City Lights: This Week's Best
Week of Nov. 27 - Dec. 3, 2008
Friday: Ed Begley Jr.
Except for Christmas (wrapping paper, empty plastic clamshells) or July Fourth (tractor pulls, fireworks), Black Friday is probably the year’s ecological nadir. A perfect confluence of boredom and low, low prices, the day after Thanksgiving has made firing up the Tahoe and hitting the sales seem almost virtuous (thrift is a virtue). But with the economy plunging as quickly as a GM exec’s hopes for scoring the G4 for a holiday jaunt to St. Barts, maybe it’s time to paint Black Friday green…with Ed Begley Jr.! The erstwhile St. Elsewhere star, author of a musical about César Chávez, and 9/11-truth-movement advocate will lead a bike tour of D.C. during which he’ll talk up the benefits of programmable thermostats, ceiling fans, and efficient heating. What, you’re gonna go see Fastball at Jammin’ Java instead? Go for a bike ride with one of America’s great character actors, and you’ll have a crackin’, low-carbon-footprint story to gift the family with come the holidays.
THE RIDE BEGINS AT 10:30 A.M. AT 7TH ST. AND JEFFERSON DR. SW. FREE. RSVP TO INFO@CHANGEHAPPENSINDEGREES.ORG.
Saturday: Elena Volkova
Elena Volkova’s work is based on a child’s exercise—taking pictures of the clouds below out the window of airplanes—but her presentation of those images is sophisticated and mature. Volkova prints her cloud pictures on large sheets of crisp white paper with white borders, allowing the faint images to fade into the paper itself. In some prints, the clouds are so white it’s difficult to tell if you’re looking at anything at all. That’s exactly how Volkova aims to manipulate, and also where she’s at her best: She makes us ponder what constitutes an image and whether the nothingness we glimpse contains something, after all.
THE EXHIBITION IS ON VIEW FROM NOON TO 6 P.M. TUESDAYS THROUGH SATURDAYS TO SATURDAY, DEC. 20, AT FLASHPOINT, 916 G ST. NW. FREE. (202) 315-1305.
Sunday: Q-Tip and the Cool Kids
Q-Tip must experience serious déjà vu when listening to the Cool Kids. Throughout their recent EP, The Bake Sale, Chicago’s Chuck Inglish and Mikey Rocks repeatedly pilfer the Nike-sporting, pager-wearing style that Q-Tip prescribed as a member of A Tribe Called Quest in the early ’90s. The duo is among hip-hop’s latest generation of Golden Age glorifiers, filtering old-school nostalgia through a modern hipster lens, but though their digital, minimal beats pay plenty of homage to hip-hop’s NYC forefathers, they have more in common with hyphy’s trunk-rattling bump. When they rap about “Bringin’ ’88 Back,” their attitude supports Q-Tip’s bebop/hip-hop comparison at the opening of 1992’s The Low End Theory: “Don’t you know things go in cycles?”
Q-TIP PERFORMS WITH THE COOL KIDS AND PACIFIC DIVISION AT 7 P.M. AT THE 9:30 CLUB, 815 V ST. NW. $32.50. (202) 265-0930.
Monday: Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities
Painter Georgia O’Keeffe and photographer Ansel Adams first met in 1929, and in the years that followed they occasionally shared subject matter—both, for instance, were inspired by the same adobe church in Taos, N. M. More often, though, they just regarded nature with equally hot-blooded gazes, even if Adams’ lush tree roots and leaves have nothing on O’Keeffe’s highly sexualized flowers. The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities” doesn’t make a big clanging noise about such intersections; it wastes little effort trying to match the artists petal for petal or pueblo for pueblo. Instead, the spare gallery space keeps the artists at a distance from each other, inviting visitors to make looser metaphorical connections. Adams’ curled dunes and snowdrifts, echoed by O’Keeffe’s curved rocks and shells, make clear that what the two mostly had in common was a need to seek out the essence of a wilderness that constantly surprised and humbled them.
THE EXHIBITION IS ON VIEW FROM 11:30 A.M. TO 7 P.M. DAILY TO SUNDAY, JAN. 4, 2009, AT THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, 8TH AND F ST. NW. FREE. (202) 633-1000.
Tuesday: Washington Metropolitan Philharmonic
How did a long-lost 200-year-old Beethoven concerto end up with the Washington Metropolitan Philharmonic? The Oboe Concert in F, written when Ludwig was 22 and a student of Haydn, had never been seen before it was discovered in the ’60s. Musicologists have slowly pieced it together from the composer’s notes found in the London and Bonn libraries. Oboist (and self-proclaimed inventor of the debit card) H. David Meyers first performed its adagio movement in Russia with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. But it has never been heard live in the United States, which makes the Mount Vernon–based semi-professional orchestra a somewhat surprising choice for its national debut. In fact, Meyers has long co-hosted this annual concert fundraiser for Children’s Hospital with WMP conductor Ulysses James. Meyers “has some interesting plans in mind,” says James, and hopes to “see the reaction with the general public” to what he promises will be an unorthodox interpretation before taking it on the road for a full tour.
THE PERFORMANCE BEGINS AT 8 P.M. AT THE STRATHMORE MUSIC CENTER, 5301 TUCKERMAN LANE, NORTH BETHESDA. $45–$75. (301) 581-5100.
Wednesday: Edie Sedgwick
Named after the brazen, ill-fated debutante who hung out with Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, Edie Sedgwick is the high-concept electro-pop project of local musician (and regular City Paper contributor) Justin Moyer. As the self-proclaimed “transgendered reincarnation” of Sedgwick, Moyer delivers sexually charged, whimsical dance songs that reveal his penchant for satirizing vapid pop-culture figures on songs like “Mary-Kate Olsen,” “Angelina Jolie,” and “Bambi/G.W. Bush.” You can hear those tracks on his third album, Things Are Getting Sinister and Sinisterer, produced by Ian MacKaye, but Edie Sedgwick is best experienced in the flesh: Moyer’s live performance unfolds like a trashy, flamboyant fashion show led by a cross-dressing prankster desperately seeking catharsis through bass and drum pulsations.
EDIE SEDGWICK PERFORMS WITH GESTURES AND BIG GOLD BELT AT 9 P.M. AT THE BLACK CAT BACKSTAGE, 1811 14TH ST. NW, $8. (202) 667-4490.
Thursday: Jane Franklin Dance
Jane Franklin Dance has a wealth of experience exploring the intersection between dance and performance art. Last year’s Temporal Interference featured three dancers stepping gracefully around a hulking sculpture, triggering changes to the soundtrack in real time. With Incidence, the area’s most forward-thinking troupe revisits the same questions: Do the dancers dictate the flow of the piece, or are they simply responding to stimuli within their environment? This time out, artist Howard Connelly provides the life-size object in the center of Flashpoint’s Mead Theatre Lab, which spins as the dancers orbit its base. Music—in the form of Gina Biver’s tailored soundscape—provides a palpable link to the here-and-now as the dancers alternately fight against (and assist) what seems like a giant impediment. Considering the company’s recent experiences dodging bodies in motion at a skate bowl in the groundbreaking Breaking Ground, finding a rhythmic pulse here ought to be a snap. The show’s run, which begins tonight, continues through Dec. 14.
JANE FRANKLIN DANCE PERFORMS AT 8 P.M. AT FLASHPOINT, 916 G ST. NW. DONATION REQUESTED. (703) 933-1111.
