“The majestic rocks off Northern California’s coast dominate the shore, slightly beyond the physical reach, but not the imagination, of humans.” So says Annie Reid, curator of an exhibit at the Westhaven Center for the Arts titled "Sea Stack Survey of the North Coast." The display running until the end of August showcases the work […]
Arts + Scene
Reviews, interviews and upcoming highlights from the week in visual and performing arts around Humboldt County.
Posted inArts + Scene
Hot Summer Hell!
Previews> The summer funfilmfest continues Wednesday, Aug. 13, with Tropic Thunder, which rides in on the crest of protests by disability advocates because of the film’s depiction of people with learning difficulties. This alleged action comedy, directed by Ben Stiller and starring Stiller, Jeff Khan, Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black, concerns a film crew […]
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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
In a 1989 article in The National Interest, the neoconservative political economist Francis Fukuyama declared that humanity was witnessing “the end of history.” With the Cold War winding down and Soviet Communism unraveling, “Western liberal democracy” had won the battle of ideologies, argued Fukuyama. People throughout the world were choosing deregulated free market economies and […]
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Don’t Forget to Remember
There are these paradoxes: theatre, like movies, TV and major-publisher literature, is increasingly created by the young, to the extent that a writer for the Dramatist Guild’s magazine felt compelled to bravely suggest that good new plays could actually be written by playwrights over the age of 30. Yet theatre audiences are consistently and increasingly […]
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Triumph of the Costner
Previews Just in time to wipe away those August blues, Pineapple Express, which opens Wednesday, Aug. 6, is a stoner comedy from the very busy Judd Apatow factory. In a bit of a twist, the film is directed by David Gordon Green, better known in indie circles (most recently for Snow Angels) now trying his […]
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Luminous Color
I’d recognize Joan Gold anywhere — her paintings that is. I only met her for the first time last week to interview her for this article, but I have been looking at her paintings for more than 10 years now, and they are very distinctive. Mostly it’s the colors. Some artists have a particular “palette,” […]
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A B- For X
Previews The new X-Files film made a believer of few people, so opening on Friday, Aug. 1, is the latest summer wannabe box office hit The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, starring the suddenly busy Brendan Fraser. Fraser reprises his character Rick O’Connell who, along with his son (Luke Ford), wife (Mario Bello subbing […]
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Flight of Farce
You wind it up tight in the first act and in the second act it flies apart, only to somehow come together in the end. That’s the basic mechanism of farce, and it’s a lot harder to accomplish than it sounds. The script is of paramount importance, and if you wanted a textbook example of […]