wouldn’t understand much of what Carr told me for years. But while I was struggling for my bearings, I was guided by Christgau’s example. My City Paper had two father figures. One of them just happened to never have worked there. I’m pretty sure I didn’t meet Christgau until 2002, when he signed the title page of my copy of Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough, a collection of essays written in his honor. Being the Dean was both a joke and dead serious—what other rock critic got a festschrift for his 60th birthday? On almost every count, Christgau was the yang to Carr’s yin, which he bears out in his memoir. Where Carr told his writers to get out from behind their desks, a young Christgau “lacked the journalist’s schmoozing gene as well as the cub reporter’s byline-grubbing hustle.” Where Carr prized his proximity to boldface names, Christgau “decided early on that intimacy with the truly famous would mess up his response mechanisms and analytic equilibrium.” Where Carr once confessed to me that he’d given up on arts writing after he “ran out of words,” for almost 50 years, Christgau’s criticism, much of it in the microbursts of his Consumer Guide columns, has been driven by his “zeal at pursuing the fundamental human task of incremental growth.” If Carr was a scoop-hungry partisan of the front of the book, Christgau “wasn’t big on that great distorting fallacy of journalistic criticism, Getting There First.” It’s telling that Carr’s origin story is one of violent self-transformation, a hard-won redemption narrative. And Christgau’s book is about “a fairly normal guy” who discovered early on what he was good at and got up each morning and tried to do it better. Both lives overflow with people. Carr’s ability to have hundreds of “Close Personal Friends” was T-shirt-worthy even before he came to City Paper, and it would make him a natural on social media. Christgau’s book, which wraps up in 1985, brims with red-diaper babies, movement feminists, writers and thinkers and pushers of copy. But every now
and then, the human tide parts for an appreciation of Plastic Ono Band or “Looking for the Perfect Beat” or for his and hers parsings of Steely Dan with his wife of four decades, Carola Dibbell, and we are assured that he didn’t miss his calling. Actually, Christgau’s callings were double: rockcrit and Carola. His memoir hits its stride once both his wordsmithing and his romance have matured—when he comes into what is uniquely and joyously his. Recollections of his childhood drag because everybody’s got a more or less equivalent set of tintypes, and his years with radical culture critic Ellen Willis wobble under the strain of a love out of balance. Although his reviews’ putdowns are many and varied—Guns N’ Roses’ “One in a Million” “is disgusting because it’s heartfelt and disgusting again because it’s a grandstand play;” Art Garfunkel is a “castrato manqué”—Going into the City satisfies because it finds a Christgau built for celebration. Only prudes and curmudgeons would begrudge him his many hymns to his wife, both literary and libidinous. And when he settles in at the Voice on the other side of the desk from Lester Bangs, Nelson George, Thulani Davis, Marshall Berman, etc., he’s exuberantly helming the really big typewriter he was destined for. Regardless of any facility with the keyboard, ultimately the best an elder can do is to steer you toward your métier so that you choose the course best suited to your temperament and talents. Writing is about finding the right scale and rhythm to express the way time flows through you, then learning to carve that line. If Carr was downhill, Christgau is slalom. I love watching downhill—the mammoth curves, the coruscant speed, the ragdoll spills. And I still think I have something to gain from it. But slalom is where I abide. All that technique, all those choppy little turns, those thousands upon thousands of gates, all so similar, each so specific, executed time after time, the separate seconds resolving into minutes, the hours compounding into days, the years into a lifetime. —Glenn Dixon
Zakir Hussain
DakhaBrakha
Kayhan Kalhor
Spanish bagpipe star & Silk Road Ensemble member in an electrifying blend of pop, Celtic, Latin, and other styles
Tabla virtuoso leads innovative Indo-Celtic ensemble
Soaring vocals and pounding rhythms from the Ukrainian band that took Bonnaroo by storm
Sat, Mar 14, 8pm Sixth & I Historic Synagogue
Tue, Mar 17, 8pm GW Lisner Auditorium
Thu, Apr 2, 8pm Sixth & I Historic Synagogue
Spike fiddle brilliance from the Silk Road Ensemble veteran and “master of Persian music” (Gramophone)
Pulse of the World: Celtic Connections
Performances at Sixth & I are made possible by the Abramson Family Foundation and an anonymous gift. Zakir Hussain is co-presented with GW Lisner Auditorium and is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Amphion Foundation. 36 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
]
Sat, May 16, 8pm Sixth & I Historic Synagogue
TICKETS: WashingtonPerformingArts.org • (202) 785-9727
MusicDiscography
OPENING FRIDAY
Opening Weekend
JAY FARRAR WITH ANDERS PARKER March 6 & 7
Art and Parcel: An “art rock” label can set unfair expectations.
All in the FAmiliAr Pretty Ugly Young Rapids Chimes Records Unfortunately, according to its Facebook bio and Bandcamp profile, Young Rapids is an art-rock band. The genre, which has become a catch-all for lazy music journalists, is a trap for bands: It asks us to rule on whether the music has transcended the tawdry, unimaginative depths of rock music to become that meaningful expression of the human condition we call art. Where most bands can regurgitate rock tropes without much consequence or scrutiny, self-proclaimed art-rock bands have an unfairly high bar to clear. For Young Rapids, one of the city’s most talented indie-rock bands, that’s a shame. The D.C. four-piece was already one of the city’s more sonically ambitious bands before Pretty Ugly, its latest record, which does a lot to improve on the shakier parts of 2012’s Day Light Savings. The production is better on the new release—put on some decent headphones and listen to the bassline on “Odd Numbers” or the crispness of the percussion on any of the record’s tracks. The songwriting is bolder, too; where Day Light Savings served up pleasant, somewhat formulaic dream pop laden with synth, toms, and reverb, the latest batch of songs shows a band trying to create a new sound altogether. What’s unusual and occasionally frustrating about the record, though, is how deliberately disjointed its songs are. There are time changes tacked onto “Someone Help The Ghost” and “Ugly” with about a minute left in each song. Coupled with noticeable dynamic shifts, this gives both songs a suite-like quality, despite the fact that neither run over four-and-a-half minutes.
These abrupt structural shifts make the music as surprising and compelling on the second listen as it is on the first. But they may also be disorienting enough that some listeners might not give the record a second listen at all. Clarity and brevity are often what make good pop music artful and infectious. And while many songs on the record are multidimensional, the individual parts don’t break free of lanes already carved by noteworthy groups. Indeed, the music often takes unexpected turns into well-trodden territory. “Pretty,” for one, transforms from a drone-y Trouble-lite rock cut into a cathartic, Explosions In The Sky waltz-tempo anthem in less than a minute. Neither of these sections are particularly unpleasant, but they are familiar. They haven’t been reinvented so much as dropped unexplained into a new context. This is not a critique of the band’s musicianship, nor is it to say that the album doesn’t offer beautiful moments or some fantastic hooks—highlights like “Odd Numbers” and “Melt” have both. But the band’s broad musical strokes occasionally bury some of its finer details. Solid pop melodies and interesting intros, outros, and refrains are abandoned too frequently for bigger, cymbal-crashing moments. While these may play well live, some of the most satisfying parts of the album are its more restrained verses. Intentional or not, Pretty Ugly is a competition of artistic ideas with divergent interests: Multi-part suites lead into songs with one or two simple melodies; effects-laden choruses bump up against sections stripped of all instrumentation save a piano; vocals inflected in a familiar way falter and change. Not every moment works, but Young Rapids’ sonic stitching belies talents that might, one day, make art rock —Maxwell Tani a label worth embracing. Listen to “Melt” at washingtoncitypaper.com/ go/melt. Young Rapids play the Rock & Roll Hotel on March 7.
TOSHI REAGON & ALLISON MILLER WITH BE STEADWELL March 8
2461 18th St., NW Washington, DC 202-667-5370
“Where the Beautiful People go to get
Ugly.” “One of the 25 best bars in America” - Playboy Magazine
Redheads always drink 1/2 price Shiner Bock!
LIVE MUSIC EVERY NIGHT Thu: Ladies Night
LOWER DENS with The Walking Sticks March 12
Loston Harris Trio March 13
Over the Rainbow:
The Songs of Harold Arlen March 14
Joe Robinson March 19 Frédéric Yonnet March 20
Vinicius Cantuária Sings Jobim March 25
Mipso March 26 The 9 Songwriter Series March 27
Yellow Dubmarine March 28
BlackAprilMasala 2 Bob McDonald Cabaret
(No Cover For Ladies)
Patrick Alban & Noche Latina Latin & World Beat
Fri: Ursula Ricks Project Deep Throated Blues From Baltimore
Madam’s House Party On The Second Floor-Featuring DJ India 10:00pm
Sat: Kelly Bell Band Voted Best Blues Band in the Atlantic Region 12 Years in a Row
Saturday Opening Act: Robert Lighthouse Acoustic Blues
7:00pm - 9:00pm Madam’s House Party On The Second Floor-Featuring DJ India 10:00pm
Sun: The B.T. Richardson Band Blues & Funk Mon: One Nite Stand Reggae, Funk & R&B Tue: The Johnny Artis Band R&B, Rock and Roll
Wed: The Human Country Jukebox Band Open Mic-8pm Second Floor
Sun, Tues & Thurs
April 4
Second Floor: Drunkaoke
www.AMPbyStrathmore.com
www.madamsorgan.com
(Karaoke with Two Drink Minimum)
washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 37
38 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
CITYLIST
Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39 Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 7 Galleries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 8 Dance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 8 Theater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 9 Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50
SearCh LISTIngS aT waShIngTonCITYpaper.Com
Music
CITY LIGHTS: FRIDAY
Rock
“SPIRITED REPUBLIC: ALCOHOL IN AMERICAN HISTORY”
Friday Fillmore Silver Spring 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. (301) 960-9999. Dropkick Murphys, The Mahones, Blood or Whiskey. 9 p.m. (Sold out) $37.50. fillmoresilverspring.com. The hamilTon 600 14th St. NW. (202) 787-1000. Lloyd Dobler Effect. 10:30 p.m. Free. thehamiltondc. com. Howie Day. 8:30 p.m. $18–$24. thehamiltondc.com. rock & roll hoTel 1353 H St. NE. (202) 388-ROCK. Prinze George, Teen Commandments. 9 p.m. $10. rockandrollhoteldc.com. U STreeT mUSic hall 1115 U St. NW. (202) 5881880. Hundred Waters, Mitski, Soft Cat. 7 p.m. $15. ustreetmusichall.com. velveT loUnge 915 U St. NW. (202) 462-3213. These Quiet Colours, Starlight Natives, The Mauls, Infinite Adolescence. 9:30 p.m. $8. velvetloungedc.com.
Funk & R&B Birchmere 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria. (703) 549-7500. Rachelle Ferrell. 7:30 p.m. $59.50. birchmere.com.
ElEctRonic U STreeT mUSic hall 1115 U St. NW. (202) 5881880. George Fitzgerald & Leon Vynehall, Philip Goyette. 10 p.m. $12. ustreetmusichall.com.
Jazz BlUeS alley 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Stanley Jordan. 8 p.m. & 10 p.m. $27.50. bluesalley.com. Stanley Jordan. 8 p.m. & 10 p.m. $27.50. bluesalley.com. Bohemian cavernS 2001 11th St. NW. (202) 299-0800. Akua Allrich: Celebrating Women’s History Month. 8 p.m. & 10 p.m. $18. bohemiancaverns.com.
BluEs Zoo Bar 3000 Connecticut Ave. NW. (202) 2324225. Over The Limit. 9 p.m. Free. zoobardc.com.
countRy 9:30 clUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. The Travelin’ McCourys featuring Billy Nershi and The Jeff Austin Band. 8 p.m. $25. 930.com.
According to legend, the Pilgrims settled in Plymouth, Mass., because their beer rations ran low. While the brew they carried from England hardly resembles what we drink today, alcohol and America have been inseparable since the nation’s founding. “Spirited Republic,” a new exhibition at the National Archives Museum, aims to illustrate how we’ve come to appreciate (and sometimes despise) our booze. Featured documents and artifacts shed light on how the government’s alcohol policy and citizens’ opinions have evolved from Benjamin Franklin’s optimistic declaration that “beer is proof that God loves us” to the work of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Exhibited items include a first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous’ “Big Book,” presidential letters and artifacts, newsreels and PSAs from the Prohibition and post-Prohibition eras, and a large graphic model detailing how much booze Americans have guzzled throughout U.S. history. Bottoms up. The exhibition is on view daily 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., to Jan. 10, 2016 at the National Archives Museum, Constitution Avenue and 7th Street NW. Free. (202) 357-5023. archives.gov. —Tim Regan
Jammin Java 227 Maple Ave. East, Vienna. (703) 255-1566. Antigone Rising, Christine Havrilla. 8 p.m. $15–$18. jamminjava.com.
Folk gypSy Sally’S 3401 K St. NW. (202) 333-7700. Town Mountain, Tuckahoe Ridge. 9 p.m. $12–$15. gypsysallys.com.
WoRld BarnS aT WolF Trap 1645 Trap Road, Vienna. (703) 255-1900. Altan. 8 p.m. (Sold out) $25. wolftrap.org. george maSon UniverSiTy cenTer For The arTS 4400 University Drive, Fairfax. (703) 993-2787. Danú. 8 p.m. $28–$46. cfa.gmu.edu. kennedy cenTer millenniUm STage 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Papo Vázquez’s Pirates Troubadours. 6 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.
GospEl clarice SmiTh perForming arTS cenTer Stadium Drive and Route 193, College Park. (301) 4052787. BOOMscat. 8 p.m. claricesmithcenter.umd.edu.
saturday Rock
9:30 clUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. of Montreal, Yonatan Gat. 8 p.m. $20. 930.com. Black caT 1811 14th St. NW. (202) 667-4490. Murder by Death, O’Death. 9 p.m. $17–$20. blackcatdc.com.
THIS M A R C H AT BLUES ALLEY! CELEBRATING 50 YEARS IN OUR NATION’S CAPITAL February 13-15 February 26-29
Peter White
Kevin Eubanks
(Guitar)
March 6-8
February 19-21
Stanley Jordan (Solo Guitar)
BLUES ALLEY
(Guitar)
Cheikh Ndoye
“A Cultural Affair”Feauturing Baaba Maal & Karen Briggs
March 31-April 5
Roy Hargrove Quintet (Trumpet)
1073 Wisconsin Ave. (in the alley) • (202) 337-4141 • www.bluesalley.com washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 39
The hamilTon 600 14th St. NW. (202) 787-1000. DRKWAV. 8:30 p.m. $20–$25. thehamiltondc.com. Jamie McLean Band. 10:30 p.m. Free. thehamiltondc.com. Rock & Roll hoTel 1353 H St. NE. (202) 388-ROCK. Young Rapids. 8 p.m. $12. rockandrollhoteldc.com.
Funk & R&B BiRchmeRe 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria. (703) 549-7500. Rachelle Ferrell. 7:30 p.m. $59.50. birchmere.com. WalTeR e. WashingTon convenTion cenTeR 801 Mount Vernon Place NW. (202) 249-3000. All Black Extravaganza featuring Musiq Soulchild. 8:30 p.m. $50–$87.50. dcconvention.com.
ElEctRonic Flash 645 Florida Ave. NW. (202) 827-8791. D-Formation. 8 p.m. $8. flashdc.com. PyRamid aTlanTic aRT cenTeR 8230 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring. (301) 608-9101. Sloth Ensemble, The Let X ≠ X Ensemble, Anduin, M.O.S., Tag Cloud. 7:30 p.m. $10. pyramidatlanticartcenter.org. U sTReeT mUsic hall 1115 U St. NW. (202) 5881880. Eats Everything, Nadastrom. 10 p.m. $15. ustreetmusichall.com.
Jazz BlUes alley 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Stanley Jordan. 8 p.m. & 10 p.m. $27.50. bluesalley.com.
Bohemian caveRns 2001 11th St. NW. (202) 299-0800. Akua Allrich: Celebrating Women’s History Month. 8 p.m. & 10 p.m. $18. bohemiancaverns.com.
BluEs Zoo BaR 3000 Connecticut Ave. NW. (202) 2324225. The Big Boy Little Band. 9 p.m. Free. zoobardc.com.
countRy gyPsy sally’s 3401 K St. NW. (202) 333-7700. Dry Mill Road, The Hello Strangers. 9 p.m. $12–$15. gypsysallys.com. hill coUnTRy live 410 7th St. NW. (202) 556-2050. Radney Foster. 9:30 p.m. $22–$25. hillcountrywdc.com.
WoRld BaRns aT WolF TRaP 1645 Trap Road, Vienna. (703) 255-1900. Vatsala Mehra. 8 p.m. $50. wolftrap.org. dance Place 3225 8th St. NE. (202) 269-1600. Yissy Garcia. 8 p.m. $15–$30. danceplace.org. FReeR galleRy oF aRT Jefferson Drive & 12th Street SW. (202) 633-1000. Mitra Sumara. 1 p.m. & 4 p.m. Free. asia.si.edu. kennedy cenTeR millenniUm sTage 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Moreira Chonguiça. 6 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.
CITY LIGHTS: SATURDAY
OF MONTREAL Of Montreal, a product of the Athens, Ga., collective Elephant 6, creates esoteric disco music for eager dancers—and on the group’s new album, Aureate Gloom, it’s expanded on that sound. Don’t be surprised when ‘70s metal guitar commingles with dancefloor bass, as in catchy album opener “Bassem Sabry,” named for an Egyptian journalist who died last year. Recorded in the Texan desert just across the border from Ciudad Juarez, Aureate Gloom is, like most everything in of Montreal’s discography, full of song titles so specific as to be nearly inscrutable; help us out with “Chthonian Dirge For Uruk The Other,” will ya? This is band-as-wild-spectacle, and that carries over to the outfit’s live performances, which are rife with elaborate sets and fluorescent costumes. Of Montreal performs with Yonatan Gat at 8 p.m. at 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. $20. (202) —James Constant 265-0930. 930.com.
40 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 41
---------3701 Mount Vernon Ave. Alexandria, VA • 703-549-7500
1811 14TH ST NW
www.blackcatdc.com @blackcatdc MARCH SHOWS
CURSIVE SOLD OUT
FRI 6
HOUSE OF SWEETBOTTOM BLUES & BURLESQUE (21+)
FRI 6
MURDER BY DEATH
SAT 7
O’DEATH
MON 9
EULA
WED 11
ROCCO DELUCA
THU 12
TWO INCH ASTRONAUT THE JOYFUL COSMOLOGY OF THE LAP STEEL TOUR
MAGIC MAN
FRI 13
CLOSE 2 THE EDGE
SAT 14
MIXTAPE
EAST VS WEST COAST EDITION
SAT 14
HEAVY ROTATION
VINYL HIP HOP ALL NIGHT
GIRL BAND MON 16 PERFECT PUSSY SUN 15
TUE 17
PERFUME GENIUS
THU 19
SEBADOH
EVERY WEEKEND AT 7PM
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
TEN FORWARD SICK SAD WORLD A HAPPY HOUR "HAPPY" HOUR 1 STAR TREK:TNG TWO DARIA EP. PER WEEK
ROMULAN ALE SPECIALS
EPISODES PER WEEK MYSTIK SPIRAL DRINK SPECIALS
NOW OPEN at 5:00 pm M-F for HAPPY HOUR!
For entire schedule go to Birchmere.com Find us on Facebook/Twitter! Tix @ Ticketmaster.com 800-745-3000 Mar
GAELIC STORM 6 Rachelle FeRRell 9 jesse cook the Quebe 10 Asleep At the wheel sisters 11 An Evening with seth Avett & jessicA leA mAyfield 12 leo kottke 13 DAVE ALVIN & PHIL ALVIN & THE GuILTy ONEs TheWestFar mid atlantic 14 Harmony sweepstakes regionals 16 Tommy emmanuel 17 Marcus Miller 5
18
LIZ LONGLEY
The Oak Ridge BOys 21 tom rush 22 reginaCarter’ssouthernComfort 23 LLoyd CoLe 20
As seen in “Glee”! “See jane Sing”
24&25
An Evening with
jane lynch reed 26 todd Snider Foehl 27 Dailey & Vincent 28 The Dan BanD 29 Angie Stone Apr 2 Avery*SunShine 3 10,000 Maniacs 4 Cleve FranCis 7&8 Brian CulBertson 10 KeiKo Matsui 11 Al StewArt Rachael 12 Shawn Colvin Sage 13 Tower of power 14 Zappa plays Zappa
‘One Size Fits All’ in its entirety & more Zappa music!
15&16 A Very Special SOLO Evening with
JOAN ARMATRADING 17&18 The AverAge WhiTe BAnd In the
21
RED ROOM & LUCKY CAT PINBALL
TAKE METRO!
WE ARE LOCATED 3 BLOCKS FROM THE U STREET/CARDOZO STATION
TO BUY TICKETS VISIT TICKETFLY.COM
Brian Wright
!
ThE WaTErBOYs 23 theMarshalltuCkerBand
LEDISI With Special Guests
THE
Intimate
TRUTH TOUr RAHEEM DEVAUGHN LEELA JAMES
Saturday, March 21, 8pm Dar Constitution Hall
Tickets On Sale Now through Ticketmaster.com/800-735-3000
42 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
CITY LIGHTS: SUNDAY
BIGGER THAN YOU, BIGGER THAN ME For many twentysomethings in D.C., a job is more than just a paycheck: It’s also a social group and sense of place in the city. Field Trip Theatre’s latest production examines that idea from the perspectives of three young people: Beth, a frustrated public school teacher trying to inspire her students; Tucker, a bureaucrat who retreats into video games in his rare free time; and Adele, another teacher, whose sudden friendship with Beth leads to a revelation that substantially shakes their lives and careers. Kathryn Coughlin’s play examines fears, both mundane and overwhelming, that screw with us in this refreshing new work about what our jobs and lives mean in the larger scheme of things. While the subject matter’s not quite uplifting, chances are good you’ll leave feeling less isolated and obsessed with your job’s tiny details. The play runs March 5 to 15 at the Anacostia Arts Center, 1231 Good Hope Road SE. $10–$15. (202) 631-6291. fieldtriptheatre.com. —Caroline Jones
ClassiCal
Jazz
Kennedy Center ConCert hAll 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Lang Lang. 4 p.m. $35–$99. kennedy-center.org.
Blues Alley 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Stanley Jordan. 8 p.m. & 10 p.m. $27.50. bluesalley.com.
VoCal
Kennedy Center MillenniuM stAge 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Jorge Luis Pacheco, Harold López-Nussa, and Aldo López-Gavilán. 5 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.
wArner theAtre 513 13th St. NW. (202) 783-4000. The Sing-Off. 8 p.m. $13–$63. warnertheatre.com.
Sunday
twins JAzz 1344 U St. NW. (202) 234-0072. William Hooker. 8 p.m. & 10 p.m. $10. twinsjazz.com.
RoCk
Folk
BethesdA Blues And JAzz 7719 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda. (240) 330-4500. Midge Ure, Margot MacDonald. 7:30 p.m. $25. bethesdabluesjazz.com.
gypsy sAlly’s 3401 K St. NW. (202) 333-7700. Gretchen Peters. 7:30 p.m. $18–$22. gypsysallys.com.
dC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. Twinsmith, And The Kids. 9 p.m. $10. dcnine.com. fillMore silver spring 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. (301) 960-9999. Meghan Trainor, Sheppard. 7 p.m. (Sold out) $26.50. fillmoresilverspring.com. roCK & roll hotel 1353 H St. NE. (202) 388-ROCK. Dry The River. 8 p.m. $15. rockandrollhoteldc.com.
Funk & R&B verizon Center 601 F St. NW. (202) 628-3200. Charlie Wilson, Kem, Joe. 7 p.m. $78–$103. verizoncenter.com.
ClassiCal nAtionAl gAllery of Art 4th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. (202) 737-4215. JACK Quartet. 6:30 p.m. Free. nga.gov. phillips ColleCtion 1600 21st St. NW. (202) 3872151. Alina Ibragimova, violin. 4 p.m. $15–$30. phillipscollection.org.
VoCal wAshington nAtionAl CAthedrAl 3101 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 537-6200. Cathedral Choral Society: Fauré Requiem. 4 p.m. $15–$75. nationalcathedral.org.
washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 43
Monday Rock
9:30 Club 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. The Church. 7 p.m. $35. 930.com. www.bethesdabluesjazz.com
th 5
m a r c h Soulcial Hour Band
fr 6
Bernard eBB Songwriting awardS Sunday march 8
midge ure
(Solo acouStic) Plus
margot macdonald
wedneSday march 11
herman romero
world renowned flamenco guitariSt Sunday march 15
new riderS of the purple Sage wedneSday march 18
the drifterS friday march 20 & Saturday march 21
maggie roSe
Sunday march 22 “whiplaSh” winner of 3 academy awardS!
7p - “whiplaSh”
film Short viewing (20 minuteS) 730p - hank levy legacy band performance f 27
th 2 w8
Frank Solivan & dirty kitcHen PluS BumPer JackSonS a p r i l cHuck redd tHe cHriS graSSo trio w/ SHaron clark thurSday april 9
the fabulouS thunderbirdS FeAT. KiM WiLson
m 23
Freda Payne
j th 18
u
n
e
lena Seikaly
7719 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda, MD (240) 330-4500
Two Blocks from Bethesda Metro/Red Line Free Parking on Weekends 44 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
blaCk Cat baCkstage 1811 14th St. NW. (202) 667-4490. Eula, Teen Mom. 7:30 p.m. $10. blackcatdc.com. DC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. Self Defense Family, Makthaverskan, Creative Adult. 7:30 p.m. $10–$12. dcnine.com. IOta Club & Café 2832 Wilson Blvd., Arlington. (703) 522-8340. Low Strung. 8 p.m. $15. iotaclubandcafe.com.
Funk & R&B fIllmOre sIlver sprIng 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. (301) 960-9999. Jazmine Sullivan. 8 p.m. $38. fillmoresilverspring.com.
Jazz bOhemIan Caverns 2001 11th St. NW. (202) 2990800. Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra. 8 p.m. & 10 p.m. $10. bohemiancaverns.com.
WoRld bIrChmere 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria. (703) 549-7500. Jesse Cook. 7:30 p.m. $35. birchmere.com. kenneDy Center mIllennIum stage 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Sílvia Pérez Cruz, Raül Fernández Miró. 6 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.
Tuesday Rock
9:30 Club 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Jukebox the Ghost, Little Daylight, Secret Someones. 7 p.m. $18. 930.com. COmet pIng pOng 5037 Connecticut Ave. NW. (202) 364-0404. La Luz, Craft Spells, The Shivas, Bilinda
Butchers, DJ Baby Alcatraz. 9 p.m. $12. cometpingpong.com. gypsy sally’s 3401 K St. NW. (202) 333-7700. John Kadlecik & The DC Mystery Cats. 8 p.m. $15. gypsysallys.com.
countRy bIrChmere 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria. (703) 549-7500. Asleep at the Wheel. 7:30 p.m. $35. birchmere.com. hIll COuntry lIve 410 7th St. NW. (202) 556-2050. The Mulligan Brother. 8:30 p.m. Free. hillcountrywdc.com. verIzOn Center 601 F St. NW. (202) 628-3200. Eric Church, Drive-By Truckers. 7:30 p.m. $28–$62.50. verizoncenter.com.
WoRld kenneDy Center mIllennIum stage 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Romero Lubambo, Hernán Romero. 6 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.
classical ClarICe smIth perfOrmIng arts Center Stadium Drive and Route 193, College Park. (301) 4052787. Music in Mind: Beethoven’s Complete Works for Cello and Piano. 7 p.m. $10–$25. claricesmithcenter.umd.edu.
Wednesday Rock
bIrChmere 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria. (703) 549-7500. Seth Avett, Jessica Lea Mayfield. 7:30 p.m. $45. birchmere.com.
ElEctRonic blaCk Cat baCkstage 1811 14th St. NW. (202) 667-4490. Rocco DeLuca, Johnathan Thomas Wright, Old Man. 7:30 p.m. $12. blackcatdc.com. u street musIC hall 1115 U St. NW. (202) 5881880. The M Machine. 10 p.m. $15. ustreetmusichall.com.
CITY LIGHTS: MONDAY
SELF DEFENSE FAMILY When a punk singer has a chip on his shoulder or the crowd misbehaves, the singer and his audience can develop an adversarial relationship. In the case of Self Defense Family, singer Patrick Kindlon’s entire persona is that he’s a raging asshole. Self-aggrandizing and petty, he goes on sanctimonious, oddly compelling rants in between songs, which sound sludgy and dense compared to their contemporaries. It’s a strange band, the sort that wins over naysayers by commanding the stage. At DC9, Self Defense Family shares top billing with Sweden’s Makthaverskan, an entertaining band in a more conventional sense. Singer Maja Milner has a voice that soars, defiant and heartbreaking, over songs that combine punk with dream-pop and a touch of ‘80s synths. When Milner ends a song by belting “FUCK YOU” at the top of her lungs, you won’t know whether to shove your first into the air or cry. These bands could not be more different, really, which goes to show that there’s no music genre quite as dynamic (or strange) as punk rock. Self Defense Family performs with Makthaverskan, Creative Adult, and Trunkweed at 7:30 p.m. at DC9, 1940 9th St. NW. $10–$12. (202) 483-5000. dcnine.com. —Alan Zilberman
yoga gym personal trainer hairstylist lawyer manipedi theater company music venue new venue gay/ 20+propertyfive oneestate 50+art gallery bar/club mgmt co. real entertainMent spectacular Breweries & restaurants eVent Mixologists agent non-profit place to stages volunteer politician cupcake neighborhood bar food truck pizza burger Goods & services • Art & ent. • PeoPle & PlAces • Food & drink yoga gym personal trainer best hairstylist lawyer mani-pedi theater company music venue new venue gay/bar/club art gallery property mgmt co. real estate agent non-profit place to volunteer politician cupcake neighborhood bar food truck pizza burger yoga gym personal trainer hairstylist lawyer manipedi theater company music venue new venue gay/bar/ club art gallery property mgmt co. real estate agent non-profit place to volunteer politician cupcake neighborhood bar food best truck pizza burger yoga gym personal trainer hairstylist lawyer mani2015 pedi theater company music venue new venue gay/ bar/club art gallery property mgmt co. real estate agent non-profit place to volunteer politician cupcake neighborhood bar food truck pizza burger thursday, april 9 yoga gym personal trainer hairstylist lawyer mani6-10 pM at carnegie library washington, D.c. pedi theater music venue new venue gay/ BUYcompany YOUR EARLY BIRD TICKET NOW! bar/club art gallery property mgmt co. real estate proceeds go to Brainfood & girls rock dc agent non-profit best place toincreAse volunteer politician Vip: $100 general aDMission: $65 *Prices will washingtoncitypaper.com/events cupcake neighborhood bar food truck pizza burger yoga gym personal trainer hairstylist lawyer manipedi theater company music venue new venue gay/ bar/club art gallery property mgmt co. real estate agent non-profit place to volunteer politician Natural Purity from America’s Peaks
washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 45
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Bohemian Caverns Tuesdays Artist in Residency Roy Haynes Tribute B FE
DC’s Legendary Jazz Club
Established in 1926 2001 11th ST NW - (202)299-0800
Valentine’s DayWeekend
Aaron “Ab” Abernathy w/ Nat Turner Fri Feb 13th
Loide
DC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. VÉRITÉ. 9 p.m. $10. dcnine.com.
9:30 Club 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. G. Love and Special Sauce, Matt Costa. 7 p.m. $30. 930.com.
Tim Green
country
ElEctronic 9:30 Club 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Sylvan Esso, Flock of Dimes. 7 p.m. (Sold out) 930.com.
The hamilTon 600 14th St. NW. (202) 787-1000. Jason Boland & The Stragglers, Cody Canada and The Departed. 7:30 p.m. $25–$30. thehamiltondc.com.
Jazz
th th Fri & Sat Feb 27 & 28
Jamie Broumas Thur Mar 5th
Akua Allrich Fri & Sat Mar 6 & 7 th
Sun Mar 8th
Kenny Wesley Sun 3/22 Fri & Sat Feb 20 & 21 Sun 3/29 Ethnic Heritage Ensemble Joel Harrison th
st
Sun Feb 22nd
Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra Mondays @ 8pm
"This group is something special." ~ Mike West (CityPaper)
Jukebox the Ghost has been making theatrical, brainy piano rock since its three members met at George Washington University more than a decade ago, but the band’s self-titled 2014 album, its fourth, is its most cohesive statement of purpose to date. Gone are the apocalyptic lyrical turns and hyperactive melodies that peppered earlier releases; the band makes an amiable appeal to the mainstream by sanding down its edges and putting its upbeat hooks front and center. “Sound of a Broken Heart” and “Made For Ending” kick off the album with infectious choruses that’ll remain in your head long after they’re gone, and later on, Ben Thornewill’s cathartic crooning on “Hollywood” recalls past Jukebox the Ghost songs that deftly straddled the line between indie pop and post-Rent rock musicals. While lead single “The Great Unknown” sounds like it could play under car commercials for years to come, it’s about time the band’s well-crafted earworms connected with a wider audience. Jukebox the Ghost performs with Little Daylight and Secret Someones at 7 p.m. at 9:30 Club, —Dan Singer 815 V St. NW. $18. (202) 265-0930. 930.com.
BluEs
Eric Deutsch
Sat Feb 14
JUKEBOX THE GHOST
Howard “Kingfish” R Franklin MA
th
th
Aruan Ortiz
Lenny Robinson
CITY LIGHTS: TUESDAY
Jeremy Pelt Fri & Sat
Apr 3rd & 4th
www.BohemianCaverns.com
46 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
World barns aT wolf Trap 1645 Trap Road, Vienna. (703) 255-1900. Buckwheat Zydeco. 8 p.m. $28. wolftrap.org. howarD TheaTre 620 T St. NW. (202) 803-2899. Luciano. 8 p.m. $25–$60. thehowardtheatre.com. KenneDy CenTer millennium sTaGe 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Arabic Andalusian Ensemble featuring Hadi Eldebek. 6 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.
classical naTional Gallery of arT 4th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. (202) 737-4215. JACK Quartet. 12:10 p.m. Free. nga.gov.
Twins Jazz 1344 U St. NW. (202) 234-0072. Jazz Band Master Class. 7:30 p.m. & 10:30 p.m. $15. twinsjazz.com.
Folk birChmere 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria. (703) 549-7500. Leo Kottke. 7:30 p.m. $39.50. birchmere.com. Gypsy sally’s 3401 K St. NW. (202) 333-7700. The Mastersons, Aaron Lee Tasjan. 8:30 p.m. $12–$15. gypsysallys.com. hill CounTry live 410 7th St. NW. (202) 556-2050. Great Peacock. 9:30 p.m. Free. hillcountrywdc.com.
World
Thursday
KenneDy CenTer millennium sTaGe 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Nathalie Handal, Hanna Khoury. 6 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.
rock
classical
blaCK CaT 1811 14th St. NW. (202) 667-4490. Magic Man, Panama Wedding, Tiger Town. 7:30 p.m. $18–$20. blackcatdc.com.
lyCeum 201 S. Washington St., Alexandria. (703) 838-4994. U.S. Air Force Band Chamber Concert. 8 p.m. Free.
Mansion at strathMore 10701 Rockville Pike, Rockville. (301) 581-5100. Steven Lin. 7:30 p.m. $25.20–$28. strathmore.org. PhilliPs ColleCtion 1600 21st St. NW. (202) 3872151. Pedro Cardone, piano, and author Antonio Munoz Molina. 6 p.m. $15–$30. phillipscollection.org.
Vocal MontPelier arts Center 9652 Muirkirk Road, Laurel. (301) 377-7800. Ethel Ennis. 12 p.m. $12. arts.pgparks.com.
Books
Martha Jo BlaCk The author tells the story of her father, who played baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers and went on to become a vice president of Greyhound, in Joe Black: More Than a Dodger. Politics & Prose. 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. March 8, 1:00 p.m. Free. (202) 364-1919. ruBen Castaneda Castaneda, a former Washington Post crime reporter, describes life in the District during the crack crisis of the 1980s and his own experiences as an addict in this reported memoir. Presented by Politics & Prose. Busboys and Poets Brookland. 625 Monroe St. NE. March 11, 6:30 p.m. Free. andrew CoCkBurn The impact of drone warfare is examined in Kill Chain: The Rise of the High Tech Assassin. Politics & Prose. 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. March 10, 7:00 p.m. Free. (202) 364-1919.
doCtor dread The reggae producer and label founder chronicles his career in The Half That’s Never Been Told: The Real-Life Reggae Adventures of Doctor Dread. Politics & Prose. 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. March 7, 1:00 p.m. Free. (202) 364-1919.
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nadia hashiMi Hashimi reads from her novel ,The Pearl that Broke its Shell, the story of a young Afghan girl who experiences a brief taste of freedom when she dresses as a man, in celebration of International Women’s Day. Georgetown Library. 3260 R St. NW. March 7, 2:00 p.m. Free. (202) 727-0232. GeorGe hodGMan In Bettyville, his memoir about returning to one’s hometown, the author, a successful editor, leaves New York for Missouri to care for his ailing mother. Politics & Prose. 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. March 12, 7:00 p.m. Free. (202) 364-1919. stePhen kotkin Kotkin provides insight into the dictator’s early years in his latest biography, Stalin, Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1879–1928. Politics & Prose. 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. March 11, 7:00 p.m. Free. (202) 364-1919. david lat The accomplished legal writer and prosecutor reads from his first novel, Supreme Ambition, about a lively Yale Law graduate who’s eager to clerk for a Supreme Court Justice. Politics & Prose. 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. March 8, 5:00 p.m. Free. (202) 364-1919. Paul Muldoon The poetry editor of the New Yorker reads from his latest collection, One Thousand Things
HAPPY HOUR SPECIAL 5-7 PM
ANY DRAFT AND A BURGER JUST TEN BUCKS 1523 22nd St NW – Washington, DC 20037 – (202) 293-1887 www.bierbarondc.com @bierbarondc.com for news and events
S H AW - H O WA R D METRO ACCESS O F F GREEN LINE
620 T ST. NW WASHINGTON DC, 2001 202.803.2899 THEHOWARDTHEATRE.COM
VALET PARKING + SELF PARKING ON INTERSECTION OF 7TH & T ST FULL DINNER MENU EVERY SHOW NIGHT
JUST ANNOUNCED
CITY LIGHTS: WEDNESDAY
SOON It’s the end of the world as we know it, and Charlie isn’t feeling so fine. She’s the protagonist of the world premiere musical Soon, which takes place during a looming apocalypse, complete with the world’s hottest summer on record and a dwindling water supply. Twentysomething Charlie finds refuge in her apartment with all the essentials: a jar of peanut butter, the warm comfort of Wolf Blitzer on the television, and her devoted pet fish, Hershel. Meanwhile, Charlie’s mother, roommate, and on-again, off-again boyfriend attempt to draw her out into the world while it still exists. A musical about the end of days might seem like a downer, but area native and Broadway vet Nick Blaemire’s sharp, smart script makes for an entertaining and lively show. Under the skillful direction of Signature Theatre’s Matthew Gardiner, Soon offers a fresh urgency that merits a trip outside your apartment. That jar of peanut butter will be waiting when you return. The musical runs March 10 through April 2 at Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. $39–$70. (703) 820—Diana Metzger 9771. signature-theatre.org.
5/1- ILOVEMAKONNEN
6/19-GINGER BAKER
3/19- BLITZ THE AMBASSADOR
3/22- Y’ANNA CRAWLEY
3/28-KENNY LATTIMORE
5/19-TECH N9NE
5/22-MOBB DEEP
5/15- WHITE FORD BRONCO
FRIDAY MARCH 6TH
RAHSAAN PATTERSON
SATURDAY MARCH 7
76 DEGREES WEST BAND
UPCOMING SHOWS RARE ESSENCE, EU FEATURING SUGAR BEAR, BLACK ALLEY & DC LOVES DILLA
LATE SHOW
EXQUISITE GHANA INDEPENDENCE BALL
WITH MUSIC BY MIX MASTER BERTO, DJ MICKEY, DJ SAM, AM & CLAUDE DI MARTIAN
MAYSA LATE FAMILIAR FACES TITLE FIGHT & LA DISPUTE KID CREOLE & THE COCONUTS TEMPTATION PRESENTS: WERQ OUT! 3/28 RAWKUS 3/29 A TRIBUTE TO THE MUSIC OF MOTOWN 4/2 DAVID CHOI / TESS HENLEY
4/7 4/8 4/10 4/11 4/17
SATURDAY MARCH 14TH
LUCIANO
PEARIS J W/ JUS PAUL, J BEALE,TP & RAW ELEMENT
THURSDAY MARCH 12
FRIDAY MARCH 20TH
RAUL ROMERO DE LOS NOSEQUIEN Y LOS NOSECUANTOS
FUNK PARADE KICKOFF PARTY 4/3
POINT BREAK LIVE BALTSOUNDMANAGEMENT PRESENTS
WEDNESDAY MARCH 11
SATURDAY MARCH 7
3/21 3/21 3/25 3/26 3/27
FRIDAY MARCH 13
SUNDAY MARCH 8TH
THE BENEFIT SHOW WITH
ONE MORE TIME THE TRIBUTE TO DAFT PUNK NORTHEAST GROOVERS MORGAN HERITAGE INCOGNITO MIXTAPE ALICE SMITH
(PRODUCED BY JILL NEWMAN PRODUCTIONS)
4/17 LATE-GRAVITY
THE WORLD FAMOUS HARLEM GOSPEL CHOIR
EVERY SUNDAY !
4/19 MICHELLE BLACKWELL 4/20 MONOPHONICS SOUND OF SINNING TOUR 4/24 JARABE DE PALO 4/25 KEITH SWEAT: ALBUM RELEASE SHOW (BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!) 4/30 SHEILA E. 5/1 ILOVEMAKONNEN
$45 GETS YOU ALL YOU CAN EAT SOUTHERN STYLE BUFFET AND ENTRY TO THE SHOW
washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 47
charles-Steck Photography UPTOWN BLUES
w/
Open Mic Blues JaM Big Boy LittLe every Thursday
over the Limit Sat. Mar. 7 Big Boy LittLe Band Fri. Mar. 13 Sookey Jump BLueS Band Fri. Mar. 20 moonShine Society Sat. Mar. 21 Stacy BrookS BLueS Band Sundays mike FLaherty’S
(across from the National Zoo)
202-232-4225 zoobardc.com
$10 BURGER & BEER MON-FRI 4 P M -7 P M
3 0 1 - 6 3 3 - 5 6 0 1 charles@steckphotography.com w w w. s t e c k p h o t o g r a p h y. c o m
TRIVIA EVERY M O N D AY & W E D N E S D AY
$3 PBR & NATTY BOH ALL DAY EVERY DAY
*all shows 21+ T H U R S D AY, M A R 5 T H
UNDERGROUND COMEDY NO COVER DOORS OPEN AT 7PM SHOW STARTS AT 8PM
12 taps--winter Beer--growlerfills
new hours:open 4 pm new +espresso ++ chai+
mon tue wed thu for
2ndwind happy hour
buzz beers - spiked lattes open 10 am friday saturday sunday breakfast = brunch = booze beer = bloody marys = b’pudn
AMA AMERICAN LATIN MUSICIANS
th 26
february head nah dragons nicole Booth
8:00 $8
S A T U R D AY, M A R 7 T H
fr bobby thompson 27 & friends
8:30 $10
F R I D AY, M A R 6 T H
DOORS OPEN AT 8PM
NEIL GAIMON “SANDMAN STRIPS” BURLESQUE DOORS OPEN AT 8PM SHOW STARTS AT 10PM $15
DOOR AT 730PM $25 AT THE DOOR M O N D AY, M A R 9 T H
DISTRICT TRIVIA
NO COVER TRIVIA STARTS AT 730PM T U E S D AY, M A R 1 0 T H
LAST RESORT COMEDY NO COVER DOORS OPEN AT 7PM SHOW STARTS AT 8PM
DOORS OPEN AT 7PM SHOW STARTS AT 8PM
BEER RELEASE
BRAUHAUS RIEGELE, KELLERBIER AND A HELLES FEATURING JEVER, AND GAFFEL KOLSCH, AUGUSTUS WEIZENBOCK, ALTEWEISS
aMy WilkinSon The author, a lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, reveals entrepreneurship tips in her book The Creator’s Code. Politics & Prose. 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. March 7, 3:30 p.m. Free. (202) 364-1919.
rachel levitin eli staples
addiSon/ripley Fine art 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 338-5180. addisonripleyfineart.com. OngOing: “Natural Allusions” A variety of nature-themed paintings and sculptures by artists Jackie Battenfield, Carson Fox, Isabel Manalo, Jackie Battenfield, Judy Hoffman, Julia Bloom, Linda Cummings, and Merle Temkin. Jan. 31–March 14. arlington artS Center 3550 Wilson Blvd., Arlington. (703) 248-6800. arlingtonartscenter.org. OngOing: “Instigate. Activate.” Four new curators present mini-exhibitions that focus on landscapes, containers and borderlands, large scale alternative worlds, and the concept of home. Jan. 24–April 4. OngOing: “Gun Love” AAC resident artist Dawn Whitmore considers the role of women in contemporary gun culture in this exhibition that features altered photos gleaned from social media and portraits of women acting out the love of firearms by posing with plastic guns. Jan. 24–April 4.
march
mo accidents 02 w/ silent critics w/ static scene
athenaeuM 201 Prince St., Alexandria. (703) 548-0035. nvfaa.org. Opening: “Enveloping Time” Paintings, collages, and mixed media pieces featuring envelopes and other print media motifs are highlighted in this retrospective of works by artist Robert Cwiok. Feb. 26–April 12.
sa 28
the who-live@leeds
8:30pm
20 great musicians plus $12 play the full 33-song performance of the who’s 1970 show at the
university of leeds incl“tommy”
su el quatro 7:30 01 w/ the el reys $10 w/ kiti garner & the deceits
tu 03
lGbtuesdays at iota
8:30 $10
free
half-priced apps & hh until 9 pm we --do you play?-free 04
W E D N E S D AY, M A R 1 1 T H
ALEX STARR COMEDY SHOW
levi tillMan The author weighs China, Japan, and the U.S.’s attempts to build a better combustion engine in The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future. Busboys and Poets Takoma. 234 Carroll St. NW. March 10, 6:30 p.m. Free. (202) 726-9525.
artiSphere 1101 Wilson Blvd., Arlington. (703) 875-1100. artisphere.com. OngOing: “Infinitesimal” Artist Monica Stroik explores the limits of perception and memory in this immersive new exhibition of oil paintings that draws inspiration from Artisphere’s architecture. Feb. 4–April 25. ClOsing: “Select 2015” Local artists showcase new works at this annual exhibition and auction that supports the D.C. art community. Jan. 29–March 6.
S U N D AY, M A R 8 T H
RAINBOW PROJECT CABARET
dC artS Center 2438 18th St. NW. (202) 462-7833. dcartscenter.org. OngOing: “Dis/Satisfaction: Permission to rewrite history, it’s personal” The nine members of Sparkplug, DCAC’s artist collective, present their first exhibition. Featured works include paintings, sculpture, and interactive performance art. Feb. 13–March 15.
Galleries
IOTA CLUB & CAFE
600 beers from around the world Downstairs: good food, great beer, $3 PBR & Natty Boh’s all day every day
Barry StrauSS Historian Strauss reconsiders the story of Caesar’s death just in time for the Ides of March in his new book. Politics & Prose. 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. March 9, 7:00 p.m. Free. (202) 364-1919.
Matt SuMell In Sumell’s debut novel, Making Nice, an angry but likable man fights and cares for his family while training to attack people. Politics & Prose. 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. March 7, 6:00 p.m. Free. (202) 364-1919.
Sat. Mar. 14 Smokin’ poLecatS
3000 Connecticut Avenue, NW
also showcases gouaches and pen works and shiny, amorphous ceramic blobs. March 6–March 28.
Cheryl Strayed Strayed chronicled her hike up the 1,000-mile Pacific Crest Trail in the memoir Wild, now an Academy Award-nominated film. She discusses her book and her love of nature with National Geographic Traveler editor-at-large Don George. National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium. 1600 M St. NW. March 11, 7:30 p.m. Sold out. (202) 857-7700.
Fri. Mar. 6
dixieLand direct Jazz Band
Worth Knowing. Politics & Prose. 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. March 6, 7:00 p.m. Free. (202) 364-1919.
open mic niGht !
8:00
twosign-ups @ 7:30 & 10:00pm
th red elvises 05 foo fighters By alex vans fr 06 practically einstein
8:30 $15 9:00 $12
sa taylor carson/band 8:30 07 lauren calve Bandon last$15
...................................
thank you for your business
TRIVIA STARTS AT 730PM NO COVER
iotaclubandcafe.com
1523 22nd St NW – Washington, DC 20037 (202) 293-1887 - www.bierbarondc.com @bierbarondc.com for news and events
ARLINGTON VA 703/522-8340 2 1/2 BLOCKS EAST OF
2832 WILSON BLVD
CLARENDON METRO
48 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
Capitol Skyline hotel 10 I St. SW. (202) 4887500. capitolskyline.com. OngOing: “Upward Mobility” Photographer Avi Gupta presents a large-scale photograph of the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s staircase printed on a banner on the side of the Capitol Skyline Hotel to close the WPA’s South Capitol Skyscape series. Feb. 2–April 30. Carroll Square gallery 975 F St. NW. (202) 234-5601. carrollsquare.com. OngOing: “Linear Function” Artists Alex Mayer, Nick Primo, and Douglas Whitmer present paintings and sculptures that require a sparse use of materials, be it wood, paint, or steel. Feb. 6–April 24. CroSS MaCkenzie gallery 2026 R St. NW. (202) 333-7970. crossmackenzie.com. Opening: “Tools for No Purpose” Artist Zimra Beiner presents his clay recreations of household objects in this exhibition. He
FlaShpoint gallery 916 G St. NW. (202) 3151305. culturaldc.org. OngOing: “Civilized” Artist Ben Tolman explores the relationship people have with their environments through drawings, sculptures, and video that represent rituals in this immersive multimedia exhibition. Feb. 27–March 28. gallery plan B 1530 14th St. NW. (202) 234-2711. galleryplanb.com. OngOing: “Ten by Ten” Artists who have displayed work at plan b in the past return to present 10 inch square paintings that capture their style at this anniversary exhibition. Feb. 18–March 22. goethe-inStitut WaShington 812 7th St. NW. (202) 289-1200. www.goethe.de/washington. Opening: “gute aussichten: new german photography 2014/2015” The eight winners of this annual photography competition display more than 300 images chronicling everything from life in Haiti and the Dominican Republic to the Matterhorn. March 5–May 1. heMphill 1515 14th St. NW. (202) 234-5601. hemphillfinearts.com. OngOing: “Willem de Looper” Stained paintings from the mid-20th century by the former Phillips Collection curator. Jan. 17–March 28. hillyer art SpaCe 9 Hillyer Court NW. (202) 3380680. artsandartists.org. Opening: “Casey Snyder” Abstract oil paintings by Montgomery College instructor Snyder. March 6–March 28. Opening: “Ruth Lozner” Lozner combines elements of Dadaism and folk art to create small trinkets and objects for this exhibition. March 6–March 28. Opening: “Luis Flores” Stone and wood sculptures by Baltimore-based artist Luis Flores. March 6–March 28. Joan hiSaoka healing artS gallery 1632 U St. NW. (202) 483-8600. smithfarm.com/gallery. ClOsing: “Bought & Sold: Voices of Human Trafficking” Curators aim to change public attitudes about human trafficking through this exhibition that features photos by Kay Chernush and an installation by Barbara Liotta. Jan. 9–March 7. long vieW gallery 1234 9th St. NW. (202) 2324788. longviewgallery.com. OngOing: “ReFresh V” Artists Mike Weber, James Hunter, Ryan McCoy, Robert Stuart, Casey Vogt and Rebecca Coles, who’ve previously showcased work at the gallery, present new work at this annual exhibition. Feb. 26–March 29. MoSaiC 2910 District Ave., Fairfax. Opening: “Transcendence” Muralist James Walker creates a largescale installation and painter James Bullough installs a 30-foot mural inspired by break dancers at this outdoor exhibition presented by Art Whino. March 7–July 26. old print gallery 1220 31st St. NW. (202) 9651818. oldprintgallery.com. OngOing: “Tonal Array” Aquatints from the late 20th and early 21st centuries by artists including Linda Adato, Takamune Ishiguro, and Henry Ziegler. Feb. 20–April 11. roBert BroWn gallery 1662 33rd St. NW. (202) 338-0353. robertbrowngallery.com. OngOing: “Thirty Years of Discoveries” View paintings, ceramics, and calligraphy at this retrospective exhibition celebrating the works of artist Stephen Addiss. Feb. 28–April 18. SuSan CalloWay Fine art 1643 Wisconsin Avenue NW. (202) 965-4601. callowayart.com. ClOsing: “Anytime/Anywhere: A Modern Landscape” Contemporary oil paintings by Minnesota-based artist Carl Bretzke. Feb. 6–March 7. zenith gallery 1429 Iris St. NW. (202) 783-2963. zenithgallery.com. OngOing: “Women of Zenith Who Have Reached the Zenith” Female artists take over the walls at this exhibition to celebrate Washington’s female leaders and Zenith Gallery’s 37th anniversary. Jan. 14–April 26.
Dance
Ballet Flamenco Sara BaraS Acclaimed flamenco performer Sara Baras and her company present the D.C. premiere of their 2014 work Voces, Suite Flamenca. Part of the Kennedy Center’s “Iberian Suite” program. Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. 2700 F St. NW. March 9, 8:00 p.m. $25-$60. (202) 467-4600. kennedy-center.org. companhia portugueSa de Bailado contemporâneo The Portuguese company presents the area premiere of Fado, Rituals, and Shadows, a passionate piece set the the music of Fado singer Carla Pires. Part of the Kennedy Center’s “Iberian Suite” program. Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. 2700 F St. NW. March 10, 7:30 p.m.; March 11, 7:30 p.m. $30. (202) 467-4600. kennedy-center.org. compañía maría pagéS Enjoy the American premiere of the Spanish company’s 2011 work, Utopía, at this performance that’s presented as part of the Kennedy Center’s “Iberian Suite” program. Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. 2700 F St. NW. March 11, 8:00 p.m.; March 12, 8:00 p.m. $25-$60. (202) 4674600. kennedy-center.org.
dorrance dance with toShi reagon and Biglovely The acclaimed tap ensemble Dorrance Dance presents The Blues Project, a collaboration between the ensemble and celebrated blues musician Toshi Reagon. American Dance Institute. 1570 East Jefferson St., Rockville. March 6, 8:00 p.m.; March 7, 8:00 p.m. $16.25-$31.25. (855) 263-2623. americandance.org. grupo corpo This Brazilian contemporary dance company performs two acclaimed pieces from its repertoire: “Sem Mim,” which tells the story of women waiting for their partners to return from the sea, and “Onqotô,” a movement-based rumination on the Big Bang Theory. Presented as part of the Kennedy Center’s “Iberian Suite” series. Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. 2700 F St. NW. March 6, 8:00 p.m.; March 7, 8:00 p.m. $25-$60. (202) 467-4600. kennedy-center.org. rueda all StarS The celebrated Cuban ballroom dance company performs, then encourages audience members to join them with help from Dance Place resident company the DC Casineros. Dance Place. 3225 8th St. NE. March 6, 8:00 p.m. $15-$30. (202) 2691600. danceplace.org. tango BuenoS aireS Like Andrew Lloyd Webber before them, this Argentine dance company tells the
LIVE
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES
JIMMIE VAUGHAN and the
TILT-A-WHIRL
BAND W/ JONNY GRAVE
TONIGHT AT 8 PM!
THURSDAY MAR 5
AUSTIN LOUNGE LIZARDS Clever satire-laden Americana
MAR 5
HOWIE
DAY FRIDAY
MAR 6
SAT, MAR 7
MAR 7
VATSALA MEHRA
Vibrant Indian singer, known as the “Ghazal Queen”
CITY LIGHTS: THURSDAY
LOWER DENS Blend hypnotic synthesizer arrangements with melodic guitars and introspective lyrics and you’ll get Lower Dens, a Baltimore quartet whose full-bodied songs transfix its listeners. Those songs are sustained by the vocals of lead singer Jana Hunter; her bold delivery, warbling lilts, and vibrato add shadow to the band’s mysterious identity, and the tracks’ instrumental interludes sound like elevator music you might hear on the way to space. Lower Dens is joined by a similarly minded local dream-pop outfit, the Walking Sticks, at this show at AMP, Strathmore’s new and imaginative sister location that spotlights fine dining and eclectic music acts. Neighborhood Restaurant Group, the team behind spots like Red Apron Butcher and ChurchKey, provides the snacks, so expect to leave with equal satisfaction for your belly and your ears. Lower Dens performs with the Walking Sticks at 7:30 p.m. at AMP, 11810 Grand Park Ave., North Bethesda. $12. (301) 581-5100. amp—Jordan-Marie Smith bystrathmore.com.
DRKWAV
FEAT JOHN MEDESKI, SKERIK AND ADAM DEITCH WED, MAR 11
JASON BOLAND & THE STRAGGLERS /CODY CANADA AND THE DEPARTED FRI, MAR 13
MAR 11
BUCKWHEAT ZYDECO
THE LONE BELLOW
SOLD OUT
W/ ODESSA
SAT, MAR 14
GENERAL ADMISSION DANCE
GIANT PANDA GUERILLA DUB SQUAD
W/ JANKA NABAY & THE BUBU GANG, COCKTAIL PARTY PHENOMENON MAR 19
LUCY KAPLANSKY & RICHARD SHINDELL The Pine Hill Project
LARRY CAMPBELL & TERESA WILLIAMS
WOLFTRAP.ORG
THEHAMILTONDC.COM washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 49
D.C.’s awesomest events calendar.
ONE OF THE FLAT-OUT FUNNIEST FILMS IN AGES!”
“
PRESENTS
washingtoncitypaper.com/ calendar WWW.WHATWEDOINTHESHADOWS.COM WASHINGTON, DC Landmark’s E Street Cinema (202) 783-9494 ARLINGTON AMC Loews Shirlington 7 (888) AMC-4FUN
#DELICIOUSNECKS
BETHESDA Landmark’s Bethesda Row Cinema (301) 652-7273 BALTIMORE The Charles (410) 727-FILM
washingtoncitypaper.com
TheaTer
Back to Methuselah George Bernard Shaw experiments with science fiction in this satirical romp that journies from the Garden of Eden to far into the future. Washington Stage Guild at Undercroft Theatre. 900 Massachusetts Ave. NW. To March 15. $20-$50. (240) 582-0050. stageguild.org. Bessie’s Blues MetroStage revives this musical look at the 20th century, which won six Helen Hayes Awards when it debuted at Studio Theatre 20 years ago. Playwright Thomas W. Jones II directs and choreographs the production that tells the story of the blues from the perspective of singer Bessie Smith. MetroStage. 1201 N. Royal St., Alexandria. To March 15. $55-$60. (703) 548-9044. metrostage.org. By heart, three Fingers Below the knee As part of its U.S. debut, Portugal’s Mundo Perfeito presents two one-act plays. In By Heart, audience members are required to memorize a poem in English and the performance won’t end until they all can recite it perfectly. Three Fingers Below the Knee tells the story of Portugal’s fascist regimes through reports by theater inspectors. Part of the Kennedy Center’s Iberian Suite program. Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. 2700 F St. NW. To March 8. $30. (202) 467-4600. kennedy-center.org.
Fri & Sat, March 6 & 7 at 11:30pm! Buy Advance Tickets Online
tickets.landmarktheatres.com
ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE • BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM ®
“SIX TALES OF APOCALYPTIC REVENGE. THE YEAR’S MOST FEARLESSLY FUNNY FILM.” -Richard Corliss, TIME MAGAZINE FROM PRODUCERS
A F I L M BY
story of First Lady Eva Perón through music and movement. George Mason University Center for the Arts. 4400 University Drive, Fairfax. March 7, 8:00 p.m. $29-$48. (703) 993-2787. cfa.gmu.edu.
PEDRO
AND
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Washington, DC Arlington Bethesda LANDMARK’S LANDMARK’S E STREET CINEMA AMC LOEWS SHIRLINGTON 7 BETHESDA ROW CINEMA (202) 783-9494 (888) AMC-4FUN (301) 652-7273
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cherokee One white and one black couple seek rejuvenation in nature and head to a campsite in Cherokee, North Carolina. But when a group member disappears and a strange local makes the remaining members consider living off the grid forever, their plans and lives quickly change. John Vreeke directs Lisa D’Amour’s companion to Detroit, which played at Woolly last season. Woolly Mammoth Theatre. 641 D St. NW. To March 8. $40-$68. (202) 393-3939. woollymammoth.net. kid Victory Legendary composer John Kander collaborates with playwright Greg Pierce on this world premiere musical about a young boy who returns home a year after disappearing and his struggle to reenter society. Signature Theatre. 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. To March 22. $29-$94. (703) 8209771. signature-theatre.org. king hedley ii In the ninth play from August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” King Hedley returns from prison determined to open a business. But when a scheming conman threatens to reveal long held family secrets, King’s plans are threatened. Arena Stage. 1101 6th St. SW. To March 8. $40-$90. (202) 488-3300. arenastage.org. laugh Mabel, a wealthy orphan, is sent to live with a calculating aunt who aims to steal her fortune by setting Mabel up with her son. Their courtship flounders but reveals a love of movies and ultimately results in a Hollywood-style romance. Studio Theatre. 1501 14th St. NW. To April 19. $20-$78. (202) 332-3300. studiotheatre.org. the lieutenant oF inishMore When the black cat of a mad Irish liberation fighter is killed, his neighbors try to replace it without his knowledge. But when they wind up with an orange cat instead, the thoughtful couple has to contend with a world of machine guns and terrorism. Matthew R. Wilson directs Martin McDonagh’s dark but gleeful comedy. Constellation Theatre at Source. 1835 14th St. NW. To March 8. $20-$45. (202) 204-7741. constellationtheatre.org. loVe, loss, and what i wore Six actresses play a variety of characters in this series of monologues about relationships and the way we dress, adapted for the stage by Nora and Delia Ephron from the book by Ilene Beckerman. Next Stop Theatre. 269 Sunset Park Drive, Herndon. To March 7. $28. (703) 481-5930. nextstoptheatre.org. Mary stuart Holly Twyford and Kate Eastwood Norris star in this new production of Frederick Schiller’s play that chronicles the final days and death of Mary, Queen of Scots. Folger Elizabethan Theatre. 201 E. Capitol St. SE. To March 8. $40-$75. (202) 544-7077. folger.edu.
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the MetroManiacs Alexis Piron’s classic farce involves poets, pseudonyms, disguises, and many intertwining relationships. Shakespeare Theatre Company presents the play as part of its ReDiscovery Series. Lansburgh Theatre. 450 7th St. NW. To March 22. $20-$100. (202) 547-1122. shakespearetheatre.org. Much ado aBout nothing This latest wordless production from Synetic Theater sets the story of confirmed bachelor Benedick and his equally stubborn and single counterpart Beatrice in 1950s Las Vegas. Synetic Theater at Crystal City. 1800 South Bell St., Arlington. To March 22. $15-$95. (800) 494-8497. synetictheater.org. the originalist Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith directs the world premiere of John Strand’s drama about cantankerous Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. Helen Hayes Award winner Edward Gero stars as Scalia, who spars with a stubborn, liberal law clerk as they prepare for an important case. Arena Stage. 1101 6th St. SW. To April 26. $70-$110. (202) 488-3300. arenastage.org. soon In this world premiere by composer and lyricist Nick Blaemire, all of earth’s water is due to evaporate in a few months, which sends aimless 20-something Charlie into hibernation on the couch. Her mother, friend, and boyfriend try to encourage her to take advantage of what time is left but she soon reveals past events that have kept her confined physically and emotionally. Signature Theatre. 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. To April 26. $39-$94. (703) 820-9771. signature-theatre.org.
Film
Ballet 422 This new documentary chronicles n the creation of choreographer Justin Peck’s first work for the New York City Ballet from inception to performance. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) chappie Neill Blomkamp, the mind behind n District 9, directs this science fiction film about a robot designed to feel emotions who must fight against the forces that try to control him. Starring Dev Patel, Hugh Jackman, and Sigourney Weaver. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) dust Robert Ashley’s opera about five people on n the outskirts who observe a disabled veteran is modeled after the medieval form of a motet. National Gallery of Art. 4th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. (202) 737-4215. nga.gov. Focus Will Smith and Margot Robbie star in this comedic caper about a conman who faces off against his ex-girlfriend as they both try to trick a billionaire. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) gett: the trial oF ViViane aMsaleM An Israeli woman tries to divorce her husband and faces opposition from the ultra-religious marriage laws in this courtroom drama starring Ronit Elkabetz. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) huMan capital Rich Italians and their imitators interact in this acclaimed Italian film that was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) the lazarus eFFect Overly ambitious doctors figure out how to bring patients back from the dead and things shockingly don’t turn out so well in this horror film directed by David Gelb and starring Mark Duplass, Olivia Wilde, and Donald Glover. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) second Best exotic Marigold hotel n the The retirees from the 2012 film return in this sequel that finds them opening a second hotel for aging Brits. Starring Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Richard Gere, and Maggie Smith. (See washingtoncitypaper. com for venue information) Business Vince Vaughn plays a n unFinished small business owner who’s trip to Europe goes disastrously awry in this debaucherous comedy. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information)
Film clips are written by Caroline Jones.
SHOWTIMES March 6â&#x20AC;&#x201C;12, 2015 Times currenT as of 4 p.m. Wednesday
REPERTORY AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring (301) 495-6700 Birdman (R) 119 mins. Fri. 2:30, 7:10; Sat. 2:50, 7:45; Sun. 3:30, 8:00; Mon. 1:30, 7:10; Tue. 2:30, 7:10; Wed. 2:30, 8:45; Thu. 2:30, 7:10 Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) (NR) 88 mins. Sat. 3:00; Tue. 5:00 Blonde Venus (1932) (NR) 92 mins. Sun. 11:10; Tue. 3:00; Thu. 3:00 Casablanca (1942) (PG) 102 mins. Fri. 5:15; Sat. 7:30; Sun. 6:45; Mon.-Tue. 12:45; Wed. 6:30 Forbidden (1932) (NR) 81 mins. Sun. 3:00; Wed. 5:00 Hell Drivers (NR) 108 mins. Mon. 9:00; Wed. 9:15 The Imitation Game (PG-13) 114 mins. Fri. 12:15; Sat. 12:40; Sun. 1:10; Mon. 11:15; Tue. 12:15; Wed. 2:10; Thu. 12:15 Ladies of Leisure (1930) (NR) 98 mins. Sun. 1:00; Mon. 5:00 Maps to the Stars (R) 111 mins. Fri. 4:50, 9:50; Sat. 5:00, 10:10; Sun. 5:45; Mon. 9:30; Tue. 4:50, 9:30; Wed. noon, 4:30; Thu. 4:50, 9:30 The Miracle Woman (1931) (NR) 90 mins. Sat. 5:15; Thu. 5:00 Nothing Sacred (1937) (NR) 75 mins. Sun. 5:00; Wed. 7:00 Notorious (1946) (NR) 101 mins. Fri. 7:30; Tue. 7:00 The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (PG) 122 mins. Fri. 11:20, 1:45, 4:15, 7:20, 9:30; Sat. 11:20, 1:45, 4:15, 7:20, 9:50; Sun. 12:20, 2:45, 5:15, 7:45; Mon.Thu. 11:20, 1:45, 4:15, 6:45, 9:15 Shanghai Express (1932) (NR) 80 mins. Sat. 11:10; Mon. 3:00 These Are the Damned (NR) 87 mins. Fri.-Sat. 9:45
Timbuktu (Le chagrin des oiseaux) (PG-13) 97 mins. Fri.-Sun. 11:30, 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30, 9:45; Mon. 11:30, 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30; Tue. 11:30, 1:30, 3:30, 7:30; Wed. noon, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30; Thu. 11:30, 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30 Whiplash (R) 105 mins. Fri. noon, 2:30, 5:00, 7:15, 9:30; Sat.-Sun. 2:30, 5:00, 7:15, 9:30; Mon. noon, 2:30, 5:00; Tue. noon, 2:30, 5:00; Wed. noon, 2:30, 5:00, 7:15; Thu. noon, 2:30, 5:00
AMC Loews Theatres Georgetown
Left Foot Right Foot (NR) 105 mins. Tue. 7:00
3111 K St. NW (202) 342-6441
Maps to the Stars (R) 111 mins. Fri.-Thu. 4:40, 9:20
American Sniper (R) 134 mins. Fri.-Sat. 12:35, 3:30, 6:30, 9:30
Road Hard (NR) 98 mins. Fri. 2:30, 2:45, 7:00; Sat.-Sun. 2:30, 7:00; Mon. 2:30, 7:00; Tue. 2:30; Wed.-Thu. 2:30, 7:00
Birdman (R) 119 mins. Fri.-Sat. 12:25, 3:15, 6:00, 9:00
The Theory of Everything (PG-13) 123 mins. Fri. 2:20, 9:30; Sat.-Sun. 2:20, 9:30; Mon.-Thu. 2:20, 9:30
Chappie (R) 120 mins. Fri. 1:00, 4:00, 7:00, 10:00; Sat. 10:00, 1:00, 4:00, 7:00, 10:00
Timbuktu (Le chagrin des oiseaux) (PG-13) 97 mins. Fri. 5:20, 7:40, 9:45; Sat.-Sun. 3:00, 5:20, 7:40, 9:45; Mon.-Tue. 3:00, 5:20, 7:40, 9:45; Wed. 3:00, 9:45; Thu. 3:00, 5:20, 7:40, 9:45
Chappie: The IMAX Experience (R) 120 mins. Fri.-Sat. noon, 3:00, 6:00, 9:00
Whiplash (R) 105 mins. Fri.-Thu. 5:00, 7:20
The DUFF (PG-13) 100 mins. Fri.-Sat. noon, 2:30, 5:00, 7:45, 10:15
AMC Loews Cineplex Uptown
Fifty Shades of Grey (R) 125 mins. Fri. 1:45, 4:35, 7:30, 10:20; Sat. 10:45, 1:45, 4:35, 7:30, 10:20
3426 Connecticut Ave. NW
West End Cinema 2301 M St. NW (202)419-3456 The Homestretch (NR) 89 mins. Wed. 7:00
(202) 333-FILM #799 Chappie (R) 120 mins. Fri. 1:30, 4:30, 7:30, 10:30; Sat. 10:30, 1:30, 4:30, 7:30, 10:30; Sun. 1:30, 4:30, 7:30; Mon.-Thu. 4:30, 7:30
Cinderella: The IMAX Experience (PG) Thu. 7:00, 9:45
Focus (R) 104 mins. Fri. 12:30, 1:30, 3:00, 4:00, 5:30, 7:00, 8:00, 9:30, 10:30; Sat. 10:40, 12:30, 1:30, 3:00, 4:00, 5:30, 7:00, 8:00, 9:30, 10:30 The Imitation Game (PG-13) 114 mins. Fri. 1:10, 4:10, 7:00, 9:40; Sat. 10:20, 1:10, 4:10, 6:45, 9:40 Kingsman: The Secret Service (R) 129 mins. Fri. 1:15, 4:15, 7:15, 10:15; Sat. 10:15, 1:15, 4:15, 7:15, 10:15 The Lazarus Effect (PG-13) 83 mins. Fri.-Sat. 1:35, 3:50, 6:15, 8:30, 10:40 McFarland, USA (PG) 128 mins. Fri.-Sat. 1:00, 4:00, 7:10; Sun.-Thu. 1:40, 4:40, 7:50 The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (PG) 122 mins. Fri. 1:20, 4:20, 7:20, 10:20; Sat. 10:30, 1:20, 4:20, 7:20, 10:20; Sun. 4:20, 7:20 Still Alice (PG-13) 99 mins. Fri. 10:10; Sat. 10:25, 10:10 Unfinished Business (R) 90 mins. Fri. noon, 2:20, 4:40, 7:00, 9:20; Sat. 11:00, noon, 2:20, 4:40, 7:00, 9:20; Sun. 4:40, 7:00
AMC Mazza Gallerie 5300 Wisconsin Ave. NW (202) 537-9553 American Sniper (R) 134 mins. Fri.-Sat. 1:10, 4:10, 7:20, 10:25; Sun. 4:10, 7:20; Mon. 1:10, 4:10, 7:20; Tue. 1:10, 4:10; Wed. 1:10, 4:10, 7:20; Thu. 1:00, 4:00 Bolshoi Ballet: Romeo and Juliet (NR) 135 mins. Sun. 12:55 Cinderella (PG) 105 mins. Thu. 7:00
Twentieth Century (1934) (NR) 91 mins. Sat. 1:00; Mon. 7:00
The DUFF (PG-13) 100 mins. Fri.-Sat. 12:20, 2:50, 5:20, 7:50, 10:20; Sun.-Thu. 12:20, 2:50, 5:20, 7:50
DISTRICT
Fifty Shades of Grey (R) 125 mins. Fri. 1:20, 4:20, 7:10, 10:00; Sat. 10:30, 1:20, 4:20, 7:10, 10:00; Sun. 10:30, 1:20, 4:20, 7:10; Mon.-Thu. 1:40, 4:40, 7:40
Angelika Pop-Up at Union Market 550 Penn St. NE (571)512-3313 Bolshoi Ballet: Romeo and Juliet (NR) 135 mins. Sun. midnight Everly (R) 92 mins. Fri.-Sun. 3:15, 10:00; Mon. 3:15; Tue. 3:15; Thu. 3:15 King Lear (Stratford Festival) (NR) 175 mins. Tue. 7:00 The Last Five Years (PG-13) 94 mins. Fri.-Mon. 5:15, 7:45; Tue. 5:15; Wed.-Thu. 5:15, 7:45 Song of the Sea (PG) 93 mins. Fri.-Mon. 11:15, 1:15; Tue. 11:15, 1:15; Wed. 11:15; Thu. 11:15, 1:15
Focus (R) 104 mins. Fri. 12:30, 3:00, 5:30, 8:00, 10:30; Sat. 10:00, 12:30, 3:00, 5:30, 8:00, 10:30; Sun. 10:00, 12:30, 3:00, 5:30, 8:00; Mon.-Thu. 12:30, 3:00, 5:30, 8:00 Kingsman: The Secret Service (R) 129 mins. Fri. 1:30, 4:30, 7:40, 10:35; Sat. 10:20, 1:30, 4:30, 7:40, 10:35; Sun. 10:20, 1:30, 4:30, 7:40; Mon.-Thu. 1:20, 4:20, 7:30 McFarland, USA (PG) 128 mins. Fri. 1:00, 4:00, 7:00, 9:55; Sat. 10:00, 1:00, 4:00, 7:00, 9:55; Sun. 10:00, 1:00, 4:00, 7:00; Mon.-Thu. 1:00, 4:00, 7:00 The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (PG) 122 mins. Fri. 1:50, 4:40, 7:30, 10:20; Sat. 11:00, 1:50, 4:40, 7:30, 10:20; Sun. 11:00, 1:50, 4:40, 7:30; Mon.-Thu. noon, 2:50, 5:40, 8:30
washingtoncitypaper.com march 6, 2015 51
SHOWTIMES (Continued) Times currenT as of 4 p.m. Wednesday Avalon Theatre 5612 Connecticut Ave. NW (202) 966-6000 Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity (NR) 83 mins. Wed. 8:00 Leviathan (R) 140 mins. Fri.-Tue. 1:15, 7:45; Wed. 1:15; Thu. 1:15, 7:45 Mr. Turner (R) 149 mins. Fri.-Thu. 4:30 Paddington (PG) 95 mins. Sat. 10:00 The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (PG) 122 mins. Fri.-Thu. 11:30, 2:20, 5:10, 8:00
Cinderella (PG) 105 mins. Thu. 7:00, 10:00 The DUFF (PG-13) 100 mins. Fri.-Wed. 1:10, 4:10, 7:10, 9:50 Fifty Shades of Grey (R) 125 mins. Fri.-Sun. 1:40, 4:40, 7:40, 10:50; Mon.-Wed. 1:40, 4:40, 7:40, 10:40 Focus (R) 104 mins. Fri.-Sat. 11:30, 12:15, 2:10, 3:05, 4:45, 5:40, 7:30, 8:20, 10:05, 11:10; Sun. 11:30, 12:35, 2:10, 3:05, 4:45, 5:40, 7:30, 8:20, 10:05, 11:00; Mon.-Wed. 11:30, 12:15, 2:10, 3:05, 4:45, 5:40, 7:30, 8:20, 10:05, 10:50
E Street Cinema
Kingsman: The Secret Service (R) 129 mins. Fri.-Sat. 12:20, 2:00, 3:40, 5:00, 7:00, 8:10, 10:10, 11:20; Sun.-Wed. 12:20, 2:00, 3:40, 5:00, 7:00, 8:10, 10:10
555 11th St. NW. (202) 452-7672
The Lazarus Effect (PG-13) 83 mins. Fri.-Wed. 11:40, 12:10, 2:35, 5:15, 7:45, 10:00
Ballet 422 (PG) 72 mins. Fri. 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30, 9:30; Sat.-Sun. 11:30, 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30, 9:30; Mon.-Thu. 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30, 9:30
McFarland, USA (PG) 128 mins. Fri. 1:00, 4:20, 7:35, 10:40; Sat. 5:40, 8:40; Sun. 1:00, 4:20, 7:35, 10:40; Mon. 1:00, 4:20, 7:35, 10:35; Tue. 1:00, 4:20, 10:35; Wed. 1:00, 4:20, 7:35, 10:35
Birdman (R) 119 mins. Fri. 12:50, 3:50, 6:50, 9:35; Sat. 10:15, 3:50, 6:50, 9:35; Sun. 10:15, 12:50, 3:50, 6:50, 9:25; Mon.-Thu. 12:50, 3:50, 6:50, 9:25
Run All Night (R) Thu. 7:00, 10:00
Gangs of New York (R) 164 mins. Fri.-Sat. 11:30
Selma (PG-13) 127 mins. Fri. noon, 9:40; Sat. noon, 2:30, 9:40; Sun. noon, 9:40; Mon.-Wed. noon, 3:00, 6:15, 9:25
The Imitation Game (PG-13) 114 mins. Fri. 1:05, 4:05, 7:05, 9:55; Sat. 10:25, 1:05, 4:05, 7:05, 9:55; Sun. 10:25, 4:05, 7:05, 9:35; Mon.-Thu. 1:05, 4:05, 7:05, 9:35
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water 3D (PG) 93 mins. Fri.-Sat. 4:50, 9:40; Sun. 5:15, 10:10; Mon.-Wed. 4:50, 9:40
My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro) (G) 87 mins. Sat.-Sun. 1:00
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (PG) 93 mins. Fri.-Sat. 11:50, 2:20, 7:20; Sun. 12:20, 2:45, 7:40; Mon.-Wed. 11:50, 2:20, 7:20
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika) (PG) 118 mins. Sat.-Sun. 10:30 The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (PG) 122 mins. Fri. 12:45, 1:45, 3:45, 4:45, 6:45, 7:30, 7:45, 9:45, 10:30; Sat. 10:15, 12:45, 1:45, 3:45, 4:45, 6:45, 7:45, 9:45, 10:30; Sun. 10:15, 12:45, 1:45, 3:45, 4:45, 6:45, 7:45, 9:30; Mon.-Thu. 12:45, 1:45, 3:45, 4:45, 6:45, 7:45, 9:30 Still Alice (PG-13) 99 mins. Fri. 1:20, 4:20, 7:20, 10:00; Sat. 10:20, 1:20, 4:20, 7:20, 10:00; Sun. 10:20, 1:20, 4:20, 7:20, 9:50; Mon.-Wed. 1:20, 4:20, 7:20, 9:50; Thu. 1:20, 4:20, 9:50 What We Do in the Shadows (NR) 86 mins. Fri. 1:15, 3:30, 5:45, 8:00, 10:15; Sat. 11:00, 1:15, 3:30, 5:45, 8:00, 10:15; Sun. 11:00, 1:15, 3:30, 5:45, 8:00, 10:00; Mon.-Thu. 1:15, 3:30, 5:45, 8:00, 10:00 Wild Tales (Relatos salvajes) (R) 122 mins. Fri.-Sat. 1:30, 4:15, 7:00, 9:50; Sun. 10:40, 1:30, 4:15, 7:00, 9:35; Mon.-Thu. 1:30, 4:15, 7:00, 9:35
Regal Gallery Place 707 7th St. NW (202) 393-2121 American Sniper (R) 134 mins. Fri.-Wed. 12:40, 4:00, 7:25, 10:30 Chappie (R) 120 mins. Fri.-Sat. 11:35, 1:15, 2:30, 3:20, 4:15, 5:25, 6:30, 7:15, 8:30, 10:15, 11:30; Sun. 11:35, 1:15, 2:30, 3:20, 4:15, 5:25, 6:30, 7:15, 8:30, 10:15; Mon. 11:35, 1:15, 2:30, 4:15, 5:25, 7:15, 8:30, 10:15; Tue. 11:35, 12:50, 2:30, 3:40, 5:25, 7:25, 8:30, 10:15; Wed. 11:35, 1:15, 2:30, 4:15, 5:25, 7:15, 8:30, 10:15; Thu. 1:15, 4:15, 7:15, 10:15
Unfinished Business (R) 90 mins. Fri.-Thu. 12:30, 3:00, 5:30, 8:00, 10:30
MARYLAND Bethesda Row Cinema 7235 Woodmont Ave., Bethesda (301) 652-7273 Birdman (R) 119 mins. Fri. 1:30, 4:20, 7:10, 9:55; Sat.-Sun. 10:40, 1:30, 4:20, 7:10, 9:55; Mon.-Thu. 1:30, 4:20, 7:10, 9:55 Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (NR) 115 mins. Fri. 1:20, 4:10, 7:00, 9:40; Sat.-Sun. 10:25, 1:20, 4:10, 7:00, 9:40; Mon.-Thu. 1:20, 4:10, 7:00, 9:40 The Godfather (R) 175 mins. Wed. 4:00, 7:00 The Imitation Game (PG-13) 114 mins. Fri. 1:40, 4:30, 7:20, 10:00; Sat.-Sun. 10:45, 1:40, 4:30, 7:20, 10:00; Mon.-Thu. 1:40, 4:30, 7:20, 10:00 Royal Shakespeare Company: Love’s Labour’s Lost (NR) 155 mins. Mon. 11:00 Still Alice (PG-13) 99 mins. Fri. 1:50, 4:40, 7:30, 9:45; Sat. 10:50, 1:50, 4:40, 7:30, 9:45; Sun. 2:20, 4:40, 7:30, 9:45; Mon.-Tue. 1:50, 4:40, 7:30, 9:45; Wed. 1:50, 4:40, 7:30; Thu. 1:50, 4:40, 7:30, 9:45 Timbuktu (Le chagrin des oiseaux) (PG-13) 97 mins. Fri. 1:05, 3:55, 6:45, 9:35; Sat.-Sun. 10:30, 1:05, 3:55, 6:45, 9:35; Mon.-Tue. 1:05, 3:55, 6:45, 9:35; Wed. 1:05, 3:55, 9:35; Thu. 1:05, 3:55, 6:45, 9:35
52 march 6, 2015 washingtoncitypaper.com
What We Do in the Shadows (NR) 86 mins. Fri. 2:00, 4:50, 7:40, 10:05; Sat.-Sun. 10:55, 2:00, 4:50, 7:40, 10:05; Mon.-Tue. 2:00, 4:50, 7:40, 10:05; Wed. 2:00, 7:40, 10:05; Thu. 2:00, 4:50, 7:40, 10:05 Whiplash (R) 105 mins. Fri. 1:00, 3:50, 6:40, 9:30; Sat.-Sun. 10:35, 1:00, 3:50, 6:40, 9:30; Mon.-Thu. 1:00, 3:50, 6:40, 9:30 Wild Tales (Relatos salvajes) (R) 122 mins. Fri. 1:10, 4:00, 6:50, 9:50; Sat.-Sun. 10:20, 1:10, 4:00, 6:50, 9:50; Mon.-Thu. 1:10, 4:00, 6:50, 9:50
Majestic 20 & IMAX 900 Ellsworth Drive, Silver Spring (301) 565-8884 A la mala (PG-13) 99 mins. Fri.-Sat. 12:25, 3:05, 5:45, 8:25, 11:05; Sun. 12:25, 3:05, 5:45, 8:25; Mon. 12:25, 3:05, 8:25; Tue.-Thu. 12:25, 3:05, 5:45, 8:25 American Sniper (R) 134 mins. Fri.-Thu. 1:45, 4:50, 7:55, 10:55 Chappie (R) 120 mins. Fri. noon, 3:00, 6:00, 7:30, 9:00, 10:30, midnight; Sat. 1:30, 4:30, 7:30, 10:30; Sun. noon, 1:30, 4:30, 7:30, 10:30; Mon. 1:15, 4:05, 7:30, 10:30; Tue.-Thu. 1:30, 4:30, 7:30, 10:30 Chappie: The IMAX Experience (R) 120 mins. Fri.-Thu. 1:00, 4:00, 7:00, 10:00 The DUFF (PG-13) 100 mins. Fri.-Sun. 11:05, 1:55, 4:25, 6:55, 9:25; Mon.-Thu. 1:55, 4:25, 6:55, 9:25 Fifty Shades of Grey (R) 125 mins. Fri.-Thu. 1:25, 4:30, 7:30, 10:25 Focus (R) 104 mins. Fri.-Sat. 11:20, 12:20, 2:00, 2:50, 3:20, 4:35, 5:30, 6:05, 7:20, 8:20, 8:50, 10:20, 11:00, 11:30; Sun. 11:20, 12:20, 2:00, 2:50, 3:20, 4:35, 5:30, 6:05, 7:20, 8:20, 8:50, 10:20, 11:00; Mon.-Thu. 12:20, 2:00, 2:50, 3:20, 4:35, 5:30, 6:05, 7:20, 8:20, 8:50, 10:20, 11:00 Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (R) 93 mins. Fri.-Thu. 10:05 Jupiter Ascending (PG-13) 127 mins. Fri.-Sun. 11:15, 2:20, 8:15; Mon.-Thu. 2:20, 8:15 Jupiter Ascending 3D (PG-13) 127 mins. Fri.-Sat. 5:15, 11:25; Sun.-Thu. 5:15 Kingsman: The Secret Service (R) 129 mins. Fri.-Thu. 12:30, 1:10, 4:20, 6:40, 7:40, 10:45 The Lazarus Effect (PG-13) 83 mins. Fri.-Sat. 12:10, 3:10, 5:40, 7:50, 10:10; Sun. 3:10, 5:40, 7:50, 10:10; Mon.-Thu. 12:10, 3:10, 5:40, 7:50, 10:10 McFarland, USA (PG) 128 mins. Fri.-Sat. 1:15, 5:00, 8:10, 11:35; Sun.-Thu. 1:15, 5:00, 8:10 Paddington (PG) 95 mins. Fri.-Sun. 11:50, 2:25, 4:55; Mon. noon, 2:35, 5:05; Tue.-Thu. noon, 2:35, 5:05, 7:30, 9:50 The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water 3D (PG) 93 mins. Fri.-Sun. 11:00, 1:30, 6:30; Mon.-Thu. 1:30, 6:30 The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (PG) 93 mins. Fri.-Sun. 11:30, 2:05, 4:05, 4:45, 7:35, 9:05, 9:55; Mon.-Thu. 12:05, 2:25, 4:05, 5:00, 7:35, 9:05, 9:55 Still Alice (PG-13) 99 mins. Fri.-Sat. 1:25, 3:35, 6:15, 8:45, 11:15; Sun.-Thu. 1:25, 3:35, 6:15, 8:45 Taken 3 (PG-13) 103 mins. Fri.-Thu. 3:50, 9:50 The Theory of Everything (PG-13) 123 mins. Fri.-Thu. 1:05, 3:55, 7:05 Unfinished Business (R) 90 mins. Fri.-Sat. noon, 2:15, 4:40, 7:15, 9:45, midnight; Sun.-Thu. noon, 2:15, 4:40, 7:15, 9:45
VIRGINIA AMC Courthouse 2150 Claredon Blvd., Arlington (703) 998-4262 American Sniper (R) 134 mins. Fri.-Sun. 1:00, 4:00, 7:00, 10:05; Mon.-Thu. 1:00, 4:00, 7:00, 10:00 Chappie (R) 120 mins. Fri.-Sat. 11:00, 1:15, 2:00, 4:15, 5:00, 7:15, 8:00, 10:15, 11:00; Sun. 11:00, 1:15, 2:00, 4:15, 5:00, 7:15, 8:00, 10:15; Mon.-Thu. 1:30, 2:30, 4:30, 5:30, 7:30, 8:30, 10:30 The DUFF (PG-13) 100 mins. Fri.-Sun. 10:45, 1:15, 3:45, 6:30, 9:15; Mon.-Thu. 1:05, 3:45, 6:45, 9:15 Fifty Shades of Grey (R) 125 mins. Fri.-Sat. 10:30, 1:30, 4:30, 7:45, 10:45; Sun. 10:30, 1:30, 4:30, 7:40, 10:30; Mon.-Thu. 12:45, 4:15, 7:15, 10:05 Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (R) 93 mins. Fri.-Sun. 6:45, 9:05; Mon.-Thu. 7:35, 10:05 McFarland, USA (PG) 128 mins. Fri.-Sat. 11:05, 2:10, 5:05, 8:05, 11:00; Sun. 11:05, 2:10, 5:05, 8:05; Mon.-Thu. 1:10, 4:10, 7:15, 10:20 Paddington (PG) 95 mins. Fri.-Sun. 11:15, 1:45, 4:15; Mon.-Thu. noon, 2:30, 5:00 Unfinished Business (R) 90 mins. Fri.-Sun. 11:45, 2:15, 4:45, 7:30, 10:00; Mon.-Thu. 12:15, 2:45, 5:10, 7:45, 10:15
AMC Loews Cineplex Shirlington 2772 S. Randolph Road, Arlington (703) 333-FILM #756 Birdman (R) 119 mins. Fri. 10:30; Sat. 11:30, 10:30; Sun. 11:30; Mon.Thu. 1:30 The Imitation Game (PG-13) 114 mins. Fri.-Sun. 2:15, 7:45; Mon.-Thu. 7:45 The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (PG) 122 mins. Fri. 12:15, 1:00, 3:15, 4:00, 5:00, 6:15, 7:00, 9:15, 10:00; Sat. 9:15, 10:00, 12:15, 1:00, 3:15, 4:00, 5:00, 6:15, 7:00, 9:15, 10:00; Sun. 9:15, 10:00, 12:15, 1:00, 3:15, 4:00, 5:00, 6:15, 7:00; Mon.-Thu. 12:15, 1:00, 2:15, 3:15, 4:00, 5:00, 6:15, 7:00 Still Alice (PG-13) 99 mins. Fri.-Thu. 1:15, 6:30 The Theory of Everything (PG-13) 123 mins. Fri. 3:45, 9:00; Sat. 10:30, 3:45, 9:00; Sun. 10:30, 3:45; Mon.-Thu. 3:45 Timbuktu (Le chagrin des oiseaux) (PG-13) 97 mins. Fri. 4:15, 9:30; Sat. 11:00, 4:15, 9:30; Sun. 11:00, 4:15; Mon.-Thu. 4:15 What We Do in the Shadows (NR) 86 mins. Fri. 12:30, 3:00, 5:15, 7:30, 9:45; Sat. 10:15, 12:30, 3:00, 5:15, 7:30, 9:45; Sun. 10:15, 12:30, 3:00, 5:15, 7:30; Mon.-Thu. 12:30, 3:00, 5:15, 7:30 Whiplash (R) 105 mins. Fri.-Sun. 1:30, 6:45; Mon.-Thu. 6:45 Wild Tales (Relatos salvajes) (R) 122 mins. Fri. 1:45, 4:30, 7:15, 10:15; Sat. 10:45, 1:45, 4:30, 7:15, 10:15; Sun. 10:45, 1:45, 4:30, 7:15; Mon.-Thu. 1:45, 4:30, 7:15