TRAVELING CHEF Joshua Ploeg is cooking a seven-course vegan meal for the first 40 people to RSVP. It's a benefit for environmental activist Marie Mason, so you can feel smugly green in any number of ways, which you're choking down tofu and ... you know, delicious vegan goodness.

» The Potter's House, 1658 Columbia Road, NW; 7 p.m., $20 donation requested; volunteers@dcinfoshop.org. (Columbia Heights)

Photo by Jay Howell

IF YOU HAVE the kids this weekend, try the National Zoo's Weekend Family Festival in celebration of International Migratory Bird Day. You will learn about birds and how they ... you know ... migrate. Or something. They're pretty!

In the meantime, you (and the kiddies) will learn about global warming, bird banding, and how to help migratory birds.

» National Zoo, 3001 Connecticut Avenue NW; Sat. and Sun., 10 a.m. - 4 p.m., free; 202.633.4800. (Woodley Park)

Photo by Jessie Cohen/Smithsonian's National Zoo

YOU WOKE UP on Sunday and saw the rain pouring down and thought "Well, I can't go to Earth Day now."

Sure, you were all set for the free concerts, like the one on the Mall — and maybe you were even going to wear this old tie-dye shirt you got that one time from your friend who went to Burning Man, and it was gonna be sweet, man. But the rain. The rain! Mother Earth herself was thwarting you. She couldn't have expected your attendance, not with all that rain.

Well guess what? You are not off the hook. Earth Day is officially today, suckers, and the sun is shining. No excuses. Just think to yourself: What would George Clooney do?

(Answer: he'd buy another hybrid car and sit in it and pretend it's a spaceship and that he is Clark Gable, Space Cowboy. Like he always does. But I digress.)

Anyway, it's Tuesday, and the Earth still needs your love and attention. Wondering what you can do? Here are some ideas.

Continue Reading "They Say It's Your Earth Day: Events Tonight" »

THERE'S NOTHING BETTER than Scandinavia. They've got volcanoes, Vikings, a buttkicking luge team and a drink known as "Glogg." Oh, and they have awesome, fun pop music, most of which will be spinning at St. Ex tonight at Hej Hej (which means "Hi! Hi!" in Swedish.)

Hej Hej is D.C.'s only all-Scandanavian dance night, founded by DJs Natalya Minkovsky and Melissa Gilmore Vivari after a trip to Iceland.

»Cafe St. Ex, 1847 14th Street, NW, Tue., 10 p.m., free; 202.265.7839. (U St.-Cardozo)

Photo by Lavanya Ramanathan

THE WAIT IS FINALLY OVER FOR NEWS GEEKS — the Newseum opens its doors at its new Pennsylvania Avenue location on Friday, more than six years after leaving Rosslyn.

The 643,000-square-foot museum of news is three times larger than the old building, and is just slightly smaller than the National Air and Space Museum. And it boasts 14 galleries and 15 theaters, including a "4-D" theater.

"It's a 3-D movie, but the seats shake, rattle and roll," Charles Overby, the CEO of the Newseum, said. The theater's first flick, "Eye Witness Time Travel," follows Nellie Blye as she goes undercover at a mental institution and Edward R. Murrow as he reports live from London during World War II.

Like its predecessor, the Newseum was designed to be one of the most interactive museums in the world. Visitors can tape their own news broadcast of a famous event, or they can watch news events like the lunar landing unfold as they took place in the museum's Internet, TV and radio gallery.

Continue Reading "News You Can Peruse: Newseum" »

AT OYAMEL, the management won't stop you from doing a shot of tequila.

But what a waste, considering the Penn Quarter restaurant is the first place in the D.C. area with special Agave de Oro certification from the Tequila Regulatory Council of Mexico.

It's an honor only a handful of restaurants in the U.S. can claim. And for Oyamel, which specializes in contemporary Mexican cuisine, it wasn't easy to get.

As Steve Fowler, the restaurant's general manager, explained, to get the certification, restaurants can't just have a broad tequila selection, although that's an important first step. Eighty percent of a restaurant's staff has to take tequila education courses and be tested on their knowledge.

Continue Reading "At Oyamel, Tequila Is a Key Ingredient" »

QUINTRON AND MISS PUSSYCAT ARE NOT SPACE-QUESTING, CRIME-FIGHTING CARTOON CHARACTERS. They are a fantastical traveling twosome, but their mission is to rescue concertgoers from the typical rock 'n' roll experience.

Quintron, a mop-coiffed inventor and multi-instrumentalist, plays a custom-built Hammond organ/Fender Rhodes synthesizer combo, a "disco light machine" and all manner of tricked-out gadgets, whipping up an electronic garage-punk ruckus he refers to as "swamp-tech."

On maracas and background vocals is Miss Pussycat, who, being more than just a cute-booted sidekick is herself an electronics wunderkind. She complements Quintron's musical performances with elaborate puppet shows that come with minimal techno soundtracks, special effects and a quirky cast of characters.

The duo's road show, which hits the Black Cat on Saturday, has won the pair legions of followers, who, taken as a whole, could be pigeonholed as fun-loving.

Continue Reading "Swamp Things: Miss Pussycat and Quintron" »

BILLED AS "THE FIRST COMPLETE GUIDE TO ASIAN FILM," Tom Vick's "Asian Cinema: A Field Guide" conducts a whirlwind tour through the film cultures of, well, all of Asia. Longtime powerhouses Japan and India are well represented, but developments in Turkey, Israel, Thailand and Malaysia are also chronicled. Vick will sign copies following a Sunday screening of Lou Ye's controversial 2006 epic "Summer Palace."

» EXPRESS: Is there such a thing as a pan-Asian sensibility?
» VICK: I would say no. "Asian cinema" is this kind of catchall, and a lot of people automatically take it to mean China, Hong Kong -- East Asia, essentially. And in a way that's because they have a larger share of our pop culture.

» EXPRESS: Are these cinemas linked only by sharing the world's largest continent?
» VICK: That's about it. But one of the reasons that I had the idea for the book was that in my own job there was no one guide I could go to for this stuff. Either things would be about a particular country, a particular director, or they were very academic.

» EXPRESS: What does the American audience for Asian film look like?
» VICK: Because Asian cinema is such a huge subject, I think it's also broken down into even smaller subcultures. There are people who really love Korean cinema or people who really love anything involving martial arts or people who love anime. And people who start out interested in those things eventually sometimes become curious and branch out into other kinds of films.

Continue Reading "Focus on Asian Film: Tom Vick" »

"OUR DOWNTOWN LOOKS NOTHING like it looked a decade ago. The office crowd is no longer just heading back to the suburbs at the end of the day."

— Neil Albert, D.C.'s deputy mayor for planning and economic development, on the rise of K Street's nightlife culture.

New, exclusive clubs have gravitated to the office buildings of the McPherson Square area, injecting new life into an otherwise quiet section of downtown after sunset, as The Post's Elissa Silverman reported on Sunday.

Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post

PERFORMANCE ARTIST and culture warrior Tim Miller would prefer his next project be something about gardening or dogs — his "weird passions."

But the core subject of his work — life as a gay American man — is made perpetually pertinent by an indolent democracy and slow-to-accept social fabric. And Miller is too much of an activist not to respond to each new discriminatory quirk in the system.
"As an artist, I have to respond to inequality ... to talk about it," Miller says. He's been talking about it for some time now.

As one of the notorious "NEA Four" group of artists whose National Endowment for the Arts grant proposals were sensationalized in 1990 after being resoundingly repulsed by a Republican chairman, protest is primary to Miller's life-as-art art form.

Continue Reading "Tim Miller: True Body of Work" »