Responding to pressure to operate in a greener fashion, Santa Barbara City Hall announced last week that it will be powering all of its diesel trucks on a cleaner burning bio-diesel fuel blend. The shift came in response to escalating gas prices which made the more expensive bio-diesel more competitive and increased pressure from within City Hall to operate in as green a way as feasible.
County firefighters who used a stationhouse as a drop-off center to distribute yard signs for 2nd District supervisorial candidate Janet Wolf during the recent primary are facing disciplinary suspension. Wolf campaign manager James Kyriaco acknowledged the mistake after the NewsPress broke the story, but said it was a one-time occurrence rather than an ongoing problem.
FOR INTRODUCTORY PURPOSES: We are now nearing the end of the first week of the Music Academy of the West’s 2006 Summer Festival. There have been plenty of master classes, but aside from the Piano Fest last Saturday at Abravanel Hall, and the Canadian Brass concert last night at First Presbyterian Church, there have been few public events of scale. That will change moderately this Saturday, and decisively next Tuesday.
CLASH OF THE TITANS: Okay, so it wasn’t Godzilla vs. Mothra, Alien vs. Predator, or even the Mummy vs. the Wolf Man. But by Santa Barbara standards, it was easily the next best thing: John Davies vs. Marshall Rose. Or perhaps John Davies versus the world, which is probably how it seemed at 7:30 a.m. just a few Thursdays ago. What had been billed as a long-awaited PowerPoint wonk fest on how best to get downtown employees to bus, bike, walk, or carpool to work quickly degenerated into a verbal smackdown worthy of the World Wide Wrestling Federation‘s pre-fight theatrics.
Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock star in a film based on Eun-Jeong Kim’s movie Siworae, adapted by David Auburn, and directed by Alejandro Agresti.
It’s too bad this film can’t make up its mind between art house and Hollywood. And not just because it throws away its potential delivery of rich thematic relationship observations – a problem so obvious that I immediately began wondering how other directors like M. Night Shyamalan or Wong Kar Wai might have attacked the same fable fare. (Answer: No happy ending.)
Responsible for helping multiply CDs’ memory capacity by five, creating streetlamps that don’t attract bugs, and working to bring brighter and more energy-efficient light bulbs to the world, UCSB professor Shuji Nakamura (pictured) was recognized last week by the international scientific community with the 2006 Millennium Technology Award. Nakamura – who has been a Gaucho professor of electrical and computer engineering since 2000 – was given the “Holy Grail of semi-conductor research” for his work with light emitting diodes (LED) and the blue laser diode that reads CDs and DVDs.
At the Lobero Theatre, Tuesday, June 13.
There was power to spare when the 1967 Gary Burton Quartet momentarily reformed on the Lobero stage last Tuesday evening, and the atmosphere in the full house was charged with excitement. Burton is known for perfecting a four-mallet technique that freed the vibraphone from its strictly percussive role and allowed him to develop longer, more complex, harmonically extraordinary lines. Guitarist Pat Metheny has been similarly inventive.
Does one become charismatic, magnetic, and a true life force, or is one born with it? Does it develop throughout time as the result of experience, or is it created from within? In John Marsch’s case, I always wondered since our friendship was only formed in the last seven or eight years. What a gift it was to learn more about him from those family members and friends who joined the private memorial service for him at his beautiful home on May 22. Together, they painted a beautiful picture of his extraordinary life. The setting was Montjoie, the historic house that John restored into an “opulently cozy home” and believed he was only stewarding on behalf of the community. Among the many events John hosted, it was the most poignant and saddest of all days. But I get ahead of myself. To fully appreciate this day, I’d like to share some of his history.
I was on the phone the other day with my brother’s wife in San Diego, reminiscing as we often do about the years we grew up in Boston only two streets apart. Ann brought up a time when she and Jack were young lovers and my parents invited her over for Sunday dinner (this was after I had left home). Since it was her first time meeting them, Ann was anxious to make a good impression, but there was so much bickering, my parents didn’t even have time to notice her. “[The fight] was, if I’m not mistaken, about the mashed potatoes,” she said.
Sometime during college, I fell deep into a Bob Marley phase, listening almost solely to the reggae legend while I studied his life with monkish dedication and searched like a pilgrim to uncover the rarities of his work. One day, that search led me to Amoeba Music on Haight Street in San Francisco, where amid thousands of CDs and cassette tapes, I located Bob Marley and the Wailer’s double disc One Love at Studio One 1964-1966. It was like nothing I’d ever heard, with Marley’s whiney voice lingering over rocksteady rhythms, occasionally breaking into slow ballads or flipping the other way into rapid ska beats.
