Two-party on

If there's a better metaphor for the swaggering ascendancy of Virginia's Democrats than Senator Jim Webb taking complete control of Congress over the Thanksgiving holiday break, we here at The Odd Dominion sure don't know what it is.

No direction homeless

In July 2004, local reference librarian Jim Barns wrote a letter that appeared in The Daily Progress. "The plight of the homeless comes to my conscience quite often," he wrote. It was true, the Market Street branch of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library where he works serves as a shelter of sorts for area homeless…

A Little Night Music

Talk about pedigree. A Little Night Music, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, was inspired by the late Ingmar Bergman's exquisite…

Danny Schmidt, with Louis Ledford [with audio]

music A week before his solo set at the Gravity Lounge, Danny Schmidt sat next to Paul Curreri on a sofa onstage while Jan Smith performed his song "Dark-Eyed Prince" as part of the annual King of My Living Room concert. Smith gave Schmidt’s song the slow, measured tempo it keeps on record, her voice […]

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

book "Nothing in the annals of musical scandal—from the first night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to the release of the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the U.K.—rivals the ruckus that greeted [Arnold] Schoenberg early in his career." From any other critic, that statement might sound like an exaggeration, but Alex Ross never pronounces anything in […]

Direct Transmissions from the Hunab Ku [with audio]

cd If colonial legend and Wikipedia are correct, Hunab Ku was the supreme deity of the Mayan civilization. The god, without a physical form, is represented by a symbol (somewhat similar to the Chinese yin and yang) that signifies the solar calendar, balanced forces and an embodiment of the center of the Milky Way, the […]