Josef Woodard

The Return of ‘Carmen,' in Academy Finery Music Academy of the West's Opera of Choice this Year is ‘Carmen,' in a Modernized Version, with Acclaimed Conductor Daniela Candillari Back in Tow The Music Academy of the West Lehrer Vocal Institute Fellows perform ‘Carmen' at the Granada July 12 & 14 | Credit: Courtesy Carmen , we thought we knew thee. The powerful, crafty and seductive lead role in Bizet's ever-popular opera showed up on stage at The Granada Theatre last fall, as the big grand opera opener of Opera Santa Barbara's season. She returns to the same stage, in a very different and more contemporary, stylized staging this Friday night and Sunday afternoon (July 12 and 14) as this year's model of a fully staged opera production in the Music Academy of the West (MAW) festival. Voice and opera are treasured elements in the Academy's academic life and international reputation, led for many years by the mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne. Now with Sasha Cooke and John Churchwell at the helm, its once-per-summer productions are not-to-be-missed occasions on the serious musical calendar. For this incarnation of Carmen , expect at least some unexpected sights and themes. Director Ken Cazan and flamenco choreographer Manuel Gutierrez are involved in what promises to be a fresh, contemporary-geared production configuration, with feminist qualities in the mix. Is Carmen a conniver, or an empowered woman ahead of her time? Her Granada return may provide an answer or two. Last week, we caught up with rising star conductor Daniela Candillari , who will lead the opera orchestra and is now officially the Music Academy's primary opera conductor. Since her first appearance in Santa Barbara in 2019, the conductor, who grew up in Serbia and Slovenia, has enjoyed upward career mobility, which found her making her New York Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall debuts, and an expanding roster of international engagements, especially in the realm of opera, old and new, and newer. You are returning to the Music Academy of the West action, as its primary opera conductor. Do you have particular first and lingering impressions or observations about the operations and artistic values of the Music Academy? This will be my fourth summer at Music Academy. As always, I look forward to the work that is ahead of us, collaborating with the faculty and administration. Music Academy of the West is such an incredibly creatively vibrant and rich environment, and it's very exciting being here. I'm always very proud of the work that the vocal and instrumental fellows do. It is so rewarding to hear from the instrumental fellows, especially those who may not have had a chance to play in an opera yet, how much they enjoy the art form and want to do more. On stage, we get to see individual artists who during the production and the summer develop into ensembles. In both cases, it speaks to the integrity of the fellows and also the incredible support and teaching that the faculty and the leadership of the Music Academy offer. The Academy's voice department and the annual opera project are very strong and widely respected. Do you have a sense of being part of the deep legacy there, and consider how you would like to explore new ideas in your position there? Before I came to Music Academy the first time in 2019, I was certainly aware of the opera and vocal programs, and the strong traditions that were built. The most important question to ask is, how do we prepare the future generations to continue in this art form, and what path are we setting up for them? This has been a significant season for you, including conducting premieres of Grounded and 10 Days in a Madhouse . And your first work with the Music Academy was conducting Jennifer Higdon's Cold Mountain , in 2019. Do you feel a sense of a mission in terms of championing new work and expanding the existing opera repertoire? Even though I grew up in quite a traditional opera house, where most of the repertoire was made up of Italian, French, and Slavic opera, my conducting debut actually happened with a new piece. So perhaps subconsciously I have been leaning toward 20th-century and contemporary repertoire. Personally, I like doing both traditional and new operas. I think doing both gives one a chance to question everything and to perhaps hear some things a bit differently. At the same time, I think it's incredibly important to invest in new work, living composers and librettists. They are the minds of our times who can capture our world and create a very unique experience that reflects our collective philosophies. It has been invigorating to see at least some semblance of long-awaited gender balance in areas of classical culture in recent years — including the culture of conducting. Is it rewarding for you to see movement, and do you feel a part of some vanguard in that regard? There have been some very important changes and discussions happening in our field with regards to gender balance. Personally, I have always been interested in becoming the best musician I can possibly be. It is of course very humbling hearing that perhaps, for some of my younger colleagues, I am seen as a part of the change. Your background is diverse and fascinating, including classical studies in Vienna, focusing on piano, and jazz studies in Indiana. Are you naturally eclectic as a musician, and does your variety of experience tribute to your overview as a conductor? Yes, my musical tastes and curiosity are quite eclectic. That has been the case since I was very young. The thing, though, that I was and am most interested in, is the creation of something. I find the same excitement and curiosity in learning for instance about how Nelson Riddle or Richard Strauss thought about orchestration, how they created textures, and then the most important question is what is the emotion behind all of those choices. For me, it's really about learning and understanding the craft of music and art, because it does shape how we then approach music and how we hear it. Speaking of Music Academy connections, once removed, you conducted the Met premiere of Matthew Aucoin's wonderful Eurydice — which I remember he was working on when he taught at Academy back several years ago. Two related questions: Do you have particular reflections of that interesting opera, which nicely flips the script of the myth, and do you find yourself interacting with artists with tentacle connections to the Music Academy? A few years before Eurydice , I worked with Matthew on a production of Crossing , his first opera, and fell in love with his musical language. So when the offer for Eurydice came, I was very excited to work with Matthew again. There are so many elements of that opera that I love and think about often: orchestral moments that remind me of Wagner, especially in the scenes between Eurydice and her Father. Eurydice's aria in Act II, There was a roar , has an incredible structural build up, and Eurydice's last aria Dear Orpheus invokes a great sense of honesty, loss, and heartbreak. This last piece always touched me, in both rehearsals and performances, and I think it speaks to a unique musical language and a great emotion behind the opera. Music Academy of the West is such a collaborative place that invites wonderful musicians and artists. So it can happen quite often that one meets at Music Academy and the collaboration continues in the future. Considering your achievements and résumé at this juncture, do you have the feeling of both having arrived and now being enabled to charge forward as an artist? Is this a happy moment for you? I'm very grateful for the opportunities that have come my way, the productions, projects, and institutions I've been involved with. I think it's important for an artistic development to think of the whole trajectory, to reflect a bit where one has been and where one would like to continue. A few years ago, I saw a fascinating documentary about David Bowie. The documentary was focused on five albums he created in a span of 10 years, and they could not have been more different from each other. Since then, I have started thinking differently about arrival points, and prefer to think more about strong curiosity that propels one forward. Music Academy of the West presents Georges Bizet's Carmen at The Granada Theatre (1214 State St.) on Friday, July 12, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, July 14, at 2 p.m. For more information, see ticketing.granadasb.org/19769

This site can't be reached Check your Internet connection Check any cables and reboot any routers, modems, or other network devices you may be using.

An iconoclastic summer escape takes the columnist to the Jazz/Improv-fueled Monheim Triennale on the Rhine River.

‘The New Art Salon: Arte del Pueblo!' gallery shot | Photo: Josef Woodard Over at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB), a new exhibition dares to pose the question: what if they gave a local art survey show and jurors and/or curators were not invited? Welcome to The New Art Salon: Arte del Pueblo! based on the somewhat radical notion of an invitation to artists for a group show with a genuinely “open” invitation. Call it a semi-Marxist proposition (if that term isn't too politicizing or polarizing): it's about putting the means of assembling an art show in the hands of the artists from every corner of the art-making community. The MCSAB space, which has hosted all manner of contemporary art over 40-plus years — including its previous life as Contemporary Arts Forum (CAF) — is presently more diversely and densely packed with art of many styles, media, and levels of artistic acumen than at any time in memory. As compared to other regional art survey exhibitions, such as Westmont Museum of Art's recent Tri-County Invitational show in which 400-plus entries were juried down to a 45-work selection, the sky was the limit here. That concept alone is tantamount to a maverick aesthetic idea on the museum's part. If the sum effect of the glut of art inside the gallery can become dizzying, the experience begins with a refreshing bang before entering the space itself. MCASB's outside “Glass Box” display case plays host to the fitting piece “Khioni Diptych,” by Cassandria Blackmore. In what may qualify as “best of show,” this reverse-painted glass piece sports elegantly broken glass panes inside this “Glass Box,” shattered in a disarmingly lovely iridescent display, less about destructive creative tactics than the end result of beauty from ruins. Inside, whether seasonally inspired by summer's onset or not, my eye was quickly drawn to a pair of strategically placed beach paintings, from different perspectives. Pamela Hill Enticknap's “Beach” is a triptych spread of beach loungers, with figures in focus, though faceless. By contrast, Lucia de Miguel's “Padaro Beach” is a witty aerial shot of a beach far below, with minute sprinklings of color — humans, umbrellas, surf boards, and accouterments — reduced (or elevated) to optical props on the sandy land. Logical links have been made over many years between MCASB/CAF and MFA artists from UCSB, and this year we find a visually striking example in the form of Dannah Mari Hidalgo's “Self-Portrait (Dannah Mari Hidalgo, Venus of Wiliawh).” The large, loud, nude study, recently seen as part of Hidalgo's role in the UCSB MFA show last month, is a self-portraiture-based variation on the theme of Manet's classic “Olympia.” Sexual buttons are also intriguingly pushed in Pino's “Blessed,” a modest but impactful hybrid of a “mud flap girl” outline containing the graceful beatific countenance of an angel. Representing the in-house, three-dimensional camp are such varied works (and scales) as Cevins McCullah's “Standing in Line,” a bench and mirror/faux pool, and B. Arriaga's playful and pink ode to vermin, “Worship Ring, Presenting Bitsy Rats.” Occupying its own little corner of the main gallery, Diego Melgoza Oceguera's “Altarities of the Past Present and Future” draws on mixed media ingredients including variously abstract, ritualistic imagery and a pink-painted tom tom drum. It suggests a shrine or altar of broad and ambiguous meaning(s). Among the veteran and widely exhibited Santa Barbara–based artists in the Salon are Mary Heebner — with “Cycladic woman,” a gauzy figurative palimpsest on handmade paper — a subtle Dug Uyesaka collage, and Michael Irwin's odd-shaped and trompe l'oeil canvas “Basin.” Michael E. Long, an expert in creating lifelike scenes in miniature, has paid a fastidious tribute to the historic restaurant Arnoldi's — especially poignant given the eatery's recent shuttering (hopefully a temporary lull). In the side gallery, the wide range of work includes an example of veteran artist Anthony Askew's Diebenkorn–esque geometric abstractions and JT Turner's wry ontological or self-reflexive painting “Why?” asking the viewer and the artist the question “Why did soMeOne WRiTE ON This?” in randomly capitalized ransom note font. This museum space also fulfills its occasional function as an enclosed room for video art, screening Alex Eleazar's video short “Between the Trees with My Father,” addressing a father's response — or lack thereof — to a child's unfolding transsexual nature. In the photography zone, the art varies from the lucid dream-like appearance of Barbara Parmet's “Tree Water Sky Dance,” an upside-downside mirrored image of a natural tree/lake scene, to the mordant charisma of Peter Honig's “Sotto Voce.” Here, the startling image of a stilled bird in a bathtub, against a stark black backdrop, piques our sense of the surreal and the mortal. Is the bird subject dead, or asleep? This and other questions are craftily begged by the image. Sometimes, particularly in a densely populated group show with artworks piled high and requiring careful maneuvering around a crowded floor, small and subtle ideas speak with a refreshing clarity. Such is the case with Demi Boelsterli's small painting “Tre,” placed in a crowded company on a wall. Sneeze and you've missed it. A charmingly rough-edged portrait of three fruits floating in compositional space (apples, tomatoes?), “Tre” follows a simple, almost folk art-like logic and palette, related to floral life, but only as distant kin: the painting plays more as a still life in dreamtime. This is a selective and subjective overview of the art that stood out of this idealistic local art smorgasbord. On another day and through another set of senses, this Salon's democratic plentitude could conjure up another response entirely. Such is the nature of such a generous and ecumenical group show. “Padaro Beach” by Lucia de Miguel | Photo: Josef Woodard MCASB is located at 653 Paseo Nuevo on the Paseo Nuevo Upper Arts Terrace, above Eureka. The galleries are open Tuesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Admission to MCASB is always free thanks to visitor donations. See mcasantabarbara.org for more info. By Josef Woodard | Tue Jul 02, 2024 By Anna Ferguson-Sparks | Mon Jun 24, 2024

'Sheep in the Forest at Fountainbleu' - Charles Emile Jacque | Credit: Josef Woodard The sweeping philanthropic imprint of the late Lord Paul and Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree has left an indelible mark on Santa Barbara, in different sectors. Its lingering impact is felt in the Ridley-Tree Cancer Center, generous contributions to UCSB, the Santa Barbara Symphony, and elsewhere, but it has a special cachet in Santa Barbara's art world, including the branding imprimatur of the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art. And just as the Westmont Museum has twice paid direct tribute to the Ridley-Trees and their auspicious gifts to the permanent collection (including many Corot paintings), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) is also extending its curatorial appreciation with the current exhibition A Legacy of Giving showcasing in-house resources courtesy of the Ridley-Trees. The generous donors (Paul died in 2005 and Leslie in 2022, aged 98) had a deep connection to SBMA over a quarter-century, including supporting the Education Center, helping with the ambitious Peck Wing renovation, and growing the permanent collection with 58 works, either donating directly or acquired. A healthy selection of 33 pieces in the McCormick Gallery, mostly linked to the collectors' passion for 19th-century paintings and other art, gives a strong sense of the Ridley-Tree aesthetic. On one wall, a quote by one of the collectors' favored artists, Gustave Courbet, poses an interesting historical-philosophical point. “When I am no longer controversial,” he wrote, “I will no longer be important.” Courbet and many of the pre-Modernist artist on view in this gallery are far beyond the buzz of controversy, but their importance — on their own terms and as influences on art to come — is decidedly important. We ease gently into the show, thanks to the dreamy scene of Paul Signac's “The Riverbank, the Seine at Herblay” from 1889, on the entrance-facing wall. A peaceable riverfront stroll is timelessly captured in the tufted and dabbled pointillist artist's signature style. Courbet and Narcisse Díaz de la Peña present alternate views of seascapes at sunset, the former tranquil and the latter stormy, while Cecil Gordon Lawson's “A Hymn to Spring” qualifies as the exhibition's largest and most unapologetically vivid painting, a meadow scene with trees tickling the foreground. The zone of paintings culled under the curatorial heading of “Factories and Farms” addresses the incursion — or peripheral hum — of urbanization and industrialization on the generally natural and agrarian turf many 19th-century painters focused on. In Gustave Caillebotte's “The Stable of Champfleury,” circa the 1880s, a low-ceilinged stable exudes a hermetically warm, palpable equestrian ambience. One of the showstoppers nudges toward the innovative late-19th-century pull of impressionism, by a master of the form. Claude Monet's spectrally rippling ode to a legendary river, “Matinee sur la Seine (Afternoon on the Seine),” projects a seductive allure, at once basking in proto-Impressionist atmospherics while also vibrant with dancing polyrhythmic brushstrokes. Paying attention to women artists from an era of male-dominant art world leanings, the Ridley-Trees also sought to acquire and promote female painters of the day, here represented by the rare female impressionists Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. In a bit of trans-institutional déjà vu, the SBMA exhibition also features a handful of paintings from the Barbizon school, including the rustic charm and artful picturesqueness of Charles-Émile Jacque's “Herd of Sheep in the Forest at Fontainebleau.” This French art movement of the mid-19th century, including the looming presence of Corot, has a bold stake in the Ridley-Tree gifts to the Westmont Museum collection, as seen in that museum's tribute shows to the grand donors. Suffice to say, the Ridley-Tree legacy includes art in and out of lofty vaults in town, art that keeps occasionally giving Santa Barbara's art scene welcome shots in the arm Fri, Jul 19 6:00 PM Goleta Fri, Jul 19 7:30 PM Santa Barbara Mon, Jul 15 7:00 PM Santa Barbara Tue, Jul 16 4:30 PM Santa Barbara Tue, Jul 16 5:00 PM Santa Barbara Wed, Jul 17 2:00 PM Santa Barbara Fri, Jul 19 5:30 PM Santa Barbara Fri, Jul 19 6:00 PM Goleta Fri, Jul 19 7:30 PM Santa Barbara Mon, Jul 15 7:00 PM Santa Barbara Tue, Jul 16 4:30 PM Santa Barbara Tue, Jul 16 5:00 PM Santa Barbara Wed, Jul 17 2:00 PM Santa Barbara Fri, Jul 19 5:30 PM Santa Barbara Fri, Jul 19 6:00 PM Goleta Fri, Jul 19 7:30 PM Santa Barbara

'Steal Big Steal Little' director Andy Davis (left) and star Andy Garcia behind the scenes. | Credit: Courtesy Santa Barbara has been a setting and location for many films over the decades, but only a few truly showcase our beloved region as a central atmospheric landscape and character of its own. Ivan Passer's dark — and darkhorse — 1980 film Cutter's Way (which inspired star Jeff Bridges to later move here), dealt with criminal connivances of the ultra-rich in a gritty but arty neo-noir fashion. Alexander Payne's Sideways is a paean to the Santa Ynez Valley wine country, which actually nurtured the growth and mythos of said wine country. But the most Santa Barbara-steeped Hollywood film to date — although underrated upon its release and still deserving wider recognition — is longtime local director Andrew Davis's satirical sweetheart Steal Big Steal Little , a big little project from 1995 which is rich in local lore and scenery. It makes perfect sense that a special live screening of this small wonder kicks off a new Granada Theatre series “Santa Barbara Home Movies: Films by Artists and Performers Who Call Santa Barbara Home,” this Saturday, July 20. Davis will speak after the screening, with Andy Garcia and other cast and crew members in house. Granada Centennial producer Scott Seltzer was the series “early agitator/lobbyist,” but he confirmed that “it wasn't too difficult to get folks enthusiastic about the idea.” With Davis as a “terrific partner,” the series includes two more of his films — Holes and The Fugitive — and five by director Robert Zemeckis: Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump , and in December , The Polar Express . (More info here Based on a true story of tangled inheritance foibles in West Virginia, Davis — who here with his family in 1984 — concocted an often madcap and sometimes improvised tale of corruption in a rich-getting-richer malfeasance and immigration issues (one of many currently relevant subjects in the film). We follow the exploits of Garcia — twice over, as alternately evil and earthy twin brothers — and the late Alan Arkin in a deliciously freewheeling performance. The scenic sweep and bubbly action zooms across the county, bouncing around State Street and framed by scenes of the Summer Solstice Parade. Proud Chicagoan Davis has often found ways to feature his birthplace in his films, but Steal Big 's only “Chicago scene” is actually a used car lot next to where Ralph's is downtown Santa Barbara. “You can actually see some Spanish Colonial roofs in the background,” Davis laughed. “But we just let it go.” The film's anchor locations take place at Montecito's Lotusland and especially on the idyllic and sprawling Rancho San Julian close to Lompoc, which is the home compound of Independent editor Marianne Partridge and her husband Jim Poet and family. (This just in from the full disclosure department: I was involved in the film as an early consultant when Davis was first devising his Santa Barbara saga, as an extra at the ranch — a morally dubious real estate agent — and also as a guitarist on one track from the soundtrack, brought in by musical hero Randy Tico, one of the film's composers and on-screen musical performer in a few of the film's celebratory music scenes.) In a real way, Davis' lovably quirky and personal side project was made possible by his previous film, The Fugitive , which gave him enough Hollywood clout to pursue an independent film of his own devising and control. Although Steal Big landed with a veritable thud, commercially and critically (what do critics know?), a fresh watch reveals its kinetic and hard-to-describe charms and renewable legacy. Although he has been looking nostalgically back recently, as with last fall's release of The Fugitive in 4K restoration, Davis' ever-active creative energies are leaning forward. He will publish the book Disturbing the Bones , written with Jeff Biggers with a future film version in mind; is adapting a Gene Wilder period piece script, My French ; and has long dreamt of filming his own version of Treasure Island , the muse and financing machinery permitting. We recently connected with Davis to discuss his close-to-home movie of nearly three decades back, deserving a new look and screen life. It was an unusual pleasure for me to watch this film again after almost 30 years, which brings back a flood of memories. I loved it when I first saw it and like it even more now. What are your reflections about it, in retrospect? It's interesting because I got my ass kicked when I made this movie. You know, the response was “what is this guy doing? He did The Fugitive and is now doing this goofy movie? It's too long. It's too complicated. What is it about?” But I always loved it. First of all, the experience was so much fun to do. Victor Kaufman, who started Tri-Star pictures, later got independent money to make the film. They ran after me right after The Fugitive , signing “the director of The Fugitive .” They raised money based on that. I had all this independence to make three movies, you know, and own the negatives. So I had this chance to do whatever the hell I wanted. Didn't have to do an action movie. And you took an actual story about corruption and family infighting from West Virginia and had the idea to transplant that to your new hometown of Santa Barbara? Yes, I made Santa Barbara's as crooked as Chicago or as crooked is West Virginia. So that's the only thing I'm sort of sad about, 'cause it's not that crooked. But there probably have been some deals that we don't even know about with land and people getting screwed. I thought “this is really an original idea.” And then it blossomed from there. How long did it take you and your writing partners to actually write the script? I don't really know. We went through phases. I hired a guy named Lee Blessing, a playwright who wrote Walk in the Woods , and there was Theresa Tucker Davies, my partner in Chicago Pacific (Davis' Santa Barbara-based production company and facility, behind the Riviera Theatre), who helped put, she's one of who found Holes (a later Davis-directed hit). Then there was Frankie Perelli, this comedian who was Lenny Bruce's roommate. Frankie, it turns out, was from Chicago. He grew up on the West side near my father, where the Italians and the Jews would fight each other. His mother was friends with Capone. He'd tell all these great stories about growing up in Chicago as a kid, and he wrote some very funny screenplays and stories. A guy named Terry Khan also worked on it with me. So it was just, it was a process. I don't think we improvised that much, but there was certainly some improvisation, especially between Alan (Arkin) and Andy. I've invited Adam Arkin (Alan's son) to the screening. He can't make it, but he wrote back and said that his father loved doing the movie. He really thought it was great. And he loved the, the, the way everybody got along with each other and the improvisation. I think it's one of his best characters and performance. There are a lot of great lines in this movie. You must have had fun, coming out of your action period, taking a hard left into broad comedy. Yeah (laughs), and I didn't spend my own money. I didn't make any money on it, but I didn't spend my own money. It went from my being the big action director to a flop as a comedy director, but I kept thinking about Coppola and what he's going through (with his self-financed One from the Heart and the new Megalopolis ) and Kevin Costner (his current Horizon project) and all these people putting all their lives into it. I didn't do that. I wasn't rich enough to do it (laughs). It didn't get that much attention, but if you think about it, it's very relevant to it in terms of greed and immigration. Your action films are embedded with social commentary and political subplots. You did the same thing here, but in a comedic direction. I wondered about the meek response. Maybe the general audience didn't know how to read the film, which is almost halfway to the art house model. Is that a possibility? It will be interesting to see how this audience (at the Granada) reacts to it. I wanna show it with subtitles in Spanish. I was invited a few years ago to a film festival in Guadalajara, and they paid for the subtitles to get put on it. I want to explore ideas about how to reach out to the Hispanic community. There's a discount for tickets for 10 bucks for two. We can feel the element of improvisation in the mix and so much of an ensemble energy going on. I kept thinking of Robert Altman. Was his work a touch point for you? It's funny, grew a very warm spot for Altman because I didn't get nominated for Best Director with The Fugitive . And he got, he got a nominated for Cookie . When it all came out, he said, this is. “They're giving it to me. 'cause I'm an old man, Andrew Davis should be one of the nominees.” I had a lot of friends who worked with him. He was a maverick. He tried to do different things and worked with ensembles. My mother and father were in the Chicago Repertory Group, with Studs Turkel and Nelson Re and all kinds of lefties in the thirties doing political theater. And one of the par women involved, it was Viola Spolin, who's the, the, the, the godmother of, of improvisational theater. She wrote the book on it. She was the best woman at my parents' wedding. Her son is Paul Sills, who started Second City. And Alan Arkin was in Second City. There's a big Chicago connection there. Andy Garcia is perfectly cast for the lead twin roles, given his gift for both nasty and romantic characters. Was he the natural choice? He was. I wanted someone Hispanic of some sort. I don't remember what the chronology was, but Denzel Washington got the script and wanted to do it after I sort of committed to Andy. He told me he had some history in West Virginia with his family. He understood this whole thing. But then the whole thing with the La Migra and rounding up workers in the fields and everything else wouldn't have worked as well. For Santa Barbarans, especially as someone who grew up here, it's a special treat to legendary locations you made good use of, some of which are no longer around, such as EJ's and Papagallo's. I forgot how much of it took place at Lotusland. The interiors were not Lotusland. They were cheated at another place. Marianne and Jim Poett's ranch was a real blessing. The adobe was melting at the time and we put a new roof on it. The movie paid for a new roof, brought it back to life. And the old Dibblee was still around [patriarch Thomas Dibblee, 1911-2004, who grew up on the ranch]. That's a very soulful property, with deep roots. Yeah. Literally. I don't know if you remember this, but I was an extra, as a real estate agent illegally peddling the property. You're in the scene with the balloons, right? So Rita Taggart was your boss. She's Haskell Wexler's widow. She didn't understand what I was doing. She thought I was crazy. There's this scene where they're yelling at each other and everything. I think she appreciated it later. Joey Pants (actor Joe Pantoliano), too. He said, “I don't know what this movie's about,” but he created this great character. You once told me that making a movie is like being in a traveling circus. There is definitely a circus quality to this movie, and you didn't have to travel very far to do this one. Is that fair to say? It was wonderful to, for instance, go out to La Purisima as a stand-in for Mexico. We had the horses available. Those horse wranglers were terrific, and I remember the day before we shot one of those balloon sequences, we had access to the horses. And when riding out there, it was at San Fernando Rey, 14,000 acres owned by a local English family. They own about five or six of those kinds of places around the world. They were sold iron to the Chinese after World War II. Your family, with your wife Adrianne and children Jenna and Julian, moved to town in 1984, and it seems you quickly dug into the community. You never seemed like one of those Hollywood people who hides away in their Montecito mansion and disregards the community. I didn't have a mansion then (laughs). We lived on the Mesa for two years before building this house (in the Mission Canyon area). We became involved in the community because of the kids, going to Waldorf School and the Oaks Preschool and all that stuff, meeting locals. Your kids become your ambassadors. Given your filmography, you are not entirely fairly typecast as an action director, but there are anomalies such as Holes, a great film for all ages. And Steal Big is something of a little gem that needs to be polished off and rediscovered. It's interesting because legally I own the negative, but the domestic rights are with Universal until next year. So the question is, how do I get it out into the world? I think it's got a huge possible audience in South America, in Central America. Andy Garcia is so handsome, young looking, for one thing. Speaking of which, the very last scene we see in the film is a brief inserted shot after the end credits, with Andy Garcia dancing alone on State Street before parade goers who probably didn't realize the star factor dancing in the streets. I should know this: what do you call those end credit pop-up shots? Director's whim (laughs). If you look at my website, there's a sample reel of things I've done, and that's how I ended it. Steal Big Steal Little kicks off the Granada Theater's new film series, “Santa Barbara Home Movies: Films by Artists and Performers Who Call Santa Barbara Home” with a screening on Sat., Jul. 20, 8 p.m. Click here for tickets. By Debra Herrick, UCSB's 'The Current' | Fri Jul 12, 2024 By Tia Trihn | Mon Jul 01, 2024 Fri, Jul 19 7:30 PM Santa Barbara Tue, Jul 16 4:30 PM Santa Barbara Tue, Jul 16 5:00 PM Santa Barbara Fri, Jul 19 5:30 PM Santa Barbara Fri, Jul 19 6:00 PM Goleta Fri, Jul 19 7:30 PM Santa Barbara Tue, Jul 16 4:30 PM Santa Barbara Tue, Jul 16 5:00 PM Santa Barbara Fri, Jul 19 5:30 PM Santa Barbara Fri, Jul 19 6:00 PM Goleta Fri, Jul 19 7:30 PM Santa Barbara

Checking in with Music Academy of the West’s progress, glancing at the CAMA season to come, and Alejandro, veteran livewire.

From the nasty fun corner of our big screen entertainment menu comes Longlegs , the feel-spooked hit of the summer. Here, writer-director Osgood Perkins has cooked up a horror film which both nods to the tropes and beloved elements of form in the B-movie genre while injecting it with intelligent twists, a keen visual and place-conscious eye, and variations on the form. Oh, did we mention a truly new and newly unnerving demonic villain in the man called “Longlegs?” This conniving, Manson-esque serial killer (or killer by proxy), with a mop-haired, pasty-faced madman countenance and confessed obedience to “Mr. Downstairs,” is creepily embodied by Nicholas Cage. Cage, also the film's producer, doesn't have to dig very deep in his thespian and psychological playbook to conjure up the required frightful eccentricity for the job. An added attraction in the film is the unexpectedly nuanced and magnetic performance by Maika Monroe, born and raised in Santa Barbara and an actress who first made her splash in another horror flick, It Follows , a decade ago. In Longlegs, she is less a classic imperiled damsel-ish “scream queen” than a complicated character with a past, decoding an ugly crime pattern involving slain families, girls with common birthdays and demonic dolls. She plays an FBI agent on the Longlegs case, with a “half-psychic” awareness and connections to a harrowing past only slowly revealed through the film. Monroe is excellent as the presumed voice of reason amidst the anarchic narrative and in the face of Cage's manic manipulations. But reason starts to get real personal as the film careens into its surprise final act. As one last touch of a winking easter egg in the film ( they know that we know some devil-ish fun is at work here), the end credits break with tradition by scrolling downward — aka hellward. Meanwhile, Marc Bolan sings “Bang a Gong,” circling back to a quote from the song in the film's intro: “you're a dirty sweet/you're my girl.” Longlegs is a thinking person's horror outing, validating the notion that such presumably “lowly” genres as action and horror can also be containers for cleverly crafted and engaging cinema art. It may scare the bejeezus out of some viewers or impress those of us seeking out sneak attack art-making on the summer movie circuit. Or both. See trailer here By Debra Herrick, UCSB's 'The Current' | Fri Jul 12, 2024

Pardon the pun, but mariachi and Old Spanish Days have long enjoyed a happy cultural marriage. This is the time when the great American Mexican regional music with roots dating back 150 years in Jalisco, often heard on a small scale at weddings, parties, and in roaming revelry, takes the big stage of the Santa Barbara Bowl for the much-heralded Santa Barbara Mariachi Festival. It's a fundraising event, benefitting scholarships for Latino students, on the Saturday of Fiesta for 27 years and counting. Although mariachi music comes out to play, in a general public way, in small bands roving the streets and stages during Fiesta festivities, the music actually has a strong stake in Santa Barbara's musical culture. Not only is the city's Mariachi Festival one of the more respected showcase events in the mariachi world at large, but mariachi concert life periodically lands in the area through such avenues as UCSB Arts & Lectures–sponsored “¡Viva el Arte de Santa Bárbara!” and the Chumash Casino. For a compact encounter with — or even introduction to — some of the finer mariachi bands and musicians anywhere, the Bowl festival offers five solid hours of music, from 5 to 10 p.m. This year's roster kicks off with one of a growing tradition of all-female Mariachi groups, Mariachi Las Catrinas, Mariachi Los Galleros de Danny Rey, and the headlining Leyendas del Mariachi. A special spot is reserved for well-known singers at the festival, a list that has included Vicki Carr, Beatrice Adriana, and crossover star Lila Downs. This year, the vocalist in the spotlight is the young and fast emerging Camila Fernández, a singer who studied at Berklee School of Music and who works across genre borders, from mariachi to pop and R&B, and back. The Jalisco-born and San Diego–raised singer belongs to a veritable Mexican musical dynasty; her father is famed singer Alejandro (Alex) Fernández — also on the festival bill— and her grandfather was the ranchera legend Vicente Fernández. She has made a splash, commercially, with her 2002 debut album Vulnerable and last year's eponymously titled album (listen here Consider the festival a break from the festive hustle of State Street and other Mercado goings-on. It can also be considered a valuable and more deeply cultured addition to the “Old Spanish Days” lore, genuine Mexican division. See sbbowl.com

Video art pieces at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, including legendary Christian Marclay, challenge expectations, gently.