UCSB students protested an ordinance proposed by Santa Barbara County staff to bar students from moving their couches outdoors. The prohibition on placing “indoor furniture outdoors” was primarily aimed at preventing deliberate couch fires.
Members: Ashley Vincenti (vocals), David Romblom (keys), Jeff Kranzler (bass), Dan Klemann (drums), and Ian Macgregor (guitar). Albums: No Shore, recorded at Orange Whip Studios and released last January. Prior Gigs: Reds, Legends, the Wildcat, Rocks, Caruso Woods gallery, the Green Room, the Alibi Room. Style: Unpretentious, artful rock ‘n’ roll. “Structurally, we’re a little bit heady,” explained Romblom, “but we’d like to think we hide this from our listeners.”
A panel of judges investigating misconduct charges against Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Diana Hall (pictured) issued its findings this week. The special masters found that Hall violated judicial ethics on three separate occasions in 2001: by driving drunk, by disguising the source of a campaign donation, and by improperly asking a prosecutor the reason why he issued a peremptory challenge to remove her from hearing one of his cases. The latter count was the most egregious, according to the panel, comprising “willful misconduct” because Hall knew she was not allowed to ask that question, but did so anyway; she then denied it.
I’ve been a sucker for music merchandise ever since I walked away from my first concert in one of those Rolling Stones lips and tongue T-shirts. So when I heard that Hank Williams Jr. was coming to the Chumash Casino on Friday, August 4, it wasn’t just the chance to hear the man’s music that got me excited, it was the allure of his merchandise.
Are you suffering from those post-SXSW, Coachella, or Bonnaroo blues? Then fear not, because from San Francisco to Chicago, musicians are still taking command of demountable stages and using porta potties in the name of rock ‘n’ roll. Here are five of the best music festivals that will round off 2006.
Scoop’s most astonishing quality is the utter wretchedness of its writing. A couple of Allen’s jokes zing like days of yore, some flop, and many more seem like reruns. The driving joke from Annie Hall, colleagues gathered to toast Broadway Danny Rose, and the mock danse macabre from Love and Death are all here, recycled and reused. Allen seems uninterested in constructing believable motivations, or even characters with consistent cores. Certainly Scoop is meant to be the smiley-faced companion piece to last year’s brilliant but unremittingly dark Match Point, and both were shot around London rather than in Allen’s beloved Manhattan. Both starred Scarlett Johansson, too, though she was a sultry temptress in Match and here plays a corny-but-bright innocent who’s abroad. That is, when she isn’t suddenly changing character to suit the whims of Allen’s flimsy comedy.
At the Lobero Theatre, Tuesday, July 25.The concert opened with Wolfgang Mozart’s ineffably sweet Oboe Quartet in F Major, K. 370, played by David Weiss, oboe, Kathleen Winkler, violin, Donald McInnes, viola, and Alan Stepansky, cello. With the possible exception of the Clarinet Quintet, this is my favorite of all Mozart’s chamber works, and this group’s reading rivals the four recordings I have of it.
S.B. Congresswoman Lois Capps offered one of the few dissenting votes last week when the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that will allow the U.S. to sell nuclear technology to India for the first time since the mid 1970s. The last time the U.S. sold civilian nuclear technology to India, India diverted the technology to a secret nuclear weapons program. (The country successfully tested its first nuclear bomb in 1998.)
Little Miss Sunshine is an American family road comedy that shatters the mold. Brazenly satirical yet deeply human, the film introduces audiences to one of the most endearingly fractured families in recent cinema history: the Hoovers, whose trip to a pre-pubescent beauty pageant results not only in comic mayhem but in death, transformation, and a moving look at the surprising rewards of being losers in a winning-crazed culture. A runaway hit at the Sundance Film Festival, where it played to standing ovations, the film strikes a nerve with everyone who’s ever been awestruck by how their muddled families seem to make it after all.
(The following parade sequence is subject to change)
