BLUE DUCK TAVERN and Park Hyatt Washington are helping kids in need through cookies. To introduce Blue Duck's signature freshly baked cookies, available daily in its pastry shop/pantry, Park Hyatt will donate 100 percent of the cookie sales this week to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

The sale ends on Mother's Day, so get your bag of gourmet treats this weekend. Selections include a rum raisin cookie with a chocolate ganache center; raspberry walnut rugelach made with cream cheese dough, homemade raspberry jam, chopped walnuts and cinnamon; and a Valhrona chocolate cookie with pecans and marinated dried cherries.

» Blue Duck Tavern; 1201 24th St. NW; 202-419-6755.

Written by Express contributor Suemedha Sood
Photo courtesy Heather Freeman

Last Friday, another Washington Wizards season ended with a playoff loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Meg Zamula took a few days to recover and compose some thoughts about her beloved Les Bulletz — or at least all the stuff that happens around the Wiz during a game at the Verizon Center.

DESPITE THE INJURIES, frustrating refereeing and occasional lack of offensive rebounding, it can't be denied that this season was entertaining. Even when the shots weren't falling, the Verizon Center tried hard to keep fans upbeat and engaged with non-basketball entertainment.

Here are the good, the bad and the startlingly unattractive aspects of the live Wizards experience.

THE GOOD

It was a banner year for the Kiss Cam. After years of Sixpence None the Richer's insipid "Kiss Me" serving as its soundtrack, someone apparently realized that the majority of Wizards fans do not spend the remainder of their leisure time watching "Dawson's Creek" reruns. Replacing Sixpence's tripe with Digital Underground's "Kiss Me and I'll Kiss You Back" was a significant improvement. And if you didn't have anyone to kiss you could still shimmy shimmy cocoa pop in your seat.

This season also provided fans with at least one classic Kiss Cam moment, when Wizards announcer Steve Buckhantz leaned over and lovingly smooched unsuspecting co-host Phil Chenier's ample forehead.

The adults featured on this year's Dance Cam tended to rely heavily on the lawn-sprinkler move, but D.C.'s children demonstrated enough rhythm and creativity to compensate. Hopefully the not-so-kid-friendly prize — a gift certificate to a seafood restaurant — won't discourage them in future efforts.

Continue Reading "Between the Bounces at the Verizon Center" »

IN THE LATE 1980s, around the time many began wondering what "alternative" was supposed to be an alternative to, Polvo was an alternative to everything.

Polvo's sound, which included de-tuned sitars, banjos played with distortion and shimmering, atonal rock-anthem riffs, forced critics to lob a lot of language their way. "For the uninitiated," wrote the Toronto Sun, "Polvo sound like a Middle Eastern folk band playing car chase music on fuzzy guitars."

Maybe so, but it was this eccentricity that resonated in the most obscure caverns of the post-punk underground; cutting seven recordings in as many years — and never selling more than a few thousand each, if that — Polvo modestly wrote rock history on a bare-bones arsenal of squawking Sears & Roebuck six-strings and schizoid time signatures.

Continue Reading "In a Class of Its Own: Polvo" »

YOUNG FILMMAKER AND screenwriter Harmony Korine has established himself as a grunge visionary with his films "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy." Cherished by art-house audiences but often leaving critics aghast, Korine's work has set itself up as antithetical to traditional notions of cinematic pleasure: pretty people, happy endings, moral redemption, plot.

It's a shame if audiences reject Korine's latest film out of hand on the assumption that it's as gristly a chew as "Gummo." "Mister Lonely" stars Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator hardly getting by in Paris. He meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) who tells him about a commune for their kind in the wilds of Scotland, where people who "live as," as the script delicately puts it, the famous can be free.

In between, a group of nuns in the South American jungle, under the tutelage of Werner Herzog — bear with us — attempt to jump out of airplanes, aloft on faith alone.

Korine found the image in his mind and it stayed. "I liked the image," he says. "I thought it was a test of faith."

Continue Reading "The Pitfalls of Faith: 'Mister Lonely'" »

CONTROVERSIAL COMEDIAN Katt Williams' epic "It's Pimpin' Pimpin'" tour hits the District with two shows at D.A.R. Constitution Hall on both Thursday and Friday.

The stand-up comic has a long resume featuring numerous forms of (largely pimp-based) humor — film and TV highlights include "First Sunday," "Wild 'n Out" and "The Boondocks" — but despite his onstage persona, Williams struck a decidedly thoughtful, low-key tone during his recent conversation with Express, making exactly one joke. So, we talked about books.

» EXPRESS: Where does your fascination with pimping come from?
» WILLIAMS: I like the fact that it's remained consistent all the way through, as the oldest profession — the mindset required on both ends of it — the teamwork involved and the benefit at the end. I've studied the story from a lot of different angles. It keeps changing for me. It keeps getting on a different level.

» EXPRESS: You've adopted enough kids to start a basketball team — with subs. How did that come about?
» WILLIAMS: It's kinda redemption: If you do bad in your life, you try and do some good things. You try to do the best that you can. I started that prior to getting famous. It was something I needed to do. And it turned out to be a good situation for the kids and for me. It changed me.

Continue Reading "Pimp of All Media: Katt Williams" »

THOUGH HE'S HAD an improbable whirlwind rise through the London hip-hop underground, Dizzee Rascal is already shedding that U.K. grime-rap label: New collaborations with everyone from Calvin Harris to Fatboy Slim could put Rascal, nee Dylan Mills, through club speakers and into the mainstream.

"Genres are just what other people make them; they're boxes people keep music in by what they say about it," Mills said.

It's a rapid evolution for the artist, who was only 18 years old in 2003, when he came out of nowhere to win the Mercury Prize, awarded yearly to the best album in the United Kingdom and Ireland, for his debut, "Boy in da Corner." Now, with his third album, last year's "Maths and English" a runner-up, Rascal isn't shy about giving the people what they want.

"That's the whole thing about being an artist and an entertainer at the same time: As much as I'm getting my fill making my music and filling my creative desire or whatever, I'm f***ing trying to fulfill what everyone else wants as well — seeing what people like and take to," Mills said. "The more I branch out and try out new stuff, the more I find out what that is."

While sticking to his garage-rap roots, "Maths and English" moves away from his previous efforts into a hip-hop style cleaned of grime.

Continue Reading "Back to School: Dizzee Rascal" »

MARTIN NOBLE, GUITARIST for British Sea Power, is sick of being asked about the differences between U.S. and European audiences.

Maybe because it's a dumb question.

Or maybe because BSP fills enormous venues in Europe but remains the object of (admittedly fanatical) cult devotion on this side of the water.

"It's kind of a head[trip], America, at first," Noble says. "Then you realize each state is like its own country."

Especially D.C., where BSP plays this week.

"Each has its different language, even though they're so similar. At first, we were like, ‘Argh, they're ruining the English language!'"

And he laughs.

Continue Reading "BSP's Power Tools: British Sea Power" »

AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA, the federal government gave people along the Gulf Coast formaldehyde-tainted trailers to live in (if it gave them anything at all).

But since 1995, earthquake refugees in Japan, Turkey and India, among other places, have received elegant paper-tube houses designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who has also created churches, museum installations and several unforgettable expo pavilions from paper and cardboard.

After studying at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the Cooper Union, Ban caught critics' eyes with a series of villas in the mountains around Nagano, Japan, before he burst onto the global scene with his provisional houses built from pulp products.

The structures are not usually all paper — there is rain and fire to consider, so you might find plastics as well as bamboo or cane, but they seem always to satisfy the building-code cops. And they're typically not permanent but do recycle nicely.

Continue Reading "Living Large on Maple Street: Architect Shigeru Ban" »

"IT'S STILL EXCITING, getting a chance to play every night," says Craig Extine, singer-songwriter for Olympia rock trio the Old Haunts. Of course, he's saying this on the phone from beachside San Pedro, Calif., reveling in his escape from the cold rain back home and having rocked a set the night before with former Minutemen bassist Mike Watt's new band, the Missingmen, in Watt's hometown.

"We're excited about a lot of the bands we're playing with on this tour," Extine says. "We like playing shows we would want to go to ourselves." On the road again to support their third full-length release, "Poisonous Times," the band is more or less scheduled to play every night for the next two months without a break. "It's a punk tradition, says Extine. "Touring is work, though — it's a risk every time."

The way he sees it, "the natural life span of a band is probably about a year or two." That's funny, because the Old Haunts are going on year seven. Despite a slew of lineup changes over the years, the band is still going strong with a new grrrl on drums, Toby Vail, late of Bikini Kill.

Continue Reading "One Sturdy Garage: Old Haunts and Their Dirty Punk" »

THE GREAT THING ABOUT being married is that you have to appeal to only one person — and it isn't even you. The same goes for all kinds of romantic bonding, and it creates a dynamic that is utterly irreproducible.

Coupling is culture, the creation of an ever-evolving two-person civilization. Each pairing creates its own language, music, play — all of which evaporate on parting. Or on simply being exposed to another person.

And yet coupling is precisely what Amy Sillman is interested in. The painter asked friends to pose, then made taut, rubbery representational ink sketches, some of which hang at the entrance to her Hirshhorn "Directions" show, subtitled "Third Person Singular." In the gallery behind are the larger abstract oils they sometimes led to, sometimes followed.

Continue Reading "Life, Memory, Me & Us: Amy Sillman" »