Dance Dance Evolution
Want to ride bikes to the ecstatic dance while listening to free downloaded world music? Or we can just watch a movie. Outside.
• The Bike Safety Event and Ride at Laguna Grande Park in Seaside is the antithesis of every bike stunt you’ve seen on Jackass. Organized by the city of Seaside and the Monterey County Health ...
War Cry
One man channels a modern telling of an old tale of glory, tragedy and war at Circle Theatre.
After a Sunday afternoon matinee of Pacific Repertory Theatre’s opening season play, An Iliad, one of the PacRep people entreated audience members to tell others about the production, an extremely abridged one-man recounting of Homer’s ...
ARTIFACTS 05.09.13 – Lifelong Learning
The guy who sang “The more I know/ The less I understand” wasn’t paying attention.
• This Sunday, 4-7pm, the public is invited to the memorial celebration of one Barbara Murphy of Portofino Presents at the Pacific Grove Art Center (568 Lighthouse Ave., P.G., 375-2208). Former PGAC executive director Joan ...
Before his appearance at this weekend’s Steinbeck Festival, Gavin Cologne-Brookes, Professor of American Literature at Bath Spa University, expounded on Steinbeck.
In your presentation, Home is Where the Heart Is, what will you highlight/extract about the relationship between Steinbeck and Salinas? I’ll be talking about Steinbeck’s simultaneous ambivalence toward his hometown and celebration of it and ...
WINE & FOOD 2013: Give Us Mercy
With abiding bravery against the elements – and a brand new tasting room – upstart Mercy Vineyards solidifies Arroyo Seco’s rep.
Michael Griva wants to take us on a motorcar tour of parts of his Griva Vineyard – west of Greenfield, in Arroyo Seco – in a red, convertible, windowless (and seatbelt-less) 1916 six-cylinder Buick. It’s ...
ARTIFACTS: Work and Play
When your 9 to 5 is a pleasure, it doesn’t feel like work.
• Paper Wing Theatre is deft at atypical film-to-stage musicals. Friday and Saturday through May 11, they give a big shout-out to the working woman with a musical homage to ’80s male-chauvinist-boss revenge movie comedy ...
Home Word
A more streamlined festival still offers plenty of entry into the work and life of John Steinbeck.
The opening night barbecue of the Steinbeck Festival will occupy a stunning setting at the Big Sur Land Trust property Mark’s Ranch. It will include food from Oldtown Deli’s Gordon Chin and live music by ...
Golden Child
One of the authors of Saturday’s Local Authors Forum in Salinas circles back to his hometown.
Poet and Salinas native James B. Golden is the author of three poetry books – Sweet Potato Pie Underneath The Sun’s Broiler, Afro Clouds & Nappy Rain, and The Inside Of An Orange. In 2012 ...
Booked Up
John Steinbeck Library hosts a panel of eight local authors talking about the writing life.
WEB SPECIAL: Full interview with James B. Golden Monterey County is teeming with published authors and poets. They convene in writers’ clubs like the Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium and the Central Coast Writers Club. They ...
ARTIFACTS: Bird Song
Spring is here, bringing with it peace, jazz and flowers.
First it was Takacs Quartet, who played the third quartet by renowned English composer (and committed pacifist) Benjamin Britten last month. This Friday, Chamber Music Monterey Bay presents Enso String Quartet, who perform Britten’s “String ...
Myth Boosters
Joseph Campbell’s lifelong exploration of the power of myth gets a month-long festival.
Like DNA, myths – the stories that surround us – inform what we do in and with our lives without us knowing it. In a way, you might say, they are the force. With that ...
See the Music
From Belgium and France and the rest of the world, music is universal.
• There are many steps in getting an art exhibit. From 2-4pm on Saturday, April 20, at the Pacific Grove Art Center (568 Lighthouse Ave., P.G.) Santa Cruz artist Eva Bernstein of the MPC Printmakers ...
ARTIFACTS: Roger & Me
Roger Ebert’s prodigious life is lovingly reviewed.
• Bill and Anne Burleigh are hosting singer-songwriter Tracy Newman in their Big Sur home and inviting you to come listen in, according to Kiki Wow. “She’s hilarious!” writes Kiki. Newman’s writing credits back that ...
Super Seed
A fledgling curator leads the opening of her family’s new contemporary art gallery in Monterey.
There’s a new art gallery in town, a small boxy space that’s not just another boutique for expensive decorative accessories. What they’re selling, as much as contemporary fine art, are ideas. Their opening show, for ...
ARTIFACTS: Generational
From a South County open house to peaceful sounds in Seaside.
• Kids rule! Like the kids of this weekend’s free and awesome Next Generation Jazz Festival or Annual Teen Film Festival in Salinas (see Calendar). Given a chance, they will surprise you. Two groups do ...
A Life Examined
Author David Shields devours literature – and “builds” books – in a struggle to understand modern life.
If you believe the hype, David Shields is on the war path against the novel as a relic that should be trampled in the velocity of modern life. He’s a brainiac reconstructing the template of ...
Ya Don’t Stop
Living legend KRS-One brings a heart that beats hip-hop to the Golden State Theatre.
KRS-One is hip-hop. Not just because the legendary MC says he is, which he does often, but because of the life that he’s lived, at one with and submerged in hip-hop, grown into and up ...
Art of the Dealer
In the crowded arena of Carmel art galleries, Winfield is praised above others.
Former Monterey Museum of Art executive director E. Michael Whittington, Pacific Grove gallerist and playwright Steve Hauk, world renowned Carmel-based sculptor Steven Whyte… they all agree: Chris Winfield and his gallery may have the best ...
Revival Theater
Phase 1’s technology is done at PacRep, while MPC Theatre Company nears the end of a major refurbish.
Pacific Repertory Theatre, aka PacRep, managed to raise and use $2 million for Phase 1 of major renovations to their two theaters – the 300-seat Golden Bough Playhouse and the 120-seat Circle Theatre – and ...
We Shall Overcome
The head of the NAACP talks to the Weekly about discrimination large and small.
Days after hosting the 44th NAACP Image Awards in Los Angeles, NAACP President/CEO Ben Jealous spoke to the Weekly about growing up biracial on the Peninsula, various fronts in the modern civil rights movement, and ...
The Surge
The National Steinbeck Center has a big couple of months heading this way.
The Steinbeck Center is a nucleus of culture in Salinas, a reflection of its city’s evolving histories and essential values. In the next few months, the Steinbeck Center will host a plethora of events and ...
Homeward Bound
Arts Habitat is again derailed in their search for a permanent home.
Nonprofit artist organization Arts Habitat is on the move again, but not in a good way. The 23-year-old organization has been working towards its singular mission – to build a permanent artist community of live/work ...
Black, White and Grey Areas
In a groundbreaking new book, Peninsula residents Ann Todd Jealous and Caroline T. Haskell examine racism – with essays
The childhood stories are telling. Here are three: When Maren, who lives in Pacific Grove, was a little girl, her grandparents employed black husband-and-wife couples as cooks, housekeepers, gardeners, mechanics and dining room servants. Dinner ...
Industrial Complex
MPC’s latest exhibit is urban and post-modern and talkative.
Urban Sights/Sites brings the griminess and noise of the city – like a portrait of a grandmother and grandkids discarded with the trash – onto the idyllic Monterey Peninsula College campus. The school’s latest exhibition ...
Show and Tell
CSUMB’s Art Department keeps the conversation about art circulating.
Johanna Poethig, associate professor of Painting and Public Art at CSU Monterey Bay’s Visual and Public Art department, wants to talk about The Lion King as a racially charged play, about public art smothered by ...
Victory Dance
Eve Ensler’s latest and most ambitious campaign to end violence against women finds a groove in Monterey.
If action follows thought, then what might follow One Billion Rising, a global dance/awareness campaign to “end violence against women” begun by Eve Ensler, creator of The Vagina Monologues and coming memoir In the Body ...
Holy Ship
Somewhere on the beach between Marina and Moss Landing, a long-forgotten boat lives past its purpose.
The Facebook message was cryptic but enthusiastic: “We found a shipwreck!” But the finder was keeping its spot secret, replying to a request for directions with essentially this: We’ll meet you in Marina and take ...
Master Rework
The Monterey Museum of Art forges a new future without Executive Director E. Michael Whittington.
There’s a new round of art going up on the walls at Monterey Museum of Art/Pacific Street, replacing the best-selling Miniatures and Annette Corcoran’s Monterey NOW exhibits. The new stuff draws prints from Henri Matisse’s ...
The Laugh Factor
Lily Tomlin has obliterated obstacles at every turn in her famed career.
Lily Tomlin has been a iconoclastic performer without even really trying. She just went about her business – comedy, acting, producing and writing, since the late ’60s – as if there were no barriers to ...
Major Movement
Musician, author and artist Bill Minor combines mediums and genres in his first memoir.
William “Bill” Minor, longtime local jazz pianist, author, poet and artist, now 77 years old, is looking back onto his life in the form of a memoir, The Inherited Heart: An American Memoir. But like ...
Revolutionary Violin
Tim Fain returns to Monterey County with a live multimedia show with a message.
Violinist Tim Fain is one of those young classical music stars who connects genres and mediums and generations, like a sort-of conduit, an emulsifier, a portal. Fittingly, Portals is the name of his new multimedia ...
First and Foremost
The last and best party of the year, First Night Monterey, celebrates 20 years with a bang.
First Night Monterey is the biggest New Year’s Eve party in the county. Last year it attracted about 22,000 people into its one-day universe of musicians, artists, food vendors, magicians and dancers. This year, its ...
Button Down World
Monterey author Anne Ylvisaker crafts a writer’s life – and a book series – from the imagined world of the Button Family.
It’s a promising Saturday afternoon in December, and children’s book author Anne Ylvisaker looks like she is right where she wants to be: standing in front of an audience of a dozen people, in the ...
Jingle Hell
Tiny Stardust Playhouse does David Sedaris’ infamous take on Christmas.
For their holiday theater offering, Stardust Playhouse was going to do a play by Steve Tesich called The Speed of Darkness, which Stardust director and co-founder Kirstin Clapp describes as a family drama of a ...
Local authors of children’s, middle grades and young adult books worth checking out.
Beverly Cleary. The 96-year-old was born on a small farm in Oregon but now calls Carmel Valley home. Her book series, like Ramona, Henry Huggins, Ralph the Mouse and Beezus, have earned her accolades including ...
Lighthouse Presents
The independent movie house screens a winter’s harvest of holiday films and much, much more.
Holiday films have long earned a place in December’s occurrences of chorales and carols, Nutcracker dances and Christmas plays, traditional meals and shopping deals. In the rush to harness the tide, Century Cinemas has got ...
Holy Hand Grenade
PacRep’s faithful take on Monty Python’s Spamalot musical is silly, clever and historical entertainment.
Monty Python is a comedy dynasty that seems destined to keep finding fresh converts to the team’s British, satirical, absurd and smart humor, beginning with their beloved and innovative BBC sketch comedy series Monty Python’s ...
Sneaky Funny
A.J. Jamal unloads wicked physical comedy and impressions on Planet Gemini.
Comedian A.J. Jamal, originally from Cleveland but now stomping around Hollywood and beyond, came up in the same Cleveland comedy scene that gave us Arsenio Hall, Drew Carey and Steve Harvey (Bob Hope and Tim ...
An extended interview with Mary, who is homeless.
One of the photographers of the Carl Cherry Center exhibition, Becoming Visible: The Face of Homeless Women in Monterey County, suggested talking to a homeless woman who asked to be referred to as Mary. Mary ...
Hiding In Plain Sight - About The Photographers
Hiding In Plain Sight - About The Photographers
(left) “I was having a rough day and one of these women could tell,” Lina Vital says. “First, she wasn’t scared to call me on whatever emotion she saw come up. She saw my pain ...
Hiding In Plain Sight
A new exhibit at Carl Cherry Center shows the pictures and tells the stories of the most vulnerable population – homeless women.
The catalog for the Carl Cherry Center’s latest art exhibition opens with a quote from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me… When they approach me they ...
Where Are
We Exactly?
Welcome to the heart of South County’s Priest Valley, pop. 45.
Down in the flat southern swathe of the Salinas Valley, 17 miles south of King City, Highway 198 shoots off Highway 101 like a maverick striking out alone. The two-lane state highway winds between sensual ...
deYoung and the Restless
CSUMB film students and alumnus will be featured at one of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
The deYoung Museum in San Francisco, which began life as the Fine Arts Building in 1894, has in its collection thousands of paintings, sculptures, textiles, clothing, artifacts and other art objects from the Americas, Asia, ...
Close Encounter
Unparalleled massive portrait artist Chuck Close sprawls across MMA La Mirada.
Monterey Museum of Art’s La Mirada exhibition of world-famous portrait artist Chuck Close emerged from an exhibit that opened there almost exactly one year ago. That show – prints and lithographs by pop art stars ...
Who Done Ate?
Saltshaker Theater’s murder/mystery performance pops up in an unlikely place for good (and probable) cause.
Saltshaker Theater’s doing dinner theater? That relic of the 1970s? Actually, the idea dates back to the Middle Ages, but established itself in the States in the 1950s and ’60s, and flourished as popular regional ...
Fetching Ideology
Lee Blessing’s Drama Desk Award-nominated Chesapeake explores the art of politics and the politics of art.
In 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts funded an exhibition by artist Andres Serrano that included his infamous photograph “Piss Christ,” which earned the condemnation of Rev. Donald Wildmon and his conservative American Family ...
Big Screening
Carmel Art & Film aims to elevate its movie moxie by focusing more on films.
The Carmel Art & Film Festival, now in its fourth year, has had since its beginning a rollicking, shifting character about it. It’s been a sprawling event, corralling dozens and dozens of films, reams of ...
One Answer to Tragedy
Compassionate Friends provides a healing space for the grieving parents.
One day Todd Harris got a call from an old friend, angry at him for missing a funeral. “A funeral for who?” Harris asked him. “Your daughter,” his friend said. Her name was Jennifer Stephanie. ...
Day in the Life
California Arts Day touches off weeks of arts activities in Salinas.
California Arts Day, which falls on the first Friday of October, has been celebrated for about a decade, but not many people – or even artists – are aware of it. It was created by ...
Uneven Steps
September Shoes and its wimpy character development trip up Western Stage.
Playwright Jose Cruz Gonzalez seems like a good fit for Salinas, for Hartnell College and for Western Stage. He is a prolific Latino playwright who focuses especially on the lives of Mexicans in America, with ...
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