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Naomi Klein talks ten years of
No Logo this month at
Busboys & Poets.
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A Culture Jamming Classic Reconsidered
Call it coincidence, but as protesters were busy smashing Starbucks windows ten years ago during the Battle of Seattle, Naomi Klein’s defining treatise on the rise of the “superbrand,” 1999’s No Logo, was just hitting the printers, waiting to be claimed as the defining text of the anti-globalization movement. A decade on, Klein is revisiting her bestselling debut with an updated reissue of the book that’ll be bringing her to Busboys & Poets’ flagship 14th & V location on Friday, Jan. 15th at 6 pm.
Though the Canadian journalist’s most well known work has fallen into the college curriculum canon alongside other crossover hits like Nickel & Dimed and Fast Food Nation, Klein still isn’t pulling her punches, whether they be aimed easy targets or sacred cows.
In her new introduction to No Logo’s anniversary edition, for example, she not only takes on the much-maligned Wall Street profiteers behind the ongoing economic morass, but President Obama as well -- a figure that she contends is brand unto himself, albeit one with “troubling gaps between its marketing and reality.” Expect both to be hot topics as she looks back on the tumultuous decade past from the appropriate perch of the nation’s capital. 2021 14th St. NW · www.busboysandpoets.com
2010’s State of the District Soundcheck
After five years and more than 50 releases, genre-colliding local label Sockets Records is starting off the New Year with an affirmative declaration that the best may still be yet to come after all.
On Friday, Jan. 22nd at The Black Cat, the homegrown label is bringing together five of their idiosyncratic acts for Sockets’ largest ever label showcase. True to their stated preference for music spanning the “experimental, incidental, minimal and arranged,” no two bands on the bill share the same sound, let alone the same genre. Six-piece hip-hop outfit The Cornel West Theory headlines, while the not-to-be-classified HUME, the post-punk agitators of Imperial China, ethereal instrumentalists Buildings and recently resurrected dance duo Big Gold Belt round out the line-up. According to Sockets’ founder Sean Peoples, the show will be a milestone is more ways than one.
“I never thought I'd be still be putting out music after a couple of years, but I think in the last year the label has really grown and I can't be more excited to work with the bands,” said Peoples. “I'm really excited to still be doing this and there's so much creativity in DC right now, so it makes sense to try and document that.”
Tickets to the Sockets Records showcase are $12 and on sale now. 1811 14th St NW · www.blackcatdc.com
Digital Tragedies Decoded
Originally just another entry in the lexicon of perverse Japanese subcultures, suicide-oriented message boards and chat rooms -- some of which have known to result in fatal pacts between two or more complete strangers -- have now made their way stateside, becoming a bona fide internet boogeyman in the process. Unlike other online memes, however, these ruminations on death and dying leave behind something substantive -- a digital paper trail of tragically unnerving web posts and e-mails.
Leave it then to DC’s own Taffety Punk Theatre Company to turn a textual analysis of those melancholic dispatches into an art form. Never one to shy away from controversial subject matter, the soon-to-be six-year-old performance collective -- whose previous works included the tale of a guerilla army overthrowing a fundamentalist American theocracy -- have cobbled together a collection of both genuine and fictitious last goodbyes into a “punk-theatre dance concert” they’re calling suicide.chat.room.
After debuting in rehearsal form only at the Kennedy Center in 2007, the newly polished stage show has been picked up by arts organization Flashpoint to mark the opening of the 2010 Mead Theatre Lab season. Suicide.chat.room will hold “pay-what-you-can-previews” on Jan. 26th and 27th with proper performances running from Jan. 28th through Feb. 14th. Tickets are $10. 916 G St. NW · www.flashpointdc.org
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