The weather outside may not be frightful, but the holiday season is upon us nonetheless. The month of December offers a host of holiday happenings for the young and the young at heart, from seasonal holiday boutiques to caroling, parades, ballets, and more for whatever tradition you celebrate this time of year. Whether you’re settling in for a night by the fire or stepping out for a night on the town, have a very happy holiday.
Let’s learn to live like the Cubans, who enjoy long lives while drinking lots of coffee, smoking many cigars, and having lots of sex. And then there’s the dancing, of course.
There are not a lot of things we, as a society, can learn from Rob Lowe. The Montecito resident can’t teach us how to act or build our dream home without infuriating our neighbors, but he sure has one valuable lesson: If you’re famous, for god’s sake don’t tape yourself having sex.
ENDZ OF ODD: Drat! I was hoping we’d at least get a moat out of the deal-one preferably stocked with piranhas, too. But it turns out the illegal fence the News-Press erected in front of its Anacapa Street parking lot will probably be coming down soon.
Levy Bankrupt: Bill Levy’s timeshare commercial project at the foot of State Street was something few wanted except for Levy, his investors, and the City Council (after Levy, his friends, and his family made big donations to some councilmembers).
Has there ever been another filmmaking era in which the “geniuses” are given so much rope with which to hang themselves, and as a result promptly do so? Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, Malick’s The New World, and now this mess from an auteur barely out of his thirties with total artistic control of his third film.
Seemingly against all odds, Christopher Guest and gang have pieced together a signature cottage industry during the past two decades, in which celluloid improv and satirical incisors add up to a peculiar and very specific kind of cine-magic.
It’s always dangerous to cast children in plays, and more dangerous if they have talent and charisma. I bet Erika Olsen didn’t mean to steal the show from the PCPA regulars, but her relationship with the audience was so direct and ingenuous that when she leapt and threw out her hands to present some simple stage magic, the crowd reacted with gasps.
How fitting that our persistently Freudian culture should produce its own theatrical genre, the “transference drama.” The story is always the same: An intergenerational odd couple, thrown together by chance, falls into a non-sexual love that recalls for each of them their families of origin.
We arrived in Santa Barbara, with two cats and all our earthly belongings, on October 20, 1984. The more significant of our cats was Duncan, a wise and confident Tonkinese, coffee-colored with dark points, who lived another 10 years to the ripe age of 18.
