Tonight: Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

The third floor of the Smithsonian American Art Museum is under renovation, which means one of D.C.’s most luminous art landmarks—Nam June Paik‘s room-filling, U.S.-shaped Electronic Superhighway—isn’t on display right now. Its neon tubes and CRT screens will glow again in September, but for now the museum’s deep relationship with the late Korean video artist will have a different expression: a showing of Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, a documentary that premiered at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Director Amanda Kim will be on hand for a post-screening conversation about the film, which not only chronicles Paik’s groundbreaking works, but also frames his career within a long list of mentors and collaborators, including musicians John Cage and Charlotte Moorman. (Paik himself was a gifted pianist.) The highlight might be the segment on Global Groove, his 1973 half-hour special for public TV, which arguably presaged everything from MTV to YouTube. Kim wisely avoids trying to outdo Paik himself; it’s a case where telling a compact and memorable story honors the subject as much as any wild gestures could. Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV screens at 6:30 p.m. on July 13 at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, 8th and G streets NW. si.edu. Free, registration required. —Joe Warminsky

Saturday: Destroy Boys at the Black Cat

Destroy Boys showed up on the scene in 2016 with “I Threw Glass at my Friend’s Eyes and Now I’m on Probation,” an unpolished song from their Sorry Mom EP that evoked the slippery humor of bands like Dead Milkmen and Propagandhi. “Glass” is funny in the dark sort of way that makes you wonder if a band realizes how funny they are. (In this case, they do.) But Destroy Boys really leveled up with the release of 2021’s Open Mouth, Open Heart. Try listening to the album while looking at the record jacket sometime. Every one of the song’s 13 tracks is personified on the cover. Songs such as “Cherry Garcia” and “Te Llevo Conmigo” attracted big-name fans like Laura Jane Grace and Billie Joe Armstrong, and confirmed the Bay Area band was more than a hard-edged sound and a one-off joke. We have the pandemic to thank for Open Mouth. At peak quarantine, vocalist-guitarist Alexia Roditis and drummer Narsai Malik were cooped up together in Philadelphia. Lockdown gave them the opportunity to focus their attention on songwriting, and to create the most technically proficient music of their artistic careers so far. That said, even with the benefit of slick production, thanks in part to Will Yip, who has produced songs for the Menzingers, Destroy Boys have preserved the X factor that made “Glass” so exciting. Beautiful mixing is great, we love it, but it wouldn’t have been worth it if Destroy Boys had lost the roaring furnace of gnarly humor, scuzzy poetry, and radical politics at the heart of their sound. Destroy Boys play at 7 p.m. on July 15 at the Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW. blackcatdc.com. Sold out. —Will Lennon  

Sunday: Jessie Gaynor on The Glow at Politics and Prose

Thin, radiant, and miserable as ever, PR maven Jane goes into a bookstore looking to run into her ex-boyfriend. Perusing a stack of paperback novels, including “last season’s triumphant, groundbreaking tour de force[,] she wished people would stop writing books, just for a little while.” Voracious readers—and book critics—will identify with this strain of prestige literary fatigue, but they won’t feel it reading The Glow. It’s an important book without being a pompous bummer, and for the cynics out there, take comfort in the fact that there is nothing triumphant about it. In this debut novel, Jessie Gaynor has produced a savage takedown of self-help culture (skin-deep but poreless) and a chilling portrait of self-sabotage (down to the bone, baby). In many ways, The Glow is a love triangle between a pathologically insecure Ph.D. student turned media professional; a lonely trust-fund kid, grown up but still aching for approval; and a lifestyle guru named Cass, whose intoxicating blend of Holly Golightly, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Gwyneth Paltrow smells of bone broth and goose poop. But it’s mostly about the kind of love Cass can monetize—a “glow so spacious that she could host others inside it”—which is to say, compulsorily intimate and completely impersonal. Do not come to Cass’ upstate retreat—or to Gaynor’s novel, for that matter—to find a friend. These characters are unlikable in the best ways: vivid, hilarious, more Reddit than Insta. Trust that, if you see yourself in this picture, you will not like it. Still, Gaynor has captured something so timely—grotesque without being exaggerated—in this book. With its rapid-fire prose, its unflinching humor, and its quieter moments too, The Glow will live in your heart far longer than a plate of activated zucchini noodles will survive your intestinal tract. Jessie Gaynor discusses The Glow at 3 p.m. on July 16 at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. politics-prose.com. Free. —Annie Berke

Sunday and Wednesday: Oklahoma! in local theaters

Since finishing journalist Sam Anderson’s book Boom Town earlier this year, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Oklahoma. The saucepan-shaped state in the middle of the nation has an outsize presence in our collective imagination, in part because it’s endured horrific disasters and in part because of an earworm-y song written 80 years ago that taught listeners how to spell the state’s name. Oklahoma!, the musical that launched the creative partnership of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, lacks the overwrought emotion and timeless songs of future collaborations, such as Carousel or The Sound of Music—at least in my opinion—but its story is particularly immersive, making it an ideal candidate to watch on the big screen. To celebrate the musical’s 80th birthday, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, Trafalgar Releasing, and Concord Originals have come together to show the 1998 London production in movie theaters across the globe on July 16 and 19. Gorgeously lit and dressed, the Trevor Nunn-directed production drew rave reviews when it first opened and subsequently transferred to the West End and Broadway. It also, for better or worse, introduced the world to an Australian newcomer named Hugh Jackman. Yes, the slightly Aussie, slightly southern accent is distracting, but don’t let it stop you from reveling in a trip back to musical theater’s golden age. Oklahoma! screens on July 16 and 19 at numerous local theaters, including AMC Georgetown, Regal Gallery Place, Landmark E Street, and Old Greenbelt Theatre. oklahomaincinemas.com. Ticket prices vary. —Caroline Jones

Monday: Cisco Swank at Songbyrd

When Kendrick Lamar released his triumphant rap-jazz fusion album, To Pimp a Butterfly, in 2015, Francisco Haye was a freshman concentrating in music at New York’s LaGuardia High School, the 23-year-old told Marcus J. Moore in the New York Times last month. To Pimp a Butterfly’s influence on Haye, who performs under the moniker Cisco Swank, is abundantly clear on More Better, Swank’s recently released debut solo album. Like Lamar did in 2015, Swank unspools traditional jazz motifs, and reconfigures them to fit snugly around his contemporary rap flows and vocals. Make no mistake, though: More Better sounds firmly grounded in 2023, and in Swank’s experience coming into his 20s during a pandemic. On “If You’re Out There,” Swank confesses that he’s “teary-eyed still thinkin’ ‘bout 2020,” as horns swell in and out. He is “back home with the fam” on “What Came From Above,” which transports its listener to his Brooklyn neighborhood: “Crown Heights, fish fry, soul food.” Swank’s calm, almost sleepy voice recalls Earl Sweatshirt, and the album’s chilled-out vibe carries forward the torches of bedroom pop and lo-fi beats, two sounds that have experienced meteoric rises in the Spotify age. “Still Trying,” More Better’s standout last track, is a gentle exercise in vulnerability and perseverance. “I’m weary of my faults but I’m still trying,” he says during the song’s hook, before it fades into a slow, jazzy piano solo that showcases his chops as a pianist. “I hope the flow up to par,” Swank confesses earlier on the track. See him perform at Songbyrd, and you’ll find out that it very much is. Cisco Swank plays at 7 p.m. on July 17 at Songbyrd, 540 Penn St. NE. songbyrddc.com. $15–$18. —Ella Feldman

Through July 30: National Small Works at Washington Printmakers Gallery

“I often think of artists as poets of the visual, presenting concepts and feelings through images,” says LuLen Walker, art curator for Georgetown University and this year’s juror of the Washington Printmakers Gallery’s National Small Works. The subsequent exhibit, which runs until July 30, showcases 36 exquisite, however petite, pieces from around the country highlighting the obsessions and concerns of today’s innovative printmakers. The themes are timeless, exploring existential, human wonderings such as the conceptions of selfhood, light after grief, and the effervescence of nature. But the pieces, many of which were crafted during the pandemic, reflect today’s particular urgencies; like how to give voice to nature in the face of climate change, or how to crisscross over lines and boundaries that seek to divide us. Take, for example, Curtis Bartone’s interweaving stone lithograph of buzzy flora overlaying a familiar, geometric cityscape, with an eye-catching moth, or butterfly, hanging from the sky mirroring the shape of a crucifix, where one might expect to see a moon or sun. “My work addresses the uneasy and nebular relationship between human beings and what we label as the ‘natural’ world,” Bartone explains. Through his multimedia techniques blending collage and sketching, he writes, “similarities and connections begin to emerge. Divisions between native and invasive, wild and domestic, or beautiful and ugly disappear.” In another boundary-bursting work titled “Seaclipse” by Katharine Warinner, planets draped across a torn sky dance like stars, all visually anchored by a silvery orb reminiscent of a tire’s wheel, or a sliced cucumber. “I think of my work as organic abstraction and work with shapes and patterns found in nature,” Warinner writes. “My goal is to create images that reach beyond a literal sense of place to an internal, meditative one.” And on the subject of fluidity, Linda Yoshizawa’s etching, titled “My Winter Journey,” features scrawling, naked trees whose velvety darkness renders the stark white of the snowy hearth pillowy soft. “I believe my artwork reflects the mixing of two cultures – American and Japanese,” Yoshizawa writes. “When I see a twisted tree, I am inspired by its strong, defiant will to survive in the face of adversity … My artwork reflects these layers of my identity. The colors, values, and textures in my work elicit mood, questions, and a sense of serenity.” The National Small Works exhibit runs through July 30 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW. Thursdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 4 p.m. washingtonprintmakers.com. Free. —Emma Francois