In the eyes of a Westerner, all those things that make the Japanese culture so intriguing -- the mastery of complex technologies, the embrace of natural elements and environmental sustainability, the obsession over all things "cute" -- are on display in interactive exhibits throughout the Kennedy Center in Japan! Culture + Hyperculture. Filling the inside halls and spilling over to the exterior grounds and even the parking garage, the exhibition gives us a taste of......

Man, I had the craziest hallucination last night. Thing is, about 2,000 other people had it, too, and to give due credit, it wasn’t really my hallucination. It was Yukio Ninagawa’s. The multi-Olivier-award winning director, who picked up a knighthood from Her Majesty’s Government in 2002 for his bold reinterpretations of the likes of Twelfth Night and Medea (making him, um, Sir Yukio, we guess), has brought his Shintoku-Maru to the Kennedy Center for a......

Victory — not the concept, but the statue at State Place and 17th Street NW — is the Ghost of Christmas Past. Freedom — the Eastward-facing statue atop the Capitol Dome; not that thing that The Terrorists hate us for — is the Ghost of Christmas Present. And the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come arrives draped in the inky robes of Grief. This stunt-casting of local landmarks as Charles Dickens’ familiar trio of......

>> A solid small local show at the Red and the Black tonight, with the pleasing rock of The Charm Offensive, Cheverly Hot Noodle, and Baltimore's Lawnchair. $8, 9:30 p.m. >> It might be easy to dismiss Galactic as some frat boy-friendly jam band, but the funk and jazz-influenced quintet are practically royalty in their hometown of New Orleans, and tonight they'll perform with a series of well-respected MCs in support of their latest......

>> The 1900s are playing the Rock and Roll Hotel, not to be confused with the 1990s. Three Stars alum Shortstack will join them on the bill, along with The Dead Trees and Kitty Hawk. $10, 8:30 p.m. >> Tonight at Blues Alley one of the area's finest jazz drummers, Nasar Abadey, takes the stage with SuperNova, featuring Allyn Johnson on piano, Gary Thomas, Jazz Studies Chair at Peabody, altoist Joe Ford, and bassist......

The big news this week came on Tuesday, as the Washington Project for the Arts announced it was officially splitting from the Corcoran Gallery of Art at the end of 2007. The success of the partnership has boosted the WPA to a place where they can function solo once more, and are currently setting up shop in Dupont Circle. The Post has an excellent summary of WPA\C's history. >> The Arlington Arts Center is our......

MONDAY >> This ain’t not J-Pop, we swear. If you want good old-fashioned Japanese rock ‘n’ roll (OK, it’s true, we don’t really know what that’s supposed to sound like either), The Captains from some place in Japan (the city name on their MySpace page uses Japanese characters) will drop by The Red & The Black tonight. They will be supported by Sugarcane Crawl, formerly known as Blues Hammer, and D.C.'s The Bourbon Dynasty. 9......

Via Gothamist, the New York Post reports on what looks to be a prank involving the American University alumni magazine, American Magazine, on two graduates of the D.C. school who later lived together in New York. In the spring edition of the magazine, it was apparently falsely reported that Ross Weil, 29, and Brett Royce, 28 were "life partners" who had been gay married, adding that they were leaders of a fake group called the......

The thing about mellow bands is no matter how good they are on record, they can be less than ideal to watch live. Unfortunately that was the case with Au Revoir Simone last night at the Rock and Roll Hotel. The three woman, three keyboard band from Brooklyn (none of whom are named Simone), play poppy, sweet indie that's light on vocals. They're busy these days, touring Japan in December and writing about it for......

“If I do my job as an actor, you won't notice that I'm South Asian or that I'm a woman, or even that I'm playing one of the most controversial political figures of all time. I'm portraying a person at a crossroads struggling with a difficult decision.” So says Zehra Fazal (pictured right) of her striking portrayal of Adolf Hitler in her self-produced, one-woman adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s play, My Friend Hitler, currently running at......

The most recent exhibition at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, organized with help from the National Museum of African Art, Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries, is as much a chronicle of history as it is a document for how art records history. Trying to pigeonhole this exhibition into a one category is difficult. It is more than just the fact the exhibition displays more than 260......

During a private dinner ceremony at the Arts Club of Washington (in the historic home of President James Monroe) on Monday night, the S&R Foundation conferred its Washington Awards on five deserving young musicians. For the four runners-up, we heard a brief recorded excerpt of their work: pianist Naoko Takao, Special Committee Award Winner (Persichetti's 7th sonata); marimbist Naoko Takada (a concerto by Ney Rosauro); composer Moto Osada (his own Take the Six for Marimba......

>> Two quality offerings from the Black Cat tonight: Japan's uber-weird noise outfit Melt-Banana take the mainstage with Hex Machine at 8:30 p.m., $13. Plus Falls Church native and now Richmond-based newgrass singer Josh Small is in the Backstage tonight, with Tim Barry and The Wading Girl, for a paltry $8 at 8 p.m. >> Campus Progress is calling all summer interns and other young folks to head over to Science Club tonight for......

A couple of months ago I found myself at Be Bar on a Saturday night confronted by what I throught would be a "graphic design competition," but turned out to be something much, much more. I was surprised to find an entire art extravaganza of sorts with graphic designers battling it out, local fashion designers selling their wares, tribal dancers and DJs to boot. A large chunk of the art community was out in......

MONDAY >> You may not be able to pronounce their name, but !!! (chk, chk, chk)’s disco enfused indie pop will leave you speechless. The former band members from The Yah Mos, Black Liquorice and Popesmashers are on tour promoting their recent release Myth Takes. Catch them at the 9:30 Club tonight with Canadian experimental rockers, Holy Fuck. $18. TUESDAY >> Velvet Revolver kicked off their Re-evolution tour on May 3rd the same way they......

Review and photos by DCist contributor Paul Ghosh-Roy They don’t speak English. Their sound system consists of PA style loud speakers draped with mics. They play thumb pianos. The guy who formed the band was born in 1933. They also have a track produced by Timbaland on Bjork’s new album. Oh yeah, and they played the Black Cat on Friday night. What to make of all this, you ask? Well, it’s Konono No. 1, son,......

By DCist Contributor Paul Ghosh-Roy Northern Virginia heard madness and murder this weekend, as jazz met Japan in Rosslyn. Billy Fox’s Kaidan Suite, as performed by improvising chamber group the Kitsune Ensemble, explored themes of Japanese ghost-story telling, jazz and tonal music, from light to dark, at the Rosslyn Spectrum. On Saturday night the Kitsune Ensemble took the stage at the Rosslyn Spectrum to debut Kaidan Suite. Composer/director Billy Fox deftly guided the improvising......

TUESDAY >> There isn't much going on today, but you might want to check out Black Cat's backstage screening of the 2005 documentary New York Dolls: All Dolled Up. Photographer Bob Gruen followed the band during the early 1970s and shot performances in venues all across the U.S. We expect plenty of sex, drugs and that other thing that comes after drugs. Kittens? $3, 9 p.m. WEDNESDAY >> The Alphabetical Order let us know that......

Large Sewage Spill Sours Potomac River: Some 17 million gallons of raw sewage spilled into the Potomac River on Saturday, reports NBC 4. The spill was caused by a three-hour power failure at the Blue Plains sewage treatment plant on the eastern back of the river. And though 17 million gallons sounds like a lot, the EPA has predicted that the spill won't have a major impact, a claim countered by the Anacostia Watershed......

From ambassadors of China's goodwill to international webcam sensations, the pandas at the National Zoo are used to the white-hot spotlight of celebrity. But now, some in D.C. want to take that fame a step further and elevate them to the lofty heights of becoming the city's official symbol. Today's Christian Science Monitor reports (echoing very closely a March 15 article in the Washington Times that we somehow missed) that members of the D.C. City......

It’s hard to find reliable information on the reputation of Japanese playwright Yasuhiko Ohashi in English. According to press materials put together by the Landless Theatre company, currently staging Ohashi’s Godzilla at DCAC, the play was a huge hit in Japan when it debuted in the late 1980s. Ohashi was awarded a Kishida Kunio Award for the play, which is in fact a prestigious prize intended to recognize young Japanese playwrights who have achieved a......

It's no secret that this Thursday and Friday afternoon thousands of area employees will "run errands," sneak off to the office TV lounge, or otherwise alt-tab their way through the day as NCAA conference tournament play blesses us all with daytime television that doesn't suck. March Madness isn't the only productivity killer available this week, however. The World Baseball Classic, which began last week with Pool A games featuring China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, comes......

FRIDAY: >> The Freer Gallery kicks off it's 10th annual Iranian Film Festival this weekend, and it's well worth a look. We'd recommend Tahmineh Milani's latest film The Unwanted Woman, a story about a married couple confronted with the devastating effects that sexual desire can have in their society. Milani is the same filmmaker who was jailed after her 2001 film The Hidden Half perturbed the fundamentalist Iranian government. As you might imagine, Milani has......

FRIDAY >> The folks over at MN8 have put together a Masquerade Ball at Black Cat, featuring prolific Venezuelan alt-rockers Los Amigos Invisibles (right) and DJ Afro. DCist's request to the band: For one night only, please change the lyrics to the song "Bruja" from "No eres ni bruja (ni santera)," to "Tu eres una bruja..." It's a masquerade party, after all. And we want to be your bruja. 9:30 p.m., $18. >> Never in......

It may not look or feel like it, but spring really is in the air. Sure the calender's moved past winter, but a more tell-tale sign is that cherry blossom fever has hit the city. The opening ceremony of the 93rd Annual National Cherry Blossom Festival, held at the new Mandarin Oriental hotel this past Saturday served as a good reminder that despite the dreary rain and decidedly un-spring like temps, some color is indeed......

Through Petworth News, we learn that the essayist, playwright and thinker Gore Vidal will be laid to rest at Rock Creek Cemetery in Northwest Washington. While this isn't necessarily anything newsworthy, it's an interesting item for future chroniclers of the city's various monuments to note. According to Petworth News (where we snagged this photo), Vidal buried his longtime partner, Harold Auster, at the cemetery last month. The Vidal plot is located near a monument to......

Georgetown, a neighborhood not exactly known for a paucity of shopping options, will soon give D.C. residents a few more ways to indulge in retail therapy. Three big-name chains -- eclectic women's clothing and home accessories retailer Anthropologie (Urban Outfitters' offering for women age 30-45), Benetton Group's Sisely, and New York-based Intermix -- are alighting in Georgetown Park mall. They join the already-open Capital Segway, a generously-sized yet sparsely furnished space where people who have......

"Lost in Translation" it is not, but the Freer Gallery of Art is offering a look at everyday life in pre-Meiji Japan in an exhibition that opened this weekend. "Life and Leisure: Everyday Life in Japanese Art" looks at life in Japan from the early-17th century to the mid-19th century through illustrations, painting and ceramic household items from the era. According to the Freer, the Edo period was the first time when "contented commoners" started......