In the wide, wild world of contemporary fiction, there are few names higher on the list of literary superstars than our town’s very own T. Coraghessan Boyle. For the last 25 years, T.C. Boyle – the 57-year-old New York native who emerged with constant creativity and prolific grace from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the late 1970s – has bombarded readers around the world with characters as colorful as any in the history of literature.
Former Santa Barbara City Council candidate Bob Hansen (pictured) has renewed his campaign to make bathrooms available 24/7 for the homeless who sleep and congregate near lower Milpas Street. At budget hearings last week, Hansen urged county supervisors to consider the effect on ocean water quality of people going to the bathroom “behind bushes and dumpsters.” Given Hansen’s long record of agitating for homeless bathrooms, he is clearly a force to be reckoned with.
Thirty minutes east of S.L.O., the Pozo Saloon has seen a lot of action since its establishment in 1858, but nothing like this Saturday’s meeting of jam band goliaths. Colorado groove gurus String Cheese Incident, following Ratdog, led by Grateful Dead guitarist/vocalist Bob Weir, pay a visit to the Central Coast. Tickets and info can be found at www.pozosaloon.com.
My father and I have been exchanging emails about FIFA’s World Cup Soccer. I was born in the Azores Islands, about 800 miles off the coast of Portugal, on one of the smaller islands named Terceira. Soccer is our island’s collective sport of choice.
Somewhere not far from the heart of Old Town Goleta is a young man working minutely in film, most days mostly alone. He’s a night person and he’s an animator. And for a young man, he is very old school.
He works on a genormous electric machine called an animation stand – one of the last left in the country – built in the 1930s, on which, legend holds, the Peanuts cartoons were made. (It’s also rumored that the feature film FernGully was, too, but the young man is happy to disbelieve that one.) His machine’s about five feet across, with a roller for panning effects; the camera and upright zooming column tops six feet high.
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s Summer Arts!
Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and give you all the information you need to plan your art calendar, The Indy’s Summer Arts Preview has it all: Summerdance gets funky; the Music Academy toots its horns; the Bowl rocks ‘n’ rolls; the Writers Conference grows stronger than ever; Theatrical Treats enchants; art gets post-modern; jazz gets phatter; and, yes, film flies through the roof. No, you don’t have to get dressed up, any ol’ cape and tights will do – just take a break from the sun every once in a while and get cultured with the events listed in the following pages.
Emotions ran high this week at City Hall as several UCSB students – a majority of them black – publicly accused the Santa Barbara Police Department of brutality during a late-night arrest gone terribly wrong last week. With Police Chief Cam Sanchez looking on, a dozen witnesses gave their accounts of the scene outside Cooney’s Bar late last Thursday night, relaying teary and outraged stories of unwarranted pepper spraying, excessive use of batons, and a woman being “dragged by her hair across the street with her breast hanging out.”
Jack Black, Ana de la Reguera, and Darius Rose star in a film written by Jared and Jerusha Hess and Mike White, and directed by Jared Hess.
Jared Hess is out to save Hollywood from itself, and he’s doing a smash-up job so far. Granted, the assessment is based on only two times at bat, but Hess clearly has something precious and needed: a new comic voice. We first got a taste of this zinger zeitgeist with Napoleon Dynamite, presumably a summer sleeper teen comedy, but instead one of the greatest American films of recent years, and one with a new twist on the concept of dry comedy, sneakily lubed with compassion.
Fri., June 23
Si Se Puede: PUEBLO Youth Chapter holds its weekly meeting. 5pm. 601 E. Montecito St. Call 729-5105.
Sun., June 25
Volunteers for Peace: Veterans for Peace needs volunteers at Arlington West every Sunday. 8am-5:30pm. Stearns Wharf. Email oldrodbrown@aol.com.
At the Lobero Theatre, Wednesday, June 14.
I have new respect for reality television. As much as I hate to admit it, it landed INXS a perfect front man. Yes, self-named J.D. Fortune is a shameless rip-off and ridiculously vain, changing three times throughout the night – from a black blazer with a fluorescent pink tie to a black T-shirt emblazoned with “Mr. Wrong” – but it turns out, that’s exactly what you want him to be.
