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theFortnight 1 9 M AY– 2 J U N E | 2 0 1 7
W W W. S A N TA B A R B A R A S E N T I N E L .CO M
19 MAY – 2 JUNE
by Steven Libowitz
Tell us all about your art opening, performance, dance party, book signing, sale of something we can’t live without, or event of any other kind by emailing fortnight@santabarbarasentinel.com. If our readers can go to it, look at it, eat it, or buy it, we want to know about it and will consider it for inclusion here. Special consideration will be given to interesting, exploratory, unfamiliar, and unusual items. We give calendar preference to those who take the time to submit a picture along with their listing.
Free Festival? Such a Deal!
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ack when I had my Bar Mitzvah (some, ahem, decades ago), one of our family friends gave me a copy of Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish. Oy! I was more into checks and savings bonds (remember those?) than a hardcover copy of a book that was even thicker than my thigh. But then I read it. And pretty soon I realized I must have been meshugge [crazy] not to realize what a treasure I’d been given. I’m reminded of this story because I was sorting through my books the other day and came across the original copy – still wrapped in plastic! – and spent countless hours skimming through it again, marveling at the pleasures in the nuances of the language, and re-reading the Klein’s long-forgotten, now tear-inducing inscription (“an occasion for hachus [pleasure in the achievements of a child] and kvelling [swelling with pride]). But also because this fortnight brings the annual Santa Barbara Jewish Festival, which also reminds me of my upbringing, what with the knishes and kosher hot dogs, klezmer music, and more. The festival has a new location for its 30th year, abandoning its longtime home at Oak Park – which already hosts far fewer ethnic festivals than years gone by – moving to Plaza del Mar, 23 Castillo Street, near the Santa Barbara Harbor, for the 11 am to 4 pm festival on Sunday, May 21. The Central Coast’s largest community-wide Jewish cultural festival and celebration of Israel’s Independence Day wants everyone – Jewish or not – to experience and share the best of Jewish culture, including lots of live music and Israeli dancing including Kalinka, arts and crafts vendors, family and children’s activities, local community organizations, and plenty of food. Chabad at UCSB’s Jerusalem Café will be serving pastrami and corned beef sandwiches, Congregation B’nai B’rith is bringing halva and gum, and Sababa It’s All Good Catering is offering falafel lunch plates, pita, hummus, to name just a few. Admission is free. Need another reason to go? Between the festival and the beach, it’s a great way to keep the kids out of tsuris (trouble). Schedule and more info online at www.jewishsantabarbara.org/ festival.
Getting Grounded in Order to Soar
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anta Barbara Floor to Air Festival is stepping up its game in its fourth year. The two-week affair that updates the ancient art of aerial technique unites professional artists from around the globe
for a collaborative residency here in town, which offers instruction for students before culminating in an ensemble performance. The artists – who this year include Shaina Brafman (New York City), Danielle Garrison (Boulder), Elizabeth Stich (Salt Lake City), Allie Cooper (Santa Cruz), Jenna Ober (Minneapolis), and Rachna Hailey, Isabel Musidora, Allie Cole, Luna Webster, Lydia Johnson, and Emily Stratton from Santa Barbara – create the piece in collaboration with Santa Barbara Centre for Aerial Dance and festival founder Ninette Paloma. The three works they come up with incorporate a variety of traditional apparatus in unconventional approaches, using bodies and flight as metaphors for the human condition. The show debuts on the Lobero stage at 7 pm Friday, May 26, before making its way across theaters and continents. Tickets cost $20-$55. Call 963-0761 or visit www. lobero.com.
Mad about Madonnari
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e’ve already established that I’m Jewish, not Italian. I don’t even know if the annual street painting festival is pronounced “Ee Mah-dah-nah-ree” or some other way. But I’ve really never seen anything like this Memorial Weekend festival, and if you’ve never been, you really do owe it to yourself to see these amazing artists in action. The street painters transform the Mission plaza using pastels on pavement, creating 150 incredibly vibrant and remarkably colorful, large-scale images. It’s absolutely astonishing what they can do to a slab of concrete with nothing more than a box of chalk. Sure, it’s a slog to wade through the crowds that throng to the place during the weekend – but if you think you’ve got it rough, imagine what these artists go through, spending countless hours kneeling on the ground, stretching out to fashion with great detail images from a photograph or their own imagination. The festival imports plenty of professionals to complete the work – street painters who travel from festival to festival around the world – but there are also lots of locals who participate every year. They’re the ones limping into work on Tuesday morning. Santa Barbara was the first to bring the romantic festival to the western hemisphere from its sister festival in Grazie di Curtatone, Italy, and is now celebrating its 31st year – the same number of flavors of ice cream
many moments where amid the gyrating bodies I found myself stopping to stare at the band, and especially devour Lembo’s ability to embody a song, alternately belting out the words with a soul-shouter’s power or bending notes with a jazz singer’s flexibility. The thing is, they were there virtually every week. So it became something you could take for granted. Fast-forward a couple of decades, past illnesses, relocations, personal changes, and the like, and now it’s a rarity that we get to see Lembo and her cohorts – currently (I believe) Del Franklin on sax and vocals, George Friedenthal on keyboards and vocals, and Donzell Davis on drums – in public concerts either locally in Santa Barbara or anywhere at all. And when we do, it’s almost always at night. But the band will be playing a gig that’s being billed as a “Bluesy Jazz Brunch & Dance Party” at SOhO on Sunday, May 28, smack-dab in the middle of Memorial Day Weekend. Show time is 11:30 am, admission is $15, and if you make brunch reservations, they’ll seat you up front. Info and 962-7776 or www.sohosb.com.
Design to Dream
A Baskin & Robbins use to have as its slogan, which is far fewer than the gradations of colors you’ll see at the Mission. Music, an Italian food market, and other vendors make it a full family affair, what with the grassy expanse where you can spread out a blanket and the Rose Garden just across the street. It’s fun to come more than once to see the progress of the paintings. Or if you’re out of town for the holiday weekend, drop by when you return, as the paintings remain until marine layer or a rare rainstorm washes them away. Admission is free, though sponsorship fees and percentage of sale at I Madonnari benefits the Children’s Creative Project, a non-profit arts education program of the Santa Barbara County Education Office. More info online at www. imadonnarifestival.com.
Raw Food at SOhO
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hen I moved back to California in the early 1990s, I settled first in Oxnard (which, by the way, still is the subject of my favorite bumper sticker of all time: “Oxnard – More than Just a Pretty Name”). Many a Sunday I would bike up the coast to Ventura for a stroll around the Ventura Harbor before continuing on to drop by Bombay, the downtown nightclub that had two separate music rooms and, not unimportantly, happy-hour prices during the day. Just about every week, Leslie Lembo & Raw Silk were the band in the main room, where they delivered set after set of remarkably good funk music, mostly cover songs, but with several originals mixed in. There were
lso in the might-be-misnamed category, UCSB Pollock Theater’s Script to Screen series stretches the boundaries of its title with its next cinema-meetsconversation event. But hey, when you’ve got a chance to host the Academy Awardwinning production designer team behind the dreamy sets and settings of the multiOscar winning film La La Land, rather than its Oscar-winning writer-director Damien Chazelle, you’re not going to turn it down for semantics. David Wasco and Sandy Reynolds-Wasco are the husband-and-wife team who created the sets for the literal flights of fancy of the film couple portrayed by Emma Stone as an aspiring actress and Ryan Gosling as a jazz musician. The (again literally) star-crossed lovers traverse a decidedly contemporary Los Angeles infused with the spirit of Hollywood’s golden-age musicals and Wasco’s and Reynolds-Wasco’s ability to render any number of scenes in the vivid primary colors of Jacques Demy’s whimsical mid-1960s work (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort) was a feat of alchemy that won a great deal of deserved praise – perhaps more than the film itself – and easily garnered this year’s Academy Award for Best Production Design (not Moonlight; they got this one right the first time). The Wascos – who previously worked with Quentin Tarantino on Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, and Inglourious Basterds, and West Anderson on The Royal Tenenbaums – will be on hand for a Q&A moderated by Pollock Theater director Matt Ryan for the event on Tuesday, May 30, following the 7 pm screening, which, by the way, will be in Sony 4K Digital Projection, so those stars will really twinkle behind them at the Griffith Observatory.