TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 2010
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An online guide to events, night life and entertainment
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Make a fresh catch, or go with the beer and barbecue If you’ve ever wondered whether the
Washington region is Northern or Southern, this month has your answer: It has the best of both worlds. Whether you’re a Chesapeake Bay seafood fanatic or Southern barbecue lover, the East Coast’s best are here. Arm yourself with sunscreen, though — with most of these events taking place outdoors, you may feel like it’s you being fried in the summer sun.
DC Coast For oyster lovers, DC Coast is offering a dozen oysters on the half-shell for $12 to celebrate its 12-year anniversary. The “Cheaper by the Dozen” oysters, served with fresh ginger, herbs and cucumber, will be offered all month during the restaurant’s happy hour. Monday-Friday, 3-6 p.m., and daily after 9:30 p.m. through June 30. DC
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Coast, 1401 K St. NW. 202-216-5988.
www.dccoast.com.
Ebbitt Block Party If you’re looking for an adults-only
party, the Ebbitt Block Party welcomes a 21-and-older crowd for live music and fresh food. Dishes include crab cake and beef brisket sandwiches for one to three food tickets ($3 each). Alcoholic beverages are $5. Be sure to get your $5 Going Out Guide discount by using the code GOGBLOCKPARTY when ordering tickets online. Saturday, 4-11 p.m. Old Ebbitt Grill,
675 15th St. NW. 202-347-4800.
www.ebbittblockparty.com. $35.
Restaurant Week for Kids If you’re more family-oriented,
Destination D.C. is offering a kid-friendly week of eats with Restaurant Week for Kids, designed to
KEVIN CLARK/THE WASHINGTON POST
encourage healthful eating habits and family dinners. There are selections from several restaurants, including Bistro 525 and Palette, where kids younger than 11 pay their age for special menus.
Sunday-June 27, various locations.
202-789-7000. www.
restaurantweekforkids.org.
Northern Virginia BrewFest Closing out the month are two big
events: the Northern Virginia Summer BrewFest and the National Capital Barbecue Battle. Now in its third year, the BrewFest brings in more than 50 breweries offering samples of their favorite beers, as well as food to
GOOD EATS:
Regional food events abound this month.
complement them. Admission includes a
glass and four sampling tickets. Additional sampling tickets are $1. June 26, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; June 27, 11
a.m.-7 p.m. Morven Park, 41793 Tutt Lane, Leesburg. 703-923-0800.
www.novabrewfest.com. $25 at the door, $20 in advance.
Safeway’s National Capital Barbecue Battle You can expect tens of thousands of people to gather downtown for the barbecue battle, now in its 18th year, for ribs, pulled pork, brisket, chicken and everything else barbecue. Bandswill play throughout the weekend. June 26, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; June 27,
11 a.m.-7:30 p.m. Pennsylvania Avenue between Ninth and 14th streets NW. 301-860-0630.
www.bbqdc.com. Admission: $10 for adults, $5 for ages 6-12.
— Kristen Boghosian PLANNING AN EVENT WE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ? TELL U S . SEND LISTINGS INFORMA TION TO EVENTS@WASHINGTONP OST.COM
Glenn Beck’s conspiracy thriller (minus the thrills)
book world from C1
tomorrow.” The novel’s evil mastermind is Arthur Gardner, a public relations genius who devised the Pet Rock fad, turned Mao and Che into counterculture fashion statements, created faux ailments such as restless leg syndrome for the drug in- dustry and lifted several presidents to the White House regardless of party af- filiation — “ideology was just another interchangeable means to an end.” Now he believes the American experiment in self-government has failed, and with the secret consent of the power elite, he is poised to manipulate the public to wel- come his ultimate coup — literally, the takeover of the nation, a “new begin- ning” as he puts it, “one world, ruled by the wise and the fittest and the strong, with no naive illusions of equality or the squandered promises of freedom for all.”
With his PR brilliance, Gardner has succeeded in selling this destructive vi- sion to the highest echelons of govern- ment. In public policy speak, he has pushed his outrageous scenario into the window of accept- ability — and pro- vided Beck with his title. Beck has been exercised for some time over a concept called the Overton Window. Under this theory, put forward by public policy ex- pert Joseph Over- ton, the public is
willing to consider only a few ideas or scenarios as reasonable — those are the ones that reside within the window. Radical notions remain outside the win- dow, unfit for serious debate. However, in some cases, powerful forces can move the window, allowing for consideration of extreme ideas. And this is why Beck picked up his pen — to warn readers that disregard for the Constitution is be- coming acceptable, is creeping into the window, and must be resisted. In a foreword, Beck notes that his thriller belongs in a category called “ ‘faction’ — completely fictional books with plots rooted in fact.” He attaches an afterword of nearly 30 pages that con- tains citations to references in the story: information on the financial bailout, unemployment, measures to ensure government operation after a disaster and the like. He laces his plot with these facts in the same manner he employs them on his TV show, to lend credence to his fantasy of a nefarious government scheme to subvert the Constitution. But enough seriousness — this is a thriller! Anyone who has tuned in to Beck’s show knows that he is sometimes joined on-screen by best-selling thriller writers such as Vince Flynn and James Rollins. In his foreword, Beck notes his love of the genre and acknowledges that “the goal of most thrillers is to enter- tain.” Sadly, he seems to have learned lit- tle from his thriller-writing friends. Thrillers often are marred by laugh- able prose, but few have stumbled along with language as silly as this one. When Gardner’s son, Noah, meets patriot Mol- ly Ross early in the novel, Beck writes: “Something about this woman defied a traditional chick-at-a-glance inventory.” It gets worse: When Noah notices that a few strands of Molly’s hair have fallen out of place, Beck tells us, “these liberat- ed chestnut curls framed a handsome face made twice as radiant by the mys- teries surely waiting just behind those light green eyes.” The suspense of “The Overton Win-
dow” comes largely from wondering when the thrills will begin. There’s the obligatory prologue murder, but then the pulse of this novel flatlines. In place
MUSIC REVIEW
Graves, living — if not singing — up to her image
by Anne Midgette JOSE LUIS MAGANA/ASSOCIATED PRESS FACTION WRITER:Glenn Beck can add “novelist” to his lengthy résumé. Beck’s publishing record
With “The Overton Window,” Glenn Beck adds thriller fiction to his catalogue of published works. Here are the fruits of his other literary labors: “Arguing With Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government” (2009) Keep getting in shouting matches with complete jerks? Here’s how to trump ’em every time on gun control, health care, immigration. Sales: 698,374 “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine” (2009) Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” as inspiration for disgruntled citizens who want to take America back from . . . whoever has stolen it.
Sales: 1,121,977 “The Christmas Sweater” (2008) Holiday treacle about a boy who wants a bike but gets a crummy sweater and learns — what else? — the meaning of life. Sales: 693,183 (The children’s picture book version has sold 107,181 copies) “An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World’s Biggest Problems” (2007) As Publishers Weekly says, “He goes after everything and everyone from poverty to perverts.”
Sales: 538,168 “The Real America: Messages From the Heart and Heartland” (2003) Collection of his railings, er, writings, on what irks him about other people’s views on family, religion and the like. Sales: 87,569
— Steven Levingston
Source: Nielsen BookScan (figures include hardcover, paper and audio book sales, as of June 6).
of thrills, we get entire chapters in which characters lecture on the right- ness of their viewpoints. A moment of cliche action erupts when a New York City taxi with Noah inside jumps a curb and nearly hits a hot dog stand. Later an atomic bomb goes off, but the mush- room cloud settles without so much as a dusty throat for anyone. Far more entertaining is the cameo
appearance by former New York gover- nor Eliot Spitzer, who leers at Molly in an elevator and then gives Noah “a man- to-man stamp of approval indicating
their shared good taste in fine feminine company,” after which Noah helpfully explains to Molly: Spitzer’s “a total horndog.” A sure-fire killer of a thriller is pre-
dictability. Yet from the moment Noah lusts after Molly on page 9, we know he will have his epiphany, defy his terrible father and come over to the cause. It takes a while, but Noah finally makes the leap in his last utterance before the epilogue. His conversion is meant to rouse dormant patriots among Beck’s readers and bring them onto the battle- field: “We have it in our power,” Noah proclaims, “to begin the world over again.”
Beck portrays his do-gooders as
peaceful to the point of sappiness — they live in simply furnished cabins with handmade quilts and “things [that] . . . had been built and woven and carved and finished by skilled, loving hands.” But this earthiness is grounded in a fervor, an obsession, to save Amer- ica at any cost. Molly and her crowd as- sert their Second Amendment right to bear arms and are well stocked with weapons. They even make their own ammunition. Their insistence on nonvi- olence appears as disingenuous as any- thing out of the mouth of their nemesis, the insidious manipulator of reality Ar- thur Gardner. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t give up to defend my country,” Molly says. “No matter how hard it might be, there’s nothing that’s in my power that I wouldn’t do.” The danger of books like this is that
radical readers may take the story’s fic- tion for fact, or interpret the fiction — which Beck encourages — as a reflection of a reality that they must fend off by any means necessary. “The Overton Window” risks falling into the tradition of other anti-government novels such as “The Turner Diaries” by William L. Pierce, which became a handbook of ex- tremists and inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. As Beck tells his soldiers in the voice of No- ah: “Put up or shut up . . . go hard or go home. Freedom is the rare exception . . . not the rule, and if you want it you’ve got to do your part to keep it.”
levingstons@washpost.com
Levingston is a senior editor of Book World.
The persona of a full-blown opera superstar took the stage at Strathmore on Sunday night. It took the form of Denyce Graves, Washington’s favorite hometown mezzo-soprano, flatteringly lit with pink gels and side banks of lights shining into the audience’s eyes. Graves’s recital, courtesy of the Washington Performing Arts Society and rescheduled due to the winter storms, was called “A Woman’s Life.” It con- sisted of lieder, opera arias and American standards having some relation to the female ex- perience (though the relevance of Handel’s aria “Ombra mai fu,” a love song from a king to a tree, is open to question). This program showed more range on paper than it did in Graves’s voice. The mezzo seemed to have two settings: oper- atic and down-to-earth. Anything in a for- eign language — even Schumann’s song cycle “Frauenliebe und -Leben” (a wom- an’s love and life) — got the full operatic treatment: a great big sound, stentorian and slightly squeezed, with a rich low voice, erratic tempos and a sense of self- importance. But with Gershwin’s “The Man I Love,” she pulled back, in the course of the first phrase, from a spread and rather rough opening to a more straightforward, slen- der sound. This set the tone for a final group of American songs that was far more accessible, in the best sense: lyrics comprehensible, sound more direct. Communication was happening. It wasn’t, particularly, in the earlier
part of the program — particularly not in “Frauenliebe und -Leben,” which was somewhat slow and tedious. In the sec- ond song, when the singer is proclaiming love for the man who will become her husband, her “Er, der Herrlichste von al- len” was so earnest as to be downright
scary. Ladies, keep your hands off him. And her bittersweet announcement that she’s pregnant, in the sixth song, sounded like full-blown tragedy. Artistry was hampered by the irreg-
Graves
ularity of Graves’s delivery. She played the traditional diva role to the hilt, not only in sporting three different dresses during the evening, but in her willful relation- ship to the tempo; Laura Ward, her accompanist, did a fine job of keeping up (apart from the moment before the final encore when, her focus perhaps rattled after an entire evening spent on her toes, she launched enthusi- astically into the wrong piece). Phrasing was choppy; intona- tion, often uncertain. In Chaus- son’s “Chanson Perpétuelle,” for which Graves was joined by the
Cavani String Quartet, her French vowels made for a couple of strikingly ugly bay- ing sounds at the beginnings of phrases. The focus of the evening seemed more on form than on content: on playing a star role rather than on communicating the essence of the music.
But when the American part of the pro-
gram started, the mood changed. Three songs by Ricky Ian Gordon (also accom- panied by the quartet) led from romantic lovely lines (“Will There Really Be a Morning?”) to the vernacular of “Coy- otes,” strongly reminiscent of “Hernan- do’s Hideaway” (“The Pajama Game”), complete with castanets.
By the end, the audience was involved and primed for the encores. For these, Graves blended opera and entertainer mode with renditions of her greatest hits, “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix” and the “Habanera,” delivered with a certain amount of shtick, like favorite cover tunes. Graves may not be offering vocal luster these days. And she may not be as much of a superstar as she tried to pre- sent. But she is very good at playing De- nyce Graves, and the crowd ate it up.
midgettea@washpost.com
Folger Shakespeare Library’s director to retire in July 2011
by Jacqueline Trescott
Gail Kern Paster, the director of the prestigious Folger Shakespeare Library, announced Monday that she will retire in July 2011. In her eight years at the Folger, Paster
has acquired increasingly rare documents of the Elizabethan era; raised millions of dollars, despite the re- cession, for the historic building and collections; and overseen the inevitable march to digitization. What Paster didn’t expect was
having to supervise the rescue of thousands of priceless volumes when a major leak occurred in the rare book spaces in August 2002, a month after her arrival. Some 900 boxes of books had to be relocated, including 28,000 volumes to Amherst College. “That was a real emergency. The water-
Paster
Paster is announcing her retirement a year in advance because “the institution needs a good year of transition,” she said. “It is very much the case I still have a real interest in my job and a deep and abiding love for the institution. Yet in a year I will be ready to step away, and I am looking forward to returning to scholarship.” The Folger exists in Washington’s com- petitive environment of librar- ies, museums and theaters, be- ing a combination of the three. It has also earned a reputation as an international research desti- nation. The Folger has the larg- est collection of Shakespeare’s printed works in the world, and its archives on Shakespeare and the Renaissance number 600,000 items. Its collections keep growing,
proofing had clearly failed,” Paster said. The underground vault was re-water- proofed and additional storage space was added. Her decision to leave, Paster said, comes
at a time when the library is on solid foot- ing in its programs, outreach and finances. Fighting the recession has been hard, and she reduced the budget from $16 million to $13 million but didn’t have to lay off any staff members. The Folger has raised $28 million in federal and private funds during her tenure.
with the addition in the past few years of nearly 14,000 books, engravings and other materials valued at more than $5 million. It now has 32,000 images in its digital col- lection, which is accessible to everyone. A lifelong Shakespearean scholar, Pas- ter taught at George Washington Univer- sity from 1974 to 2002. Among her writ- ings are three books related to Shake- speare, following her personal interest in cultural history. In 2004 she published “Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage.” At the Folger she also edited Shakespeare Quarterly until last year.
trescottj@washpost.com
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