Poet Brad Leithauser, who’ll be reading from his latest collection of poetry, Toad to a Nightingale, Saturday afternoon at Politics and Prose, published his first collection of poetry, Hundreds of Fireflies, in 1982. He was probably unprepared for the attention it received, not so much for what it contained, but for what it lacked: the collection was, for the most part, completely absent of poetry influenced by High-Modernist, experimental “free verse.” In other words: poetry…

Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine are two filmmakers who call D.C. home. They’ve made a name for themselves as writers, producers, and directors of documentary films, often for National Geographic and television, but their latest project has raised their profile far beyond the recognition of their previous work. War/Dance, for which the pair take joint directorial credit, has earned the couple a mantle’s worth of awards this year, including the documentary directing prize at…

Our beloved D.C. United may have crashed and burned (again) in the MLS playoffs this season, but life goes on. Also, the playoffs go on — right in our backyard, in fact. Many moons ago, Washington was picked to host the 2007 MLS Cup this Sunday at noon, at RFK. Time to put aside your grieving and check out the game. Tickets start at $30, maybe even less on Craigslist. When else are you going…

With jambalaya simmering in the corner, and people waiting in line to get a haircut, you wouldn’t have thought you were in a bar, let alone at a rock show. But last week, upstairs from haircut-and-a-shot night, The Red & The Black was in fact hosting a lineup of several very different styles of local music. Despite a modest midweek crowd — consisting mostly of other bands — one group from Baltimore introduced a unique…

Although Gist has been around with varying lineups for almost twenty years, the current lineup of singer/guitarist Nayan Bhula, bassist Finley Martin and drummer Fred Burton have only been together for the past five. In that short time they’ve released two albums, Art is Now Human and Diesel City, the latter of which established them as an act whose sound could be simultaneously tied to the district and reflect their diverse backgrounds and influences,…

As usual, you said a lot of funny and thought-provoking stuff last week. But like LeVar Burton, don’t take our word for it, and read on for Georgetown protests, monkeyrotica running a museum, and GMU fraternities, among other things. —— monkeyrotica would be an awesome director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine: The disorganized state of the Army Medical Museum is an example of vicious circle funding: hardly anybody visits the place because…

Travis Morrison Hellfighters play Thursday night at the Rock & Roll Hotel as part of a benefit show for Survivors and Advocates of Empowerment, with Ra Ra Rasputin and Jukebox the Ghost (***). 8:30 p.m., $10 in advance, $12 at the door. You can read our review of Morrison’s latest album, All Y’all here What does the new album, All Y’all, mean to you? Well, it’s the first thing I did with this band. Travistan…

Versatile instrument, the piano. The primarily guitar-based P.J. Harvey turns to it to help her write an album of sober, somber chamber music, while the Idaho-bred, Oberlin-educated, equally guitar-centric Josh Ritter uses it to help him loosen up. At least that was the way he made The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, his fifth album since 2000, but his first since 2006’s The Animal Years elevated him from being just another huge-in-Ireland singer-songwriter to someone…

Movers get a bad rap. Their companies are frequently thought of as fly-by-night operations. Usually they lose or break some of your things, and they help you lose your security deposit by scratching the walls. They’re always expensive, and it usually takes longer than you would have hoped. But they work long hours doing a strenuous job everybody hates — you rarely hear someone talking excitedly about lugging all their stuff to a new home….

Jon Langford is responsible for way too much great art for you not to know who he is. To begin at the beginning, he’s one of two remaining original members of the Mekons, singing and playing guitar in the increasingly difficult-to-categorize onetime punk band he founded while studying art at the University of Leeds, England, in 1977. Their albums Fear and Whiskey and Edge of the World, from 1985 and 1986, respectively, were among…