Shaun Tomson, 1977 world surfing champion and 12-year local resident, has enjoyed a successful professional surfing career, competing in the World Tour from 1975 until 1990 and earning accolades as one of the finest tube-riders of all time. In addition to his surfing prowess, the Durban, South Africa, native was, and continues to be, the consummate professional, bringing a well-mannered voice to the surfing world.
It’s hard to believe, as I look out my window at perfect tropical lefts, that not too long ago I was scouring the Gaviota Coast for a ridable wave, coming up empty-handed at each turnout. That routine of searching for surf, as well as the smell of musty wetsuits and the sound of traffic, seem as unfamiliar to me now as if I were from outer space.
Of course VH1, American Idol, and the whole popular culture industry have about driven it into the ground, but there was once a time when the word “diva” actually meant something. What it meant was an impossibly egotistical and demanding opera singer, and that’s just what Terrence McNally’s play Master Class promises to deliver-the original diva, Maria Callas, in all her delirious, late-career glory.
YEAR IN REVIEW: Years come, years go, and as one number yields to the next, music scribes struggle to make sense of the beautifully anarchic flow of culture, recorded and live. It’s just the way of things, an attempt to put the inherently mad and subjective world of culture in a tidier perspective.
When Todd Reynolds performs Still Life with Mic, boundaries between art forms collapse. Spoken word, movement, video, musical composition, and improvisation melt together in a shifting array of visual and auditory input. It’s no coincidence, then, that Still Life will be performed next week not in a traditional theater or concert hall, but in an art gallery.
For 15 years now, New York experimental music composer Phil Kline has taken his boom box-based tape loop Christmas carol, Unsilent Night, on the road to cities around the world each winter. For a guy who created a musical event with such an international cult following, he’s pretty casual about the whole affair.
After Bill Kraft retired as Corwin professor of composition at UCSB, the university conducted a search for “a composer of international stature who will be an effective educator and play a leadership role in our composition program.
Much of this exhibit is literally a palimpsest of Greg Botts’s recent paintings. More than half the pictures were created using a two-step process. The images begin as large, painted plein air sketches done in daylight in the various landscapes-from Aspen, Colorado, to Madrid, New Mexico-that Botts calls home.
On Wednesday morning, January 3, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival unveiled its slate for the 22nd annual affair, this year running from Thursday, January 25 to Sunday, February 4. The fest’s flamboyant director Roger Durling promised, “This is the best film festival that this town has ever seen.” The full list of films is included inside.
Despite a certain audience member’s assertions to the contrary, Ranking Roger-the Jamaica-born toast maestro who cofounded The English Beat with Dave Wakeling in the late 1970s-was not at SOhO Saturday night with the band. (Nor was former bandmate Saxa, for that matter.) Or, if Roger was, he never really emerged onto the narrow stage.
