saturday, july 24, 2010
MUSIC REVIEW Congolese cool
Style ABCDE C S THE STYLE INVITATIONAL
comes to D.C. Konono No. 1 brings the sounds of trance on junkyard
instruments to the Black Cat. C8
Say Venn Make your point inside a circle, or two or three. C2
CAROLYN HAX
Not marriage material She’s fine as a casual date, but . . . C2
BOOK WORLD “ ART REVIEW
At Conner, some local students are on a roll
pieces featured in ‘Academy’ by Blake Gopnik
to.
They look at tyro art, so you don’t have Every year for a decade now, curator
Jamie Smith and the other staff at Con- ner Contemporary Art have vetted their way through all of our many local art schools and university programs, choos- ing the best emerging work for Conner’s summer “Academy” show. The 10th edition, now at the gallery, is
a typical mix: some very good, some so- so, almost all deriving from the work of older artists — which is a good thing, since it shows these students have their eyes open.
I was impressed by the images of Katie
Miller, which show newborn children nude on white backgrounds. Blown up to maybe three times life-size, the babies look more like extraterrestrials than any- thing that might become an adult hu- man. They’re far more creepy than cute. My only question was why the artist chose to show them as fancy photoreal- istic paintings rather than simply giving us the photos her paintings were based on.
Elsewhere in “Academy,” the street photos by Corcoran graduate Michelle Yo were as good as ever. (I profiled her in
art review continued on C2
Camper Contemporary, a mobile gallery, among
THE OTHER SIDE:Celia Wren, who has opined on past Fringe offerings, got into her “Rave Scenes” character by donning an orange wig.
A critic raves
A lot of the novel is a freewheeling comic
monologue, part satire, part
whine and skillfully vicious.” — Lloyd Rose, on Susan Isaacs’s new release. C3
PHOTOS BY JUANA ARIAS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT? Celia Wren, right, and her “Rave Scenes” castmates run through their lines outside their Fringe Festival venue. by Celia Wren Special to The Washington Post
on
washingtonpost.com SANDY HUFFAKER/GETTY IMAGES
celebritology and
washingtonpost.com/ comicriffs. Plus, the convention crowd in San Diego knows how to party, C5.
For Comic-Con interviews and more, go to
washingtonpost.com/
says with improbable cheerfulness as a re- hearsal of “The Rave Scenes,” the new play we’re acting in, chugs into gear. It’s a Fri- day evening in an American University classroom. Our show, part of the Capital Fringe Festival, opens in six days — and our playwright-director, Nathaniel Russ Jr., has just informed us that one of our fellow actors has quit. It’s the second performer desertion in a
“T
Shaving’s latest ‘upgrade’ is enough to get anyone in a lather
by Monica Hesse It has come to our attention that Sha-
veMate, in its efforts to break into a stub- ble market dominated by Schick and Gil- lette, has recently introduced the Shave- Mate Titan 6, which has six blades. Six. We set out to find out why. “It’s not just the blades,” says Lou To-
massetti who, along with his brother Pe- ter, invented the Titan. “It’s really every- thing you need in one.” The Titan, he ex- plains, also comes with shaving cream in
the handle and a moisture strip. “If you go out and try to buy equip- ment for shaving today,” Lou continues, “it’s very complicated.” “You might have to buy batteries,” Pe- ter adds. “ShaveMate is really a lifestyle change” from all that, Lou says. “It’s a shaving revolution.” Lou and Peter, it must be noted, call themselves the Inventor Brothers. In ad- dition to razors, they specialize in a wide variety of horns, such as the Dog Horn Training Tool/Attack Deterrent. But why stop at six? Why not eight?
Why not go Spinal Tap, to 11? Why not in- vent a 49-blade mask that clips onto your face and vibrates the hair away? Why not cut to the chase already, Tomassetti brothers, and debut Titan 7?
his is a rare opportunity where everything that could possibly go wrong in a show . . . has,” my castmate Danny Pushkin
A Post reviewer dives into
Fringe head- (and wig-) first
week, and the anxiety that’s swirled in me since we started rehearsals is alchemizing into giddy fatalism. As for Russ — he should be in tears, given the challenges he’s already coped with: the abdication of a costume designer; the scheduling prob- lems posed by an actress’s wisdom-tooth surgery; the awkwardness of hosting ini- tial read-throughs in his tiny apartment, which happens to be in his parents’ base- ment, and which is crammed with books and a model roller coaster. But no: The 29-year-old director gives an almost beatific smile. “Welcome to Fringe!” he says happily. I would not ordinarily be whiling away
fringe continued on C4
Anyway you slice it, don’t six blades feel excessive? “It’s funny you should say that,” says
Lou, “but we think we hit the sweet spot.” We blame Gillette. It was Gillette that first intro- duced the disposable-blade safety razor, back in 1904, replacing the straight-edge razor long favored by barbershops. It was Gillette that added a second blade in 1971, and that, in 1998, introduced the three-blade “Mach3” which, in ads, equated shaving with driv- ing really fast cars through deserts. Naturally, there were parodies. On
“Saturday Night Live,” Will Ferrell hawked the Platinum Mach14; “MadTV” advertised a Mach20: “The eighth blade sends an electronic pulse, which de-
blade continued on C3
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALLISON GHAMAN/ THE WASHINGTON POST
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