The droll, mock-heroic adventures of star-crossed lovers imagining then living their own mini-epic story gets told on the really big screen—the wall of the Julianne and George Argyros Plaza— in Segerstrom’s free outdoor summer movie series. A favorite Wes Anderson film, appropriate (mostly) for families, Moonrise Kingdom is meticulous, weird, charming and smart, featuring a […]
Now See This: Cinema Paradiso
@ Bowers Museum
The Bowers Museum’s already molto dolce Italian cinema series further sweetens the deal, with an offer that’s too good to resist. Before screening possibly the most subversively romantic movie about film ever, they offer basic Italian language instruction to help you follow the smart, funny dialog of Giuseppe Tornatore’s instant classic and 1988 Academy Award-winner, Cinema […]
A Nixon-Hater Reconsiders Tricky Dick in the Age of Trump at the Rebooted Nixon Library
YORBA LINDA: WHERE GOOD REPUBLICANS GO TO STAY DEAD It's Friday morning, Oct. 14, in Yorba Linda—named after the beautiful or narcissistic Yorba family, Californios who once owned much of present-day Orange County, with the city motto “Land of Gracious Living”—and I'm driving the Richard Nixon Freeway. This is, of course, the first of many […]
Andrew Tonkovich
Count on the smart, engaged programmers at Muzeo, Anaheim’s huge and user-friendly cultural arts center and museum complex to make a place in their casa for a throwback crafts movement to complement the current rage for bespoke couture, homegrown food, artisanal cheese and microbreweries. Their ‘The Art of Woodworking’ show celebrates the enduring and beautiful […]
The Show Ponies
Their engaging website promises that “The Show Ponies are an indie-folk band with old time and bluegrass tendencies.” This young five-person outfit knows whereof they sing— by way of Texas and Arkansas originally, then to California and three CDs in just 5 years since. Beyond their winning self-description, SP is a sophisticated, musically literate American […]
Dick Van Dyke 90th Birthday Celebration
Actor of TV, film and stage, song and dance, sometime political activist (Bernie Sanders supporter!) and author, Dick Van Dyke turns 90 this week. A jolly fan cult celebrates the career of the man who played comedy writer Rob Petrie, Mary Poppins’ iconic chimney sweep pal, a crime-solving physician and a Tony, Emmy and Grammy […]
The Hula Girls
The Hula Girls are men, in fact four talented musicians whose gentle if arch-clever mix of genres into something called hulabilly goes just right with the legendary if nutty exotic drinks and whimsical tiki-culture décor at what must be one of the Girls’ favorite local venues. “Hula! Hula! Bang! Bang!” and other inspired song journeys […]
Adams, Curtis and Weston: Photographers of the West
Bowers offers a nifty short survey of the West featuring three totally recognizable names and a few of their representative masterpieces. Legendary photographers who innovated and shaped their art who also shaped our collective consciousness of place (for good and bad), Ansel Adams, Edward Curtis and Edward Weston teach as much about seeing as believing. […]
A Behanding in Spokane
Director Michael Serna’s casting call for Costa Mesa Playhouse’s production of A Behanding in Spokane advised that auditioning actors be “fun, funny, and fearless,” which is how the envelope-pushing troupers at one of OC’s bravest, best small theaters will no doubt stage Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s 2010 black comedy about a bad man who’s spent […]
Dreams of Home, Dreams of Exile: 1888 Center, Orange County, CA
Maintaining the ostensible focus of this Orange County-themed literary arts blog is easy this week when a fellow UCI Lecturer and literary pal shared a copy of a novella published by Black Hill Press aka 1888 Center, an outfit I have been remiss in writing about. Check out its handsome website, with elegant description of many […]
Gravity N Other Myths
Look out, Cirque du Soleil and flying Chinese acrobats, the Aussie dance-movement-circus ensemble Gravity and Other Myths (great name!) arrives with its witty, graceful, dangerous balance (get it? Balance?) of modern dance, performance and gymnastics magic. This collective human kinesis-machine of seven women and men dares you to blink as they launch and propel themselves, […]
NTLive Presents: Hamlet
His thespian’s journey from Holmes to Hamlet seems just right, if still satisfyingly audacious for British super-actor Benedict Cumberbatch, the intense, empathetic and hyper-literate popularizer of smart, dark anti-heroes on film and television and in radio and live theater: Sherlock, Khan, Julian Assange, Alan Turing, Richard III, both Victor Frankenstein and the Creature. Thanks to […]
Gore Vidal's Conquest of Everything, or Not Quite
This week's fall fund drive at KPFK 90.7 FM arrives as the only real non-commercial people's alternative media station struggles to make the case for what should be wildly self-evident, which made my taped interview with novelist, poet, essayist, editor and, now, biographer Jay Parini so further ironic, if also encouraging. Parini was a close […]
UCI Zine Fest
What are the cool kids up to these days? Spinning vinyl, donning Ramones t-shirts and going old-school DIY artsy with self-produced ‘zines, a hipster throwback of an enduring underground tradition. UC Irvine’s library calls all zine-ophiles and other creative types to learn about, celebrate and create their own exemplary personal iterations of the homemade magazine […]
One Man, Two Guvnors
In award-winning playwright Richard Bean’s adaptation of Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni's classic “The Servant of Two Masters,” the dimwitted manservant typical in Italian comedies wears a loud double-breasted suit. Set in 1960’s Brighton, England, the attire in the international hit One Man, Two Guvnors is already funny in its own dated period way, as are […]
Blocks of Time: Paintings by Heather Roth
The owner-activists at Laguna’s Gallery of Contemporary Art have organized showings by vigorously pro-humanitarian artists. So you may not know much about art but will be won over before even seeing the work on display, and for sale, just now 'Blocks of Time' by local OC painter, woodworker and all-around materials repurposer Heather Roth, who […]
All Politics is Locavore and Connected, Too: Reality and the Hammer of Art
No caption for this photo, so I'll put one of my favorite quotes (by Bertolt Brecht) into the mouth of one of my favorite eco-activists (Naturalist-for-You Joel Robinson), by way of celebrating local art, local politics, local books and all kinds of loving, liberating, loco (!) writers, filmmakers, artists and activists: "Art is not a […]
Walt Whitman Sings
Walt Whitman’s immortal poet lives on— in every democratic American dream, brilliant scientific ambition, crackpot mythology and vigorous youthful affection. A recent biography suggests that the world-famous queer, socialist poet of the people can perhaps save us even now from ourselves, so that witnessing him reincarnated in actor-director-teacher John Slade’s one super-man dramatic show of […]
Calling All Rebels: The Moral Imperative to Read, Write and Revolt the Chris Hedges Way
In welcoming Chris Hedges to Orange County for an event called, un-shyly, indeed provocatively, "Calling All Rebels: The Moral Imperative to Revolt," we celebrate an exemplar of civic engagement and find an opportunity to celebrate something of ourselves, together. Especially bibliophiles who appreciate, value, the written word and its authors at a moment of seeming […]
The 1968 Exhibit
Persistent, if often contradictory— thus described is the collective American identity of those who lived the imagined, re-imagined, unimaginable, sometimes nearly imaginary year of 1968. History gets told by the victors, perhaps accounting for multiple, often loud narratives still colliding over a lost war and in contemporary echoes of civil rights and liberation struggle, enduring […]
The Little Brother's Revenge: Victoria Patterson Brings It All Home
The writer Victoria Patterson's name should by now already be at the top of everybody's unlikely if welcome list of sincere and important and, yes, esteemed Orange County writers of literary fiction. It's actually a pretty strong list, and if you need further convincing, do check out this column's archives, recently celebrating poet Grant Hier […]