Rapid-fire fun, witty over-the-top wordplay, lavish costumes, brilliant acting—you must put Santa Cruz Shakespeare‘s The Liar on your August calendar. We laughed ourselves senseless on opening night and gave thanks for the astute casting, directing, and savvy choice of a mid-summer night’s dream!
Life’s too short NOT to see this delicious spectacle.
[Shown here is the insanely talented Brian Smolin, who tears up the stage as the feckless liar, Dorante.]
Soif’s Grand Opening celebration happens tomorrow, Wednesday, from 4-6. For everybody!! Come check out the new remodel, enjoy comp samples of the new menu, buy yourself a nice glass of wine and salut this team who invested in a vibrant downtown Santa Cruz.
Soif.
Yes, but who—or what—is the deus in this taut probe of artificial intelligence?
Directed by sci-fi screenwriter Alex Garland, Ex Machina slowly turns some of the major questions of futuristic metaphysics (e.g. Philip K. Dick) around in its spare, elegiac hour and 45 minutes. With complete precision the film moves like a beautiful Swiss watch, involving only a few moving parts. It is impossible to stop watching.
Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson is Caleb, a young programmer selected by billionaire über scientist (read Victor Frankenstein) Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac) to take part in a variation on the Türing test (is an artificial creation capable of exhibiting seamless consciousness). Helicoptered to Nathan’s remote compound (you can feel Mary Shelley haunting the wild and rocky periphery) Caleb meets both the creator, and his creation Ava (Alicia Vikander) a disturbingly perceptive composite of beauty and circuitry. Caleb has seven days in which to decide whether Ava is the real deal. Is she capable of self-awareness, emotion, humor, and deception? Without revealing crucial plot details, the short answer is hell yes! What happens, however, as we gradually gain increasing knowledge that things are not what they seem (more…)
Once upon a time people went out to galleries, museums, private homes, and lots of other places, to enjoy seeing artwork.
Today people go out to rented spaces, retail shops, and studios to support artists.
In other words, people go out and congregate in places filled with all of their friends to support the work of another one of their friends. The results can be scorchingly bad. Privately, people will admit that they’re weary of having to support the arts, weary of traipsing through one more opening of work that would embarrass a beginning student. Everybody knows it’s become an obligation, rather than a pleasure. These sorts of vanity fairs fail to surprise, delight, or provoke controversy. They’re designed to bolster egos and provide soothing reassurance.
The word “support” makes this party-like activity seem like a good thing, like helping a disabled person cross the street. Or throwing a Tupperware party. But supporting such vanity activities actually neutralizes genuine art-making, and levels the hard work, brilliance, and inspiration of real artists.
Art in the era of digital reproduction has been reduced to so much hobbyism, therapy, narcissism, and social activist reassurance. Instagram, ergo sum.
At these politically-correct gatherings—people come in, and go out very very quickly (more…)
We’ve been the best of friends, we’ve been the worst of enemies. We’ve been intimate and we’ve been indifferent. But Stephen Kessler and I have known each other for 35 years and except for the few decades when we didn’t speak, we’ve managed to maintain a robust respect for each other’s shared defiance in the face of mediocrity.
Stephen Kessler has written with a fierce intelligence pretty much every single day of his life. From those early alternative riffs called “Polygraph” that he penned at the dawning of the age of the Santa Cruz weeklies, to his literarily impeccable Redwood Review, to countless gracefully nuanced, and internationally celebrated translations of the A list of Spanish poets, Kessler just doesn’t know how to cease and desist.
And just when we thought we’d already collected enough of his work to savor for years to come, he up and launches not one, but two new works. New prose poems that Proust their jazzy way through some of the key memory spots in his personal biography—Where Was I?—and a brilliantly curated “greatest hits” of memoirs, essays, vision quests, and kvetches titled Need I Say More?
I savored the prose poems, rife with street scenes of LA and Santa Cruz, (more…)
A book of sensory adventure: The rituals, passions and discoveries of an engaged life.