Among the most difficult questions facing the world’s art collectors, museums, and galleries is what to do about stolen or otherwise illegitimately obtained art objects. Ask Marion True, the former curator of antiquities at the Getty, who has been brought up on criminal charges in Rome over her role in acquiring art for the museum that later turned out to be stolen.
In mid-August, the Fishbon collective held one of the most unusual underground art events of the year.
At 8:30 on Saturday morning, the three chefs and general manager of the Hungry Cat drift into the small restaurant on the corner of Anapamu and Chapala streets and brew some coffee, pouring it hot and strong into clear pint glasses and using it to chase the chunks of bright orange Charlene melon they pass around. The restaurant won’t open until 5 p.m., but today is Farmers Market day, and in a few minutes the team will pile into Chef Dylan Fultineer’s Subaru station wagon with a hand truck and drive the 10 or so blocks to what is clearly their idea of heaven-the Santa Barbara Farmers Market.
With a new cooking reality show popping up virtually every week on television, a Whole Foods coming soon to upper State Street, and interest in cooking and greenmarkets at an all-time high, we decided to take a look inside the workings of two of the most happening restaurants in town-Downey’s, a Santa Barbara institution, and the Hungry Cat, a new restaurant started by a celebrity-chef couple from Los Angeles and run by some young potential rising stars in the Santa Barbara culinary firmament. George Yatchisin sat down with John and Liz Downey to discuss their legendary restaurant’s 25th anniversary, while Charles Donelan chased the crew from the Hungry Cat through the Farmers Market and then ate the consequences.
The rapturous response for Charlie Haden’s Quartet West at the Lobero Theatre last November was in no small part due to the playing of saxophonist Ernie Watts. Since joining the Quartet West when it formed in 1987, Watts has made it clear that he belongs in the elite category of major jazz saxophonists alongside big names like Wayne Shorter and Sonny Rollins. He carves up the changes and rides the rhythm section with the best of them, bringing a soulful, bluesy tinge to the full range of post-bop, post-Coltrane sax techniques.
The Music Academy of the West loves its alumni, and that love was amply requited last Tuesday as one of its most distinguished alums, clarinetist David Shifrin, appeared in all four pieces on a program that could have easily been titled “con amore”-with love.
While the ubiquity of reproductions of great modernist classics has made it easy to imagine that the late 20th century was dominated by large images and grand statements, connoisseurs know that some of the best work of even such familiar names as Jasper Johns and James Rosenquist was done in the more subtle but no less imaginative arena of the print studio.
Summer vacation is to students what weekends are to working adults-an agreement about time off so seemingly universal that it’s hard to imagine life without it. But the current, standard American school year of 180 school days and nearly three months of summer vacation is a relatively recent development, and not something often observed in other parts of the world.
Popcorn! Short Film and Video Festival, the popular one-night, outdoor mini-festival of short films presented each year by the Contemporary Arts Forum, gets a makeover and an upgrade this year with the addition of a musical performance. The trio that will play between the films is led by Brent Green, a Pennsylvania animator and musician who has worked with the Chicago band Califone.
At the height of Fiesta and in the heart of downtown, a large audience gathered at the Lobero to participate in a different kind of spectacle-the opera La Bohme, as performed by the Music Academy of the West. The contrast between the interior of the theater and the revelry outside in the streets was not as great as one might think. Opera audiences are among the most festive and demonstrative in all of music, and this one was no exception.
