Month: March 2004

Here’s a bistro that’s just what it should be, though we would have liked bigger crab cakes for eleven bucks. The spanking new Amsterdam, with its brick-and-wood interior, tin ceiling and little corner-shaped bar looking out onto the Third Street terminus, seems destined to become a favorite jumping-off spot for a night on the town.…

Will Durst, to paraphrase the old country radio music billboard, was doing political satire before it was hip, and he’s still going strong. Part of the San Francisco contingent of comics who didn’t sell out to Hollywood for sitcoms and potato chip commercials, Durst displays the thoughtfulness of Mort Sahl without Sahl’s patina of Ward…

You’ve seen him hobnobbing with Bill Clinton, partying (and attending IMF meetings) with Bono, and doing other cool and prestigious things that world-class playwrights-cum-presidents do. But have you actually seen a play by Vaclav Havel? (We won’t ask about the political essays.) Now’s your chance. Known as Havel’s most “successful” (read: accessible) work, the three…

A simple but powerfully chilling idea ripe with dramatic possibility: What would you do if you were sentenced to die for a crime you didn’t commit? Husband-and-wife writing team Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen (a 1988 Apple Valley High School grad) interviewed forty wrongfully convicted death-row prisoners and boiled their stories down to six. Exonerated’s…

Photographer Justin Newhall takes on the myths of the American West, tracing their subtle but inescapable residue in contemporary junkscapes of parking lots, stores, parks, monuments, and suburban tracts. He picks out the sculptural abstractions in a lakeside picnic area in South Dakota, and documents a shaggy heap of invasive Russian olive trees sprawling dumbly…

Remember when you could snuggle up with the newspaper rather than read it online? When you could get your information from the phone book rather than from Google? Those were the days. A group of 50 photographers and one installation artist remind us of our love for the tangible as they turn their camera lenses…