Once again, the Pollstar Concert Industry Awards nomination list shows that D.C.'s no small potatoes when it comes to touring music. Like last year, the 9:30 Club is nominated for Nightclub of the Year, Wolf Trap's Filene Center is nominated for the Red Rocks small outdoor venue award, and Birchmere's Michael Jawarek is nominated for Nightclub Talent Buyer of the Year. There are a few new additions to our area's nods too. The Verizon......

If you really must attend a holiday concert, make it something musicologically interesting. In what has become an annual tradition (see the 2005 and 2006 installments), the Folger Consort is presenting the most appealing and satisfying Christmas concert in the city. More than just a concert, it is a staged production of the Second Shepherds' Play, an English mystery play from the Towneley cycle. Director Mary Hall Surface began by modernizing the play's Middle English......

Our Pilgrim cousins to the north have been having all the wintry fun of late. While we sit here in the mid-Atlantic frantically wondering if we'll get snow instead of an annoying, ice-cold spritz, Boston gets about eight inches of commute-snarling precip. Why do they get all the snow AND all the good sports teams? This weekend is our next chance at a winter coating, but again, we sit on the line of pure snow......

It goes without saying that Stevie Wonder is a living legend. The singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist has been performing for well over 40 years and is responsible for a slew of well-known hits. As one concert-goer stated to me on my train ride home, the near capacity crowd at Verizon Center would’ve been there for a couple of days if he’d decided to play everything in his discography. Instead, he covered approximately 27 songs over the course of......

"Writing is easy," wrote legendary sportswriter Red Smith. "Just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein." Though most of us no longer sit at typewriters nor face blank pieces of physical paper, there's nothing more daunting than a blank screen and the notion of putting something meaningful on it. Compound that with the idea of doing that for approximately 200 pages and you begin to realize why a lot of novelists end up......

Written by DCist Contributor Oscar Bunoan Despite what you’ve read, Vincent Van Gogh was not insane. I mean, what’s the use of an earlobe to a painter anyway? An artist under mental distress, after all, would have immediately deemed his moneymakers a more suitable gift for an unsuspecting prostitute. Why make reference to the 19th century post impressionist? Because, whether James and Miranda Chen—owners of the Asian influenced Sunflower Vegetarian—realize it or not, he serves......

Editors Note: We enjoyed the tour diaries J. Tom Hnatow wrote for us as part of These United States' last tour, so we asked him if he wouldn't mind doing it again as the band embark on their first ever intercontinental tour of the UK and Europe. He graciously agreed. Look for his dispatches from the road abroad over the next few weeks. Tuesday, October 16, 2007 We walk (and walk and walk) from Baker......

Once again Penn Quarter Living is on the ball with a newsworthy neighborhood post. They link to a Downtown Neighborhood Association announcement that Douglas Development has been negotiating with Whole Foods Market to lease them store space on 7th Street between E and D Streets NW. This is the same space that Balducci's was briefly considering before deciding against the move last year. Balducci's retreat from the location was met with a lot of desperate......

Ragged Glory plays tonight at the Velvet Lounge. Can’t afford to pay $100 for a cheap seat at Neil Young’s upcoming DAR stop in November? You’re in luck. During our last chat with Ryan Walker from The Beanstalk Library, we found out he also put together a Neil Young cover band a few years back. They call themselves Ragged Glory, and the lineup plays something like a who’s who of up-and-coming local bands: Brian Kent......

Once again, we would like to take a brief moment to thank this week's advertisers on DCist. Bookfest 2007 at the Library of Congress, starting tomorrow! Book parties are the new...book party. Zipcar, because they're just so darn convenient. Fierce People, a movie with more dysfunctional people than we know what to do with. Who Hates Whom, the new book from Bob Harris. Thunderstruck, the bestseller now in paperback. Busted Tees, which has a $12......

Washington Concert Opera presented the first half of their new season on Sunday night at an admirably full Lisner Auditorium. Rather than a more typical rarity, it was one of the gems of the bel canto repertoire, Vincenzo Bellini's late opera I Puritani, or as bad-girl soprano Anna Netrebko memorably put it, "crap." No one should ever mistake I Puritani for a dramatic masterpiece, but it does have some of the best, most polished, and......

The Post shares some newly released data from the Census Department. Apparently Washington area residents retire later than all other Americans -- even after controlling for members of the U.S. Senate. The article lays out two separate likely causes why our older workers continue to work, one far less the sunny than the other. The area's high number of white-collar jobs accounts for at least part of its residents slower transition to bird-watching and writing......

Tom Knott: Once again, Tom Knott has managed to take what seems to be an isolated incident and turn it into evidence that liberalism of any sort is just evil. This week, Knott recounts the badly-handled trial of a Liberian immigrant accused of raping a seven-year-old girl in Montgomery County. Due to some bad decision by the trial judge, the charges were eventually dropped, though the county has stated that it will appeal. Regardless, it's......

Once again, the country is in a tizzy over a conservative Republican senator doing naughty things. According to a Post report, Sen. Larry Craig (R-Id.) was arrested earlier this month in an airport bathroom in Minnesota after he became a little touchy with an undercover police officer. (Similar allegations were made against him here, though they allegedly occurred in a Union Station bathroom.) Our favorite part? That during an interview with police after the......

There was quite a bit of discontent going on in the comments section over our post yesterday regarding Spoon's canceled 9:30 Club shows. Imagine our surprise when the band's front man, Britt Daniel, graciously added his voice to the discussion to let us know what happened. Hi guys I first heard about this situation last week while we were traveling in Europe. There was some misunderstanding on my part from the beginning...I was told that......

If you missed this story in Saturday's Washington Post, do make sure you check it out, for your own personal safety if nothing else. It seems the enormous popularity of the ugliest shoes on the planet, Crocs, has led to an alarming increase in the number of escalator mishaps on Metro this summer, as the shoes' soft resin soles can easily be grabbed by the metal teeth of the moving steps. Once trapped, the Crocs,......

Construction of the temporary building at Eastern Market has begun, though somewhat behind schedule. The Examiner reports that the estimated opening date of the temporary building that will house the South Market vendors has been pushed back to mid-August, even though Mayor Fenty promised the vendors they'd have a new home by the end of July. According to the article, delays in construction have been caused by delays in manufacturing of the steel for the......

Glen Hansard (of The Frames) and Marketa Irglova, the stars of the hit avant-musical film Once, are touring under the guise of The Swell Season and and playing a selection of songs from the soundtrack. The tour stops at the 9:30 Club Thursday with Amy LaVere and to celebrate, we're giving away a pair of tickets to the show. All you need to do is fill out the form below with your name and......

If you’ve ever wondered about what lay behind closed doors, BUILDING, now on view at Project 4 Gallery, gives you a glimpse of just how big that universe can be beyond the boarded windows and padlocked gates. A small, unassuming brick building in Belfast, Northern Ireland ran the city’s electricity for nearly half a century. Once wild with rippling currents and responsible for channeling energy to all of residential, domestic, commercial, and industrial Belfast, the......

Since 2003, D.C. residents have been able to pick up a copy of the now bi-monthly newspaper Street Sense from a local vendor for a dollar. Inside, one finds in-depth reporting on issues of homelessness and poverty, profiles of vendors -- members of the homeless who make 75 cents off every paper sold -- information on services by shelters, veterans groups and other organizations, book reviews (the current issue tackles John Edwards' Ending Poverty in......

It's time to dig your stakes out from under your beds, Buffy fans. Those of you who thought deep love for the series was dead should have known better. After all, Buffy creator Joss Whedon is the man who turned a beloved but hastily canceled TV sci-fi western into a feature length sci-fi film. As we learned in the fifth season, Buffy never really dies. Throughout the country, fans of the Scooby gang will......

As the full Senate readies to debate and vote on legislation that would grant the District a voting seat in the House of Representatives, voting rights activists are focusing on two key senators -- Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). According to people close to the lobbying effort, the legislation has garnered enough votes for a simple majority, but is still short of the votes needed to prevent a filibuster. And while......

A couple of weeks back, we found ourselves at IOTA paying $10 to see two bands we were previously unfamiliar with (Iowa City's Death Ships and Chapel Hill's The Old Ceremony). The experience left us feeling satisfied and slightly adventurous. We wanted to make a regular habit of checking out bands based on 30-second clips and "borrowed" tracks from elbo.ws. And that's partly why we were at IOTA last night to see mellow Canadian folksters......

Once, they call it. There’s a song by that name in the film, but the title could just as well be writer/director John Carney’s private joke about how often this premise can be expected to work: Two talented musicians, one of them very young and not yet famous; the other no longer young and probably as famous as he’s likely to become, meet cute on the streets of Dublin and spend a couple of......

The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics changed its tune yesterday and reversed an earlier decision by stating that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's school takeover plan cannot be the subject of a referendum. Once again, it comes down to the Home Rule Charter: attorneys for the election board said in papers filed yesterday that because Congress and President Bush have approved an amendment to the city's Home Rule Charter that gives the mayor direct control......

This post from DCist contributor Matt Cordell Although BLT Steak just moved into town ("BLT" is not bacon, lettuce, and tomato, but Bistro Laurent Tourondel as in New York City's BLT Steak, BLT Prime, BLT Fish, and BLT Burger), it has already masterfully affected one of D.C.'s core stereotypes: the clubby lobbyist haunt. Here, in a scene of dark wood and suede, pricey food comes heavy, dull, and fast, but without any serious missteps. As......

If you've been to the box suites at RFK Stadium, you may have noticed photos of acts that have played the stadium lining the hallway - U2, New Kids on the Block, the Promise Keepers and so on. But after we finished laughing at the New Kids, one plaque off to the side caught our eye: "Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, site of Olympic football, 19 July-4 August 1996." What? The Olympics were at RFK? There......

Memorial Day is this Monday, meaning a lot of Washingtonians have a three day weekend. With the extra day comes extra opportunity to take a day trip (or two) around the area. We polled our staffer for some good destinations in the area to share, so pump up the bike tires, get out the hiking boots or start the car (Zip, Flex, or your own). And if you have any other good suggestions, let us......

After passing the House and getting a hearing in the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee last week, The D.C. Voting Rights Act moves to the Senate Judiciary Committee tomorrow. The committee has scheduled a full hearing on Wednesday called “Ending Taxation Without Representation: The Constitutionality of S.1257,” which will address, natch, the constitutionality of the bill. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, is a supporter of......

Those who showed up at the 9:30 Club on Saturday night with any doubts about The Kooks' talent were certainly persuaded, and maybe even wooed into super-fan territory. The four lads from Brighton played a pitch-perfect set that had all the classic elements of an epic rock show, including crowdsurfing and a young woman who threw her underwear up on stage. The Kooks have been on the fast track to superstardom since forming in 2004,......