Here’s how it works: Tell us why you deserve free tickets for a night with Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band in the comments section below, then email us your contact information. We’ll announce our winner on Thurs., Sept. 10!
This has been a good week for The Apple Tree. We did our first “stumble through” of the show on Wednesday. There is a magnificent thing about the first “stumble through.” You must understand that until this point, rehearsals are all about running and fixing scenes that are often out of order. It’s impossible to get a sense of the big picture. But once the director has blocked the entire show with the actors, and all the music and choreography has been learned, then the real fun begins. It’s like inventing something with a bunch of moving parts, letting it go for the first time, and then praying that earlier efforts of trial and error and due diligence won’t blow up in your face.
Thankfully, we did OK. Now we know how far we have left to go.
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What’s the appropriate gift for a 24th anniversary? Silver? Paper? Beef?
To celebrate its 24th year in business, Patrick’s — in downtown Sarasota — is dropping the prices on all its iconic burgers to 1985 levels. That means a beefy patty on a bun will cost you a mere $4, with cheese an additional quarter and the South Beach Burger Salad a pleasant $5.50. The promotion runs the entire month of September.
Maybe next year they’ll serve the burgers on commemorative silver platters. I think I’d prefer the $4 price tag, instead.
This piece, by Anthony Nicholas, will appear in this week’s issue of Creative Loafing.
With the loud, dumb and often disappointing summer movie season behind us, I head into fall with some optimism. There’s a good amount of work by reliable writers and filmmakers on tap, which gives the season a lot of potential. And it’s our first bombardment of Oscar Bait, with many of the titles here angling for awards come the end of the year.
SEPTEMBER
You the Living. Roy Andersson’s followup to his 2000 cult hit Songs From the Second Floor, You The Living has been making the rounds on the festival circuit since 2007, though the film has only recently reached America. The deadpan masterpiece revolves around the lives and dreams of the sad residents of a desolate town.
Gamer. A thriller set in a future where humans can take control over other humans in “mass scale multiplayer environments.” Everything’s great until a popular player (Gerard Butler) tries to gain his independence from the game’s evil mastermind (Dexter’s Michael C. Hall).
Extract. Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, Office Space) may finally grab the box office success he deserves with this film starring Jason Bateman as the owner of a small-town flower-extract plant and Ben Affleck as his stoner best friend.
Ed. note: This piece, by Chuck Shepherd, will appear in this week’s issue of Creative Loafing.
LEAD STORY: Lonely Japanese men (and a few women) with rich imaginations have created a thriving subculture (“otaku”) in which they have all-consuming relationships with figurines that are based on popular anime characters. “The less extreme,” reported a New York Times writer in July, obsessively collect the dolls. The hardcore otaku “actually believes that a lumpy pillow with a drawing of a (teenage character) is his girlfriend,” and takes her out in public on romantic dates. “She has really changed my life,” said “Nisan,” 37, referring to his gal, Nemutan. (The otaku dolls are not to be confused with the life-size, anatomically-correct dolls that other lonely men use for sex.) One forlorn “2-D” (so named for preferring relationships with two-dimensionals) said he would like to marry a real, 3-D woman, “(b)ut look at me. How can someone who carries this (doll) around get married?”
National Specialties: 1. In May, Singapore’s Olympic Council, finding no athlete good enough, declined to name a national Sportsman of the Year. 2. A survey of industrialized nations by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development revealed that Japanese and Koreans sleep the least, while the French spend the most time at both sleeping and eating. 3. A Tokyo rail passenger company, Keihin, installed a face-scanning machine recently so that employees, upon reporting for work, can tell whether they are smiling broadly enough to present a good impression.
Flower children, psychedelic buses, Vietnam war vets, antiwar protesters, leftist political groups, black militants, Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Janice Joplin — all amid four days of peace and free love. These are the images I have thinking about the Woodstock Music Festival of Aug. 15-18, 1969. Where were you on those fateful days? I was in my parents’ house in Hewlett, Long Island envying the throngs who braved bumper to bumper traffic to attend. You weren’t born yet? You can see the movie and learn how this amazing concert happened.
If not for Elliot Teichberg, a gangly, awkward Jewish boy from the Catskills, the most famous American rock concert may not have taken place at all. Four promoters, one who had the millions to pay for it, arranged to have the New York town of Walkill host it in July, but the townspeople balked, fearing the hippies and druggies would destroy their properties and bucolic tranquility. What does a very ambitious mama’s boy do? Elliot is planning a small concert in White Lake where his Russian immigrant parents run the seedy El Monaco motel, in desperate need of tourists to bail them out of foreclosure. With his permit for the White Lake concert in hand, he contacts Woodstock Ventures and pitches them his idea of holding the music festival on his friend Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm.
This week, life threw a massive curve ball at Creative Loafing Media. Taken over by the NYC-based hedge fund to whom we owed a ton of money, each employee processed the news in a different way: sadness, optimism, relief. Me? I got shit-faced. On great wine. I figured if my family’s legacy — my parents founded Creative Loafing, and my brother, Ben, was CL’s former CEO till last week — is going down, I should consume voluminous amounts of quality juice. Fast. However, the questioned remained… which ones? So many choices, so little time to race and get to the promised land.
Obviously, I needed something high in alcohol. These sorts of wines emerge from hot areas, where the grapes grow fat with sugar and the resulting wine has more punch (sugar converts to alcohol in fermentation). Napa, Sonoma, Barossa Valley (Australia), Washington (yes, there are areas where it isn’t miserably rainy), and a host of other delicious choices for the perfect Zen state of non-thought.
Directed by Michele Soavi
Starring Rupert Everett, François Hadji-Lazaro, Anna Falchi
Italy/ France/ Germany, 1994
R, 105 min
live action, color
An arty, English-language Italian zombie movie starring a pre-My Best Friend’s Wedding Rupert Everett, Cemetary Man is an odd little movie to be sure. It shouldn’t work: It’s pretentious, joltingly episodic, hard to follow and outrageously sexual. But everyone I know seems to like this clearly not-for-everyone film.
I was sitting at the Starbucks downtown, and the window outside was showing the library pillars and it looked pretty awesome. Follow the jump for image number two:
Ed. note: This piece, by Andisheh Nouraee, will appear in next week’s issue of Creative Loafing.
What’s the latest from the political crisis in Honduras?
Along with the week between Christmas and New Year’s, August is supposedly a slow time for news.
That’s not to say nothing’s happening in the world. There’s plenty happening. Like Christmas, August is only considered “slow” because media muckety-mucks tend to time their vacations to coincide with congressional and presidential vacations.
“Slow news month” is, in fact, a synonym for “plenty of trees are falling in the forest, but we can’t hear it because half the news department is on vacation.”
How slow of a news month is August 2009? Alyssa Milano’s wedding photos made the cover of People last week. People! I mean, In Touch Weekly I’d understand. But People?
And over in the supposed real news category, August has been so “slow” that Fox, CNN and MSNBC made stars of every screeching, under-informed, over-opinionated, occasionally armed douchetard who showed up at a health care town hall forum this month.
The coverage of the so-called health care “debate” has been so vile and misleading that I’m almost glad broadcast news outlets have ignored so many big stories this month. Better to ignore than distort, I suppose. Among those biggies is the ongoing political crisis in Honduras.
