Having survived Mel’s last week, we decided to check out another “neighborhood joint,” one with that very phrase blazoned across its sign. Arch Rock Fish (say that 10 times fast) spent a lot of the summer promising to open, and it just made it. Located in the former space of Melting Pot, this is a local endeavor, with menus designed by Scott Leibfried and, most importantly, drinks designed by Mike Anderson, the mixologist behind Marquee.
The theme here is local favorites, and the menu drops locations, some well known and others rare, including the Arch Rock of the title, part of Santa Cruz Island. The menu has its fair share of “place” names.
Though the dance company Pilobolus counts over 100 works in its repertory, the majority of readers will know it from its shadow pieces. Featured in Hyundai ads and on the Oscars, the dancers assemble themselves into organic shapes, from animals to teapots, and the audience sees them only through a screen. But this intersection of “art and athletics,” as The New York Times once wrote, has many more levels, as their return to UCSB’s Arts & Lectures on Thursday demonstrates.
For Renée Jaworski, choreographer and former dancer with the company, Pilobolus is unlike any other organization, and this is from a former member of the equally wacky Momix.
In ‘A Film Unfinished,’ documentarians from Oscillscope unearthed footage from the Nazi propaganda machine attempting to depict rich Jewish captives as indifferent to the crimes against their fellow Jews during the Holocaust.
A disturbing Holocaust feature, “A Film Unfinished” brings up many issues about documentaries, propaganda and the invisible lines between the two. Young Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski has unearthed a relic of that era and turned a silent film into one that screams to be heard.
In 1942, the walled-off Jewish area of Warsaw contained 440,000 Polish Jews, all crowded into a three-mile area and awaiting “deportation.” Into this cramped, awful space stepped a film crew with less than good intentions.
‘SONICSENSE TOUCHSENSE,’ (detail) BARNEY HAYNES AND JENNIFER PARKER
Forget the signs at the museum telling you not to touch the art. When “SonicSENSE” sets up its exhibition for this coming week’s First Thursday Forum Lounge at Contemporary Arts Forum, it wants interaction. Play away — who knows what will happen.
One piece features a small corridor made out of piezo speaker film, a very thin, shiny metal paper. As the viewer walks through this narrow space, the displaced air ruffles the fabric, producing a ghostly sound between a rumble and a breath. Spooky, but intriguing.
Animator and artist J.Walt takes his stage name from Walt Disney, who he counts as a huge influence. But Uncle Walt never could have dreamed of the technology and the hallucinogenic imagination that goes into J. Walt’s work.
Set to show tonight through Sunday at Center Stage Theater, “Spontaneous Fantasia” takes the viewer on a spin through huge virtual worlds that J.Walt creates live using a drawing tablet and a joystick. Its name is just another tribute to his entertainment hero. Years ago, this sort of mind-bending journey would have taken months and months to assemble and process. But with modern processor speed and graphics cards able to crunch numbers at an incredible rate, J.Walt’s movies are now created in the same way that a jazz musician would improvise a melody.
Gretel Ehrlich’s travels have afforded her views of remote and largely frozen locales that have grown accustomed to a way of life threatened by climate change.
Wyoming-based writer Gretel Ehrlich laughs when her maintaining residence in Santa Barbara, where she was born, is mentioned. “I wouldn’t call it maintained,” she laughs. It’s a ranch, she says, and she’s rarely there. In Wyoming, she gets to live off the grid and close to nature, a lifestyle she’s had for most of her life as a nature writer.
Her first book in 1985 was “The Solace of Open Spaces,” a collection of essays, and she’s sought its namesake out in many areas of the world since. For her latest, “In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape,” she returns to one of the most open spaces on the earth: the Arctic Circle.
Mary Roach explores what it’s like to prepare a human for space in her new book, “Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void.” She will speak in October at UCSB Campbell Hall.
In the introduction to Mary Roach’s new book, she observes how ideally suited and evolved the human is to life on Earth, a match between man and environment that has lasted millennia. In space, however, nothing works for us: no water, no air, no gravity, not to mention the very, very long distances. But that’s why preparing humans for space — as revealed in humorous, wondrous and oftentimes gross detail in Ms. Roach’s “Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void” — has become a rich and growing industry but less talked about when compared to the science of booster rockets.
This is not the first time the writer has sought out weird science. In her books “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” (2003) and “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife” (2005), she took on death and the people who study it. With “Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex” (2008), she found sex researchers in Cairo and wrote more about sow insemination than most would want to know except farmers. And she has written all this popular science with a cocked eye, a sense for the absurd, and a smart sense of humor.
By the time you read this, Alberto Pizano will have already been handed the resolution honoring Spanish Heritage Month from Santa Barbara County and had his photo taken as a thank you. For the council, Pizano represents the best in our community, and those in the arts will know that Pizano and his daughter Vibiana, co-founders of the Flamenco Arts Festival, represent the opportunity to see a culture that often seems so close to us, yet still a continent away. For 10 years, the Pizanos have brought the top stars of this flamenco to our city.
The Pizanos have marked the 11th year of the two-day festival by moving in a new direction, as far as traditional flamenco goes. David Peña Dorantes changed the flamenco world in his native Spain by choosing the piano — not the traditional guitar — to play, and now he is coming here.
Pity the wealthy upper class of the Northeastern United States, as typified by the family at the center of A.R. Gurney’s play “The Cocktail Hour.” In place of a quiet reunion upon prodigal son John’s return home, a family is rocked by the news that he intends to turn their foibles into a play. It’s title? “The Cocktail Hour.” Let the martinis and bickering commence.
Gurney’s comedy also toasts to the end of Circle Bar B’s theater season, and David and Susie Couch have called in their favorites to make the evening a proper sendoff to a year well done. Leesa Beck, Matt Cooper, Don Margolin and Kathy Marden star, and Jim Sirianni — a long-time favorite who most recently helmed DIJO’s “Frost/Nixon” — directs.
Max chats up Sydney over coffee in filmmaker John Lengsfelder’s ?Blind Date Interactive.?
John Lengsfelder spent the earlier part of his filmmaking career working in a typical linear form, where stories had beginnings, middles and ends before being packaged up and sold. Apparently, that wasn’t enough for him.
“I reached a point in my life where I loved making films, but there was a letdown when it was done,” he says. “It’s no longer yours, and you have no relationship with it. I wanted to try staying in a relationship with my film, which meant being interactive with the film and the audience.”
