Five reasons to look forward to the work week: an animation festival, bluegrass and BBQ, reasons to be pretty, a romantic symphony, and South First Fridays.
Attractions News - page 61
As Major League Baseball saunters into the final weeks of the season, the prolific documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has completed a compelling two-part mini-series, The Tenth Inning, that serves not only as an insightful sequel to his nine-part Baseball, but also provides a compelling and definitive backdrop to the national pastime during the past decade-and-half.
The entire cast of Angels in America, Part One delivers great performances, which are all the more commendable because of the play’s great length and the fact that, as Kushner intended, most of the actors play multiple roles.
San Jose’s annual celebration of Mexican music, culture and cuisine kicks into high gear this weekend.
Even though I had never eaten at Palo Alto’s Lavanda Restaurant and Wine Bar, somehow I had an image in my mind of what it was all about: Italian food that rambles around the Mediterranean to pick up a few other culinary influences. I figured it was pretty good, but given the profusion of lackluster Italian restaurants on University Avenue, I never stopped in to see if my preconceived notions were correct. But a few weeks ago, I happened to walk by the restaurant and a flier caught my eye. “Specialties from Croatia,” the paper read. Croatia? That’s not what I expected.
White Trash Gothic is perhaps the best label to stick on Killer Joe, a black comedy now being staged by Renegade Theatre Experiment. Written by Tracy Letts about 15 years before he won the Pulitzer Prize for August: Osage County, the play concerns the Smiths, a clan of Texan riffraff who decide to kill their family matriarch for her insurance money.
We’re familiar with pho, Vietnam’s best-known culinary export. Some of us are even familiar with bun bo hue, a spicier version of beef noodle soup from central Vietnam. Now, I would like to introduce banh xeo, a crepe filled with sizzling pork and shrimp that everyone ought to get to know better. Pronounced “boon say-o,” banh xeo consists of a rice-flour crepe seasoned with turmeric and filled with bits of pork, shrimp and bean sprouts. It’s a popular South Vietnam street food that’s served with piles of lettuce leaves and fresh herbs.
Set during the Great Depression in the early 1930s, Susannah (Jessica Wortham) is a stiff, staunch and white ethnomusicologist for the Library of Congress. She’s ambitious about getting a teaching job at Harvard, so she travels from prison to prison to find black singers to record songs that date back “before slavery times.”
The 2010 01SJ Biennial rightly cements San Jose and Silicon Valley among the destinations for global contemporary art gatherings. For more than 20 years now, new-media art fests have emerged on several continents, addressing key issues in the overlapping fields of art, science, critical theory, digital media and cultural studies. But there has never been a definitive equivalent in the United States, which is why everyone involved with 01SJ says it will become the North American model.
SAVE YOUR MONEY!!!!!!!” Allen Ginsberg told Jack Kerouac in a letter from 1957. Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” was a hit after a high-profile trial over its presumed obscenity, and Kerouac’s second book, On the Road, had transformed the author nearly overnight into the most popular novelist in America. “God knows what oblivion we’ll wind up in.”
