by Christina Waters | Feb 21, 2012 | Home |
Last week I expected to find disarming French reds (wines, not commies) and inventive rosés, but I’m not sure I was ready for just how polished the kitchen at Soif has become.
New menu, new generously-proportioned attitude, and dishes loaded with comfort flavors and non-tricky presentation.
Here is a spinach and multi-beet salad, with infant turnips and a liberal crown of blue cheese. It was huge and great glorious eating. Ditto a scallop salad with black trumpet mushrooms, and another appetizer of lobster and bitter greens.
Soif — more than simply a stylish, welcoming wine bar. May I use the hackneyed-phrase, “better than ever?” Thanks. I just did.
by Christina Waters | Feb 19, 2012 | Art, Home |
Pina Bausch was one of my heroes. Most of my life I tracked her conceptual innovations in choreography, and the creation of her Tanztheater company in Wuppertal Germany. Moving dance beyond the lexicons of ballet and even Graham’s modern dance tropes, Bausch used the body to explore the archetypes of animality. Her “dances” are in fact small narratives, riddles, myths and gems of erotic psychoanalysis. In the process she created nothing less than a poetics of pain.
In her pieces, at once expressionist, avant garde, and laced with angular angst, Bausch transformed dance into an emotional incantation in which longing and long-limbed velocity were employed to invoke something like redemption. (more…)
by Christina Waters | Feb 15, 2012 | Home |
A preliminary stab in the highly-hyped dark.
Hugo and The Artist just might cancel each other out.
Which would leave The Help battling with The Descendants.
Will the George Clooney factor kick in?
Or will the tasty froth that is Midnight in Paris take home the gold statuette?
I am still throwing the i ching on this one, but I will bet that Glenn Close won’t be named Best Actress. She’s the right choice, in the wrong film.
More soon!
by Christina Waters | Feb 14, 2012 | Home |
Is this man the thinking woman’s opera star? the most heroically proportioned tenor currently plying the world’s Wagner circuit? or is he the Siegfried that launched the Metropolitan Opera’s current Ring cycle to mega-YouTube status?
Yes, yes and yes! Jay Hunter Morris is a big blonde Texan with voice, looks and intelligence enough to command the final installments of Richard Wagner’s opulent transfiguration of northern mythology into cultural gold. Gold, as in the ring itself.
Easily the most compelling artistic argument against postmodernism, The Ring is a fable whose moment is exactly now. The quest for eternal youth, power, and fathomless wealth, is what drives the Wagnerian epic, and never have its tensions or tragedies been so eerily reflected in political reality as at this moment of the early 21st century. Just sit quietly with this for a minute.
The gold that lives in the Rhine river, the property of the industrious underworld of the Nibelungen, has been won through trickery (more…)
by Christina Waters | Feb 13, 2012 | Wine |
Should you need another reason to swing by the Cellar Door and feast upon biodynamic vibes, Bonny Doon Vineyard wine and glamorous food, now there’s David Taylor, from San Francisco’s sizzling A16, who will take over the kitchen for a Winemaker Dinner, Sunday Feb. 26 at 7pm.
Need tempting? The multi-course menu ($80 per person, wine pairings included) begins with an amuse of rabbit terrine with roasted alba mushrooms. Antipasto of wild arugula (more…)
