City Lights: This Week's Best
Week of Aug. 15 - 21, 2008
Friday: El Vez
El Vez, The “Mexican Elvis,” is probably the most famous high-concept Elvis impersonator around, and he’s definitely the one with the most impressive place in underground music history. Watch the seminal Los Angeles punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, and you’ll see him in his pre-Presleyian incarnation as Robert Lopez, member of attitudinal synth-punk act Catholic Discipline. Dig deeper into punk history, and you’ll find he’s a founding member of the Zeros. In the years since Lopez took on the El Vez persona, he’s brought a punk mind-set to the world of Kingly simulacra: His larger-than-life, kitsch-meets-critique act employs sneers and pelvic thrusts that once left parents petrified in the service of more meaningful commentary. Rewriting Presley’s classic “Suspicious Minds” as a scathing attack on immigration policy in “Immigration Time,” he raises questions about race that surely never graced Graceland. EL VEZ PERFORMS WITH HUMAN HANDS AT 9 P.M. AT THE BLACK CAT, 1811 14TH ST. NEW. $15. (202) 667-4490.
Saturday: Marine Chamber Orchestra
Felix Mendelssohn was one of those kids you hated in middle school. His dad was a banker, his grandfather was a famous Socratic philosopher who inspired the Jewish Enlightenment, his sister married some hotshot mathematician—you know the type. Felix himself was a child prodigy who drew comparisons to Mozart and began writing major orchestral pieces while still in diapers. Whether it was piano lessons in Paris or aesthetics classes in Berlin, nothing was too good for daddy’s little man, who still found time to learn four languages and hobnob with the likes of Hegel and Goethe. He also composed 12 sinfonias (Italian-inspired baroque symphonies) by the time he was 14, about the same age you were devoting your considerably more limited creative talents to bad mix tapes and acne cover-up. The Marine Chamber Orchestra performs his Sinfonia No. 12 in G minor, along with the second of only two violin concerti written by Bach, and Dvorak’s Serenade in E for Strings. THE MARINE CHAMBER ORCHESTRA PERFORMS AT 7:30 P.M. AT NORTHERN VIRGINIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE’S SCHLESINGER CONCERT HALL AND ARTS CENTER, 3001 N. BEAUREGARD ST., Alexandria. FREE. (202) 433-4011.
Sunday: Dan Friel
“Noise music” isn’t often uttered in the same breath as “accessible,” but Brooklyn’s Dan Friel has routinely found ways to connect the two. As the frontman for the quartet Parts & Labor, Friel has penned fist-pumping anthems for several years, using annihilated keyboard lines to complicate the group’s songwriting. The increased emphasis on pop-punk vocal hooks since its 2003 debut, Groundswell, may not be particularly appealing for noise purists, but it’s certainly exposed the band to a larger indie-rock constituency. Friel’s first solo full-length is a place where everyone can get along, championing addictive electronic melodies among breakbeat blasts and digital overload. The fittingly-titled Ghost Town plays like an 8-bit epic Western, crafted from layered choruses of an old toy keyboard but still packing the punch of a Parts & Labor track. “Noise pop” may seem like an oxymoron, but in Friel’s case, it works. DAN FRIEL PERFORMS WITH INSECT FACTORY, MIND OVER MATTER MUSIC OVER MIND, AND PROJECTION: ZERO AT 9:30 P.M. AT THE VELVET LOUNGE, 915 U ST. NW. $8. (202) 462-3213.
Monday: McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Warren Beatty hadn’t heard of Robert Altman before the turbulent production of 1971’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and the first, final, and initially unloved movie they made together was nobody’s idea of a classic. Nearly 40 years later, the pairing of a pretty-boy producer/star and the visionary auteur behind the modern ensemble film makes more sense. The anti-establishment cred Altman earned with M*A*S*H prevented Beatty from turning into the bourgeois caricature he played on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and the future almost-presidential-candidate gives the film a center some of Altman’s post-Nashville efforts lack. (Those who fell asleep during A Prairie Home Companion, you know who you are.) Throw in Julie Christie, a dubious view of Christianity, and a downbeat ending, and you’ve got a recipe for a gothic anti-Western not seen again in Hollywood until Unforgiven—and sure as hell not in shootouts like last year’s 3:10 to Yuma remake. MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER SHOWS AT 7 P.M. AT THE AFI SILVER THEATRE AND CULTURAL CENTER, 8633 COLESVILLE ROAD, SILVER SPRING. $10. (301) 495-6700.
Tuesday: Breena Clarke
In her new novel, Stand the Storm, D.C. author Breena Clarke once again takes a clear-eyed look at her hometown’s history of slavery and racism. Her measured prose re-creates antebellum Georgetown, telling the story of Annie Coats and her children, Gabriel and Ellen. Needleworkers who are able buy their freedom, the Coatses find that emancipation at a time when most blacks are still enslaved means that every day is a hustle, and the family struggles with devastating discrimination and injustice. Clarke’s previous novel, River, Cross My Heart, also set in Georgetown, became a best seller and an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 1999. Almost a decade later, Stand the Storm is a fulfilling follow-up, written with the same restraint and sensitivity that made her earlier novel such a hit. BREENA CLARKE DISCUSSES AND SIGNS COPIES OF HER WORK AT 7 P.M. AT POLITICS & PROSE, 5015 CONNECTICUT AVE. NW. FREE. (202) 364-1919.
Wednesday: Aesop Rock
Aesop Rock has improved his diction considerably since his celebration of the 9-to-5 grind on 2001’s Labor Days. He no longer swallows whole words while he spits, though his rhymes—generally, metaphors about the neurotic obsessions he shares with Woody Allen (sex and death)—remain willfully dense and obtuse. Aesop Rock’s core constituency prefers its man to retain his air of mystery; there is actually great fun in being able to decode only one-tenth of what the orally fixated emcee is going on about, even with the benefit of a lyric sheet and a dictionary. On last year’s return to form, None Shall Pass, Aesop Rock ditched the nebulous commercial overtures of his recent work in favor of spare backing tracks from frequent collaborators El-P and Blockhead. On “Citronella,” he simultaneously pokes fun at mass media and grouses about the decline of Western civilization. Pop a Prozac and try not to get too bummed. AESOP ROCK PERFORMS WITH ROB SONIC AND DJ BIG WIZ AT 7 P.M. AT THE 9:30 CLUB, 815 V ST. NW. $20. (202) 265-0930.
Thursday: Paul Auster
“Fuck Iraq,” says a soldier in Paul Auster’s new novel, Man in the Dark. “This is America, and America is fighting America.” This civil war the man describes takes place solely in the head of August Brill, a retired book critic, and the reasons for the bloodshed read like a DNC revenge fantasy scripted by Michael Bay: Americans responded to the 2000 election not with grudging acceptance but open revolt, as various states secede and attempt to stave off attacks from belligerent “Federals.” Brill’s dream, though, matters less to Auster than Brill’s reasons for dreaming it, and while Man in the Dark has its share of noirish, postapocalyptic war scenes, the novel’s center is Brill’s wide-awake concern for his granddaughter, Katya, whose boyfriend recently died from violent and (until the very end) undisclosed causes. No writer is working harder than Auster to give America an existential literature to call its own, and Brill has a ruminative and slightly despairing mood that recalls Camus’ antiheros. Yet Man in the Dark isn’t a headlong leap into emptiness: Instead of revisiting the woolly abstractions of his previous novel, last year’s Travels in the Scriptorium, Auster treats the theme of isolation straightforwardly, studying the emotional costs of war through Brill’s own vivid memories and his family’s own recent heartbreak. In the process, he arrives at the provocative notion that war stories and love stories aren’t as different as we might like to think. AUSTER DISCUSSES AND SIGNS COPIES OF HIS WORK AT 7 P.M. AT POLITICS AND PROSE, 5015 CONNECTICUT AVE. NW. FREE. (202) 364-1919.
