MONDAY: Oliver August will be at Politics and Prose to discuss his latest book Inside the Red Mansion, which chronicles the hunt for China’s most-wanted fugitive, Lai Changxing. For more information, check out this short film on the making of the book. 7 p.m. TUESDAY: Writer Dominic Cicere will be holding a book release party at Galaxy Hut for Near Wild Heaven, which contains a collection of poems, a short story and a screenplay on…

The members of Dead Meadow were born in the wrong decade. While the D.C. scene of the ‘80s and ‘90s revolved around harDCore punk, typified by bands like Fugazi and Rites of Spring, the future members of Dead Meadow found themselves drawn to the Zeppelin-style hard rock of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Jason Simon, Mark Laughlin, and Steve Kille played separately in bands on the periphery of the D.C. music scene, including…

MONDAY “Hey. What’s up. My name is Malcolm Lawrence. I couldn’t help noticing that you’ve been sitting outside the Hefner Auditorium here at the Keese School for Continuing Education—located, as I’m sure you know, at 417 Russell Avenue in Gaithersburg—for quite some time. Just waiting for something exciting to happen? Yeah. I don’t blame you. Well, I’ll tell you what, if you’ve got two bucks and can wait until say, 7:30 this evening, I’ve got…

It’s been a while since we brought together some of D.C.’s musical minds. In the name of open forums and discussion, we bring you the third installment of DCist’s Music Roundtable. This time around we asked our panel about the effects of emerging technologies on the music industry. Will record labels become obsolete? Is a proletariat uprising of music fans in our near future? Does MySpace really make a difference? We got some input from…

We thought it was cool when Merriam-Webster named “blog” its word of the year. But now TIME notes that 2004 was the Golden Age of the Blog. Well, we guess it was quite a year for “the blogosphere” (this DCist hates that word with a distinct passion). Popular celebrity blogs gave way to numerous blogs-to-riches stories, including some from our own stomping grounds. Blogs even got a nice little mention on The West Wing. DCist…