Results tagged “ahistory”

Written by DCist contributor Benjamin Schuman-Stoler Last week in our “revisiting sites we’ve walked by a hundred times" series we presented the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This week, we’ll look at that huge phallus in the exact center of the original D.C. map -- the Washington Monument. Screaming nothing but glory and testament, it is the classic D.C. monument. But we know its background isn’t as simple as its geometric profile. The National Park Service commissioned...

At the heart, it's about blood. With Cronenberg, it's always about blood. No other director of his stature has built a career out of such a fascination with blood, and the other assorted slick bodily fluids that course through Cronenberg's filmography. What makes him unique, and apart from the average gorehound, is his coldly clinical presentation of the warm organic matters that make up life, and the deeper truths he uses them, slyly, as an avenue to reveal. Eastern Promises is about blood, but in the familial as well as the literal sense. For the director, it's quite clearly a companion piece to (and just as good as, if not better than) 2005's fantastic A History of Violence. Both films focus closely on the importance of family. The family you come from, the family you choose, and the families that choose you.

>> Black Cat plays host to Oakland's Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, who'll be pounding out their avant-rock on a few homemade instruments while performing puppet shows and giving pseudo-scientific scholarly presentations. What's not to like? Stinking Lizaveta, an intense experimental trio from Philly, will kick things off. $12, 8 p.m. >> Tonight is your last chance to stop by the Smithsonian American Art Museum to catch their lecture series on The Media Arts: A History....

>> Music junkies raised in an era of candy-coated pop or Seattle-based indie should check out a screening of The Day The Country Died: A History of Anarcho-Punk 1980-1984 at the Black Cat tonight. The flick features rare performances caught on tape before the era of ubiquitous personal video recorders, along with interviews from artists and activists. $5, 9 p.m.

MONDAY Murder, urban intrigue, and the promiscuous pen of Edgar Allan Poe are the ingredients of Daniel Stashower’s treatise on the evolution of the detective story, The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allen Poe, and the Invention of Murder. Chapters, 445 11th Street, NW., 1pm. TUESDAY Head on over to the Baird Auditorium at the National Museum of Natural History to hear Andrea Mitchell discuss Talking Back: . . . to Presidents, Dictators, and...

>> As you've all no doubt heard, we're all Time magazine's Person of the Year. Unless you've never authored a blog post, a comment, or even submitted a loosely-sourced tip to a blogger who would irresponsibly publish it. Then you're nothing. [Time]

You've heard the story about what was to be the Georgetown Metro station, right? They were going to build one, but the residents protested, leaving the Orange Line to proceed directly to Rossyln. It turns out this "story" is pure fiction -- the only Metro station not built due to citizen protest was a proposed Oklahoma Avenue Station in Northeast. If you're anything like us, you spend plenty of time on Metro's buses and trains...