Getting my spook on: an epic fail

Normally I love the Halloween season. Yes, season. I have at least three large storage containers stuffed with rubber bats, glow in the dark skeletons and other creepy 3-dimensional objects that only see the light of day for a few weeks each year.
I could blame my apathy this year on pumpkin spice deficiency since [...]

BEST OF: the subjectivity of hierarchy and a few of my favorite things in Ventura County

We just put our annual Best Of Ventura County issue to bed after a long but mostly painless labor (depending on who you talk to.) This was not the first time I’ve been involved with the issue but it was my introduction to the back-end/inner workings of the voting process.
I am currently working on an [...]

Bloodlust: in anticipation of the True Blood season finale

Yes, I am one of them. A would-be fangbanger lusting after Eric, loathing Maryann, adoring Lafayette, sympathizing with Sam, being embarrassed for Jason and tolerating Sookie (whom a friend of mine unaffectionately refers to as “Sucky”.)
What has developed into an epic battle of good and evil, antihero against hypocrite will [...]

Closed Until Further Notice: Hush Lounge

As Chris Mastrovito mentioned in his most recent column, after 4 years in business, Hush has been shushed. Whether it’s a victim of what would appear to be a war on downtown Ventura’s nightlife–and specific sectors of such–remains to be seen.
Hush Lounge was an upscale nightclub with DJs, live music, and a restaurant. Dress code [...]

Festivals and rumors of festivals

In the wake of the epic failure that was the California Music Fest, it seems that yet another would-be promoter is cooking up something big in Ventura. And when I say big, I mean BIG. Why Ventura? Who knows. Yes, it’s a beautiful place, yes it’s got that certain je ne sais quois, but [...]

bandwagonesque

It seems that every week I receive one or two new requests from restaurants to be added into our After Dark section because they have live entertainment. This presents a conundrum similar to what I’ve experienced with gallery listings: restaurants with live music are like retail stores with art. The restaurant is not a nightclub, [...]

Parental responsibility and the power of media

The other night at the video store I overheard a conversation between a mother and her son. The boy was somewhere between 4-6 years old.
Boy: Mommy, look there’s Scream! Can we get it?
Mother: No, I don’t think so, we watched it 6 times last week. Let’s find something else.
A few minutes later, she approached the [...]

Obama as muse

Much has been said and written recently about the potential impact our new president could have on the arts in America. Obama is literary and tech-savvy. When he described the prose from a book he was reading as “sparkling,” the loins of writers everywhere briefly tingled. There’s even a petition circulating to add [...]

The death of irony

The following is a correspondence between my dear friend Jay Windsor, who really needs a blog (or I need him to have one) and myself.
Windsor: Interesting piece about the rather rapid decline of the use of the word “irony,” in recent times. Me, I enlarged the chart that’s offered, printed [...]