Year: 2006

REGENTS RETHINK EXEC PERKS:

The UC Board of Regents grappled with hidden executive compensation packages last week, passing several measures designed to make pay packages more transparent beyond the disclosure of salaries, including such perks as car allowances, stipends, and various bonuses. Regent Judith Hopkinson, an outspoken advocate for greater transparency, noted that luxury perks were more often a source of political embarrassment for the UC campuses with medical programs, which UCSB does not have. She also noted that execs in the UC system were paid, on average, 17 percent less than executives at comparably prestigious educational systems.

Black Genius

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

At the Arlington Theatre, Tuesday, March 7.
Alvin Ailey’s choreography-passionate, reverent, and simple-pays homage to the African-American culture of his Texas childhood; it is steeped in joyous Christian faith and the human instinct for celebration, even in times of suffering. It’s remarkable that a work like Ailey’s “Revelations,” choreographed in 1960, still has life in it, yet it does. So much life, in fact, that last Tuesday’s program came out lopsided: Nothing preceding the signature piece could do it justice.

Shining Through

Whitney Brooks Abbott

At the Easton Gallery, through April 2.

“The Last Walnut,” the centerpiece of Whitney Brooks Abbott’s current show at the Easton Gallery, empties itself to make room for what takes place there. Nothing but a pale, butter-colored driveway extends across the lower half of the three-foot-square canvas, while a gray barn tucks itself discreetly into the middle-ground on one side. Thus, although the tree is not exactly in the center of the composition, it feels as if it is, painted in purples, grays, near-magentas, and almost-mahoganies.

My Cousin Vin Diesel

Find Me Guilty

Vin Diesel, Ron Silver, and Alex Rocco star in a film written and directed by Sidney Lumet.

In 1960, Kenneth Tynan wrote in the New Yorker, “Hardly anything in the whole range of dramaturgy is more difficult to write than a dull trial scene.” Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Murder on the Orient Express), who directed 12 Angry Men four years before Tynan’s pronouncement, might have felt scanted in this regard. His courtroom masterpiece, unlike, say, Witness for the Prosecution, unwinds after the trial proper in the jury’s chambers. He didn’t get to have a gruff attorney bray, “Objection, your honor,” or a crusty but benign judge bark, “Overruled” while waiting for some juicy inappropriate behavior to develop into the stuff of life and death, truth or consequences, innocent-versus-guilty capital-T theater.

POETRY MATTERS

Peaks and Valleys

“I live in the only east-west valley in North America.”
-Dan Gerber, in conversation

Iraq War: Still Shocking, Still Awful

This week marks the third anniversary of the Iraq war. On Monday, President George W. Bush warned that we will soon be “seeing more images of chaos and carnage.” He was correct. During the next two days, 87 corpses were discovered scattered around Baghdad, buried in shallow graves or dumped in trash heaps. Twenty-nine bodies were stuffed in the back of a pickup abandoned in a busy city intersection.