by Christina Waters | Jan 23, 2008 | Home |
Is it just me or is Berkeley really more there than most other places in the Bay Area?
Whatever it is, I shamelessly confess that I like having lunch all by myself at one of the outdoor tables of Cafe Rouge. This hopelessly hip place holds down one corner of the 4th Street mecca, between Gilman and University. Upscale boutiques twinkle along a two-block section of this neighborhood along the main route to the UCB campus. Between the illegally luxurious Pasta Shop (sea salt from Wales and Sicily!) and relatively downmarket Peet’s, Cafe Rouge has always been ahead of the curve in terms of out-and-out chic, killer menu and artisan charcuterie.
So here was obviously the place for me to test drive a Niman Ranch hot dog. At $7, it was a dollar cheaper than my gorgeous organic salad, and two dollars cheaper than the glass of minerally 
Grüner Veltliner that went with the frank like Prada on Kate Moss. Loaded with garlic, the hot dog was sheer bliss (maybe it was the outdoor setting, warm sun, plus I was famished). But the secret weapon here was a relish of spiced cabbage so good I could have inhaled the container even without any accompaniment. The potato chips weren’t bad either.
Oh, did I mention that the hot dog had been mesquite grilled? That’s the sort of touch that makes Cafe Rouge one of my favorite places to have lunch in Berkeley. Plus it’s across the street from Sur la Table where I bought a few little chartreuse, square salad plates. Chartreuse is my favorite color.
by Christina Waters | Jan 19, 2008 | Home, Movies |
How much is Julian Schnabel paying the film critics? There’s no other reason why intelligent film-goers would succumb to the sophomoric exercise in cinematic vanity that is The Diving Bell & the Butterfly. Intrigued by raves from a wide range of reviewers, including local filmies, I wasted $7 and two hours on this pathetic excuse for a movie about a magazine editor confined to almost complete paralysis and the “life lessons” he learns thanks to attractive therapists, hand-held camerawork and of course, those crucial sub-titles.
Did Schnabel really think that making the film in French would elevate its mawkish, soporific effect? It doesn’t. It just means that you listen to lots of French speakers while you’re being bored to tears.
Wait, I know. Schnabel (a well-connected New York artist famous for painting on really big plates) decided to invoke the “Atonement effect.” You know, that’s where you shamelessly capitalize on a five-minute cameo by a major-but-aging star. (more…)
by Christina Waters | Jan 17, 2008 | Home |
We joined art lovers this weekend at the opening of Linda Pope’s latest curatorial creation at the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery at UCSC. Claire Lerner‘s eclectic combinations of photographic images and mixed media – “The Relaxation Project” (detail,r.) fills the Main Gallery, while Jimmy Chen‘s “Sleepwalking” series occupies the Annex Gallery.
Chen – a graduate of the university’s Art program and a former student of painter Frank Galuszka, makes small, moody nightscapes. Chen’s work explores the underbelly of suburbia’s comfort zone, in unsettling little studies that suggest Edward Hopper by way of David Lynch (below).
Claire Lerner’s pieces elicit a reflective mood of carefree summertimes, and their underlying quiet, idyllic nothingness.
Show continues through March 8, 2008. The Gallery is located at Cowell College – 831/459-2953.
by Christina Waters | Jan 15, 2008 | Home |
Once again, Avanti scores a direct hit – this time the kitchen won us over with a lunch special of braised pork (pastured pork from TLC Ranch, butchered at the restaurant), golden chanterelles and tumescent, gravity-defying gnocchi.
The pork surrendered upon impact, the chanterelles were blatantly addictive, the gnocchi were perfect and the whole thing was bathed in meat juices and topped with a few, choice bitter greens.
This is food worth getting out of bed for. More and more restaurants are using this incredibly delicious, humanely raised, organic pork raised in south Santa Cruz County by Jim Dunlop – and also available at your favorite local farmers market.
by Christina Waters | Jan 8, 2008 | Home |
Americans in record numbers are exercising their metastasized souls and fickle appetites. And it’s not on eBay – it’s on the presidential primaries. I thought this was supposed to be a presidential election, not a national installment of “American Idol.” But I was wrong. Showing their collective appetite for fashion, sound bites and easy rhetoric, my fellow Americans are throwing themselves at candidates who mouth the juiciest phrases and have “good personalities.”
Reality check: the public seems to be disfunctioning big time. I call this randomized, ubiquitous hysteria, apocalyptic behavior. This is occurring at every juncture: viz. our mass idolatry of TV personalities and fascination for Britney Spears, hand-held technology, and cheap clothing made by children in China. We have become a nation of media junkies (George Orwell was here first) in thrall to just about everything we see on a computer or tube. Any tube. CNN, Fox, BBC, YouTube, MySpace, QVC, every single blog du jour. We don’t know why trans fats are bad for us, but we do know that Nicole Kidman is finally pregnant.
Just saying a word doesn’t bring about a new state of affairs. (more…)
