Arts & Culture

For anyone who has ever been stuck with horrible seats or waited in line at a ticket office only to be turned away, it can be agreed upon – good live music can be hard to find. Fortunately, a solution to this problem can be found in downtown Davis. Friday at 10 p.m. begins the spring and summer live music season at Sophia’s Thai Kitchen, located at 129 E St. On the bill for opening night is San Francisco-based western swing group Lady A and her Heel Draggers as well as the townies Mad Cow String Band. When Sophia’s first opened in 2001, co-owner Kevin Wan said hosting live music was never far from his plans for the business. However, due to logistics and other matters of running a new business, the concert series did not get its start until about two years ago. Last year, Wan and Michael Leahy, a Davis resident and DJ at KDVS 90.3 FM, presented Sophia’s “Cool As Folk” live music series (named after Leahy’s radio show). The series invited acts like Minnesota-based folk band Cataldo as well as the Dodos, who toured with Frenchkiss labelmates Akron/Family and performed at the South by Southwest Music Festival.

Kurt Rohde, assistant professor and resident composer in the department of music, was awarded a prestigious fellowship for music composition from the American Academy in Rome on Apr. 10. Rohde also serves as the co-director of the Empyrean Ensemble. He will be conducting research in the Italian capital on the Venetian Puppet Orchestra for 11 months beginning this September. The Academy, known primarily as a research and arts institution, houses American scholars and artists to whom they have awarded fellowships. Rohde, who has just joined the music faculty in fall 2008, is the first UC Davis composer to win the Rome prize. “This is a hugely prestigious and well-merited award to a distinguished young composer of apparently limitless promise,” said UC Davis music professor D. Kern Holoman.

Art students will soon be able to make use of a unique donation to the department – a time capsule of 21st century pop culture. On Friday the Nelson Gallery, the art department’s faculty-run teaching museum, opened a donation of original photographs from the Andy Warhol Foundation valued at $188,000. The package was opened Friday in the small space of room 125 in the art building, with an anxious audience huddled around. About a year ago, the Nelson Gallery Registrar and Collection manager Robin Bernhard explained, Nelson Gallery director Renny Pritikin received a peculiar letter in the mail from the foundation asking if UC Davis would like a portion of the $28 million donation of the American pop artist’s work that would be distributed to around 200 universities for academic use. Pritikin filled out a form and returned it to the foundation, and on Apr. 8 received a sealed package, which remained unopened until Friday so that it could acclimate to its new western atmosphere.

LIVE MUSIC Internal Conflict, Plead the Fifth, Knuckle Puck, Wipeout Friday, 7 p.m. Turtle House I always enjoy a good movie reference, especially from a childhood classic like D2: Mighty Ducks. What’s more enjoyable about Vacaville’s Knuckle Puck is that they belong to the dying breed of two-step, thrashy hardcore like the Bay Area greats Ceremony and Sabertooth Zombie or the classics, Infest and Minor Threat. Keep shredding, brothers. Whole Earth Benefit Dance Party Friday, 8 p.m., $3-5 Delta of Venus Help WEF build up some funds for the festival you all know and love by coming out for a night of electronica and more. Here’s the breakdown of genres by DJ: Tao will cover the dubstep, drum ‘n bass; Kelly D will spin the electro, breaks and tech-house; N’Demik has a change of pace with psychedelic and progressive and Ian Lesperance brings the funk. Half-handed Cloud, LAKE, G2 Friday, 7 p.m. Scrambled Eggs House Berkeley’s interesting soloist John Ringhofer will be entertaining Scrambled Eggers with both song and side notes tomorrow evening. The Asthmatic Kitty Records artist sounds pretty odd, he works part time and is a doodling addict. Hopefully he will share some of these stories at the show. Aftershocker, Shayna and the Bulldog Friday, 10 p.m., $3-5, 21 The G St. Pub It’s locals’ night for this G Street Concert, matching two very different acts. Aftershocker’s (you guessed it) hair rock meets Shayna’s charismatic pop rock, which has taken a surfy side on their Basement Love Explosion EP, due out next week and can be picked up at their Burgers ‘n Brew release party Apr. 18. Preview the EP Friday night! Apple Pie Hopes, Katie Delwiche, Pete Bernhard, Connecticut Saturday, 7 p.m., $5 Delta of Venus Apple Pie Hopes… you’ll eat it? That’s my best guess about this happy-go-lucky Americana band from Oakland. If the idea of a pirate anthem scares you, then the opening acts are the ones you’d like to see, such as the pleasant townies Katie D and Pete Bernhard (fans of Willy Mason or M. Ward will dig him!). They’re likely to slow down the evening with bluesy-folksy-perfection.

As most fans of quality television programs know, “The Office” returns to its weekly spot on NBC tonight to resume its fourth season. For Office fanatics like myself, this requires some preparation. Surprisingly, I don’t follow this show religiously just for the priceless puppy face Jim (John Krasinski) makes into the camera after Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) says something outlandish and illogical. The main appeal of this cleverly written sitcom is its ordinary-meets-wtf style of humor, and personally speaking, its quaint similarity to my work life in The Aggie newsroom. There are many ways in which the staff here at this fine student-run publication brings the spirit of “The Office” to our everyday life. White tape clearly shows the boundaries of the “water cooler talk” region, where all the juicy gossip goes down. We have our Jim Halperts, our Angelas (which is played by me on stressful days),but unfortunately, there’s no one over 50 to play the role of Creed. We have yet to hold any office Olympics, and the Dundees are in store for June 2008, but we do hold an ongoing office competition of foosball. They really need to get a foosball table at the Dunder-Mifflin office to add a new competitive and silly pastime to their repertoire. We have two here at The Aggie, and I can assure you they create a very productive work environment, among other things. So as I’ve explained, we here at The Aggie have been patiently waiting it out. Since the writers’ strike, this has been enough for me and my fellow Office-ites, but we all miss weekly unveilings of new episodes. A writer myself, obviously, I understand and am not resentful about the long halt between season four episodes. But I do have some expectations, predictions and hopes that the show’s writers will fulfill as they close out the season:

Editor’s note: MUSE offers a monthly feature to review specific exhibits from art galleries on campus and throughout the Davis/Sacramento area. This month’s “Gallery Review” is of the exhibit ‘American Folk Art’ by various artists. The exhibit will be on display until Apr. 19 at the John Natsoulas Gallery. The gallery experience can be an overwhelming one. However enlightening the creations, a plaguing stiffness can be in the air. That sense of heightened formality, a need to whisper and the rule to keep a respectable distance from the work on display. This prim decorum is not the case with “American Folk Art.” It’s a welcome unpretentiousness: Folk art is created by those with little or no formal training in art, and most of the works on display in the exhibit are marked by a naivety, a certain inexperience that lends itself to an unstudied aesthetic. Many of the paintings are have a childlike quality – bright colors, flat images, a simplified, almost archaic approach to light and perspective – pieces that would seem more at home on a refrigerator door held up by a kitchen magnet than on a gallery wall.

If you’ve always wanted to learn a percussion instrument or brush up on your current skills, now’s your chance. Tonight, Saturday and Monday, the UC Davis Percussion Festival will commence, complete with workshops and concerts from both students and masters, featuring Brazilian beats, merry marimbas and more. The UC Davis department of music began doing music festivals four years ago, with each year celebrating a different particular instrument. Last year was the cello festival, and this year will mark the first percussion festival to be held on campus with percussion lecturer and performer Chris Froh at the helm as the festival’s director. “To be given free range, and to basically do whatever I’d like to do, has been ideal,” said Froh. Today’s performance in Mondavi’s Grand Lobby will feature both the percussion students and the samba school, a newer and relatively unheard of addition to the course catalog. The class is open to all levels of experience and performs every quarter, which made participating in the percussion festival a natural flow of events, Froh said.

The arrival of spring goes hand in hand with images apt to inspire the nearest lounging poet. How fitting, then, that National Poetry Month should fall on this time of year. In Yolo County the celebration has already begun, but with readings on the way at both The Avid Reader and Bistro 33, the coming weeks promise to be eventful. The Sacramento Poetry Center, located on 25th St., held its annual poetry conference Apr. 4and 5, featuring readings, workshops and lectures by local and visiting poets. Among its participants was Sacramento State English professor, Joshua McKinney, who read with fellow poets Camille Norton and Jane Hershfield on Friday evening. The following morning he held a workshop with approximately 10 participants. “What I liked most was the camaraderie, the spirit of sharing a mutual endeavor that I experienced,” McKinney said. “There were some fine writers in attendance.”

Stop-Loss Directed by Kimberly Peirce Paramount Picture Rating: 3 Stop-Loss isn’t a political movie, per se. It’s not meant to sway the audience in any particular way about the political ideologies. It’s not necessarily an anti-war movie, nor does it preach “Support Your Troops” messages into every scene. At heart, Stop-Loss is a drama that focuses on the effects of war – not the war itself. Rather than concentrating on the merits of war, director Kimberly Peirce focuses on the storytelling of human drama, an area that seems to suit her better, based on her directorial debut in 1999 with Boys Don’t Cry. Stop-Loss is about a group of soldiers returning from duty in Iraq. Undoubtedly, it’s been a tough gig: On their last tour, Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) and his men are ambushed, leaving one man in their group killed and another permanently disfigured. Friends, family and a cheering town greet the soldiers at home in Texas, but life doesn’t get any easier for them once they return. Duty and combat has permanently changed them; one soldier is in rehabilitation after losing an arm, a leg and his eyesight after the ambush, and he is unable to visit his family in Mexico. The effects are more than physical for other soldiers: Brandon suffers from nightmares about the ambush that he feels responsible for. After their homecoming party, Sergeant Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) suddenly snaps, and Brandon finds Steve at home in a drunken fit, digging a trench hole in his front yard in his underwear.

Anyone who left Theta Chi’s Zion I and Mistah Fab outdoor show last Saturday without a few black and blue spots,smashed eyeglasses,mysterious bite marks,or at least an elbow to the stomach should count themselves lucky. In town like Davis,chock full of young hip-hop fans from the Bay Area,you have to expect that people are going to get bit crazy – or you might say,hyphy,when two extremely popular hip-hop artists from Oakland come to visit. The double lineup nicely catered to both fans of the socially conscious and poetic underground fare of Zion I as well as the lighter-themed,pounding,up-tempo beats of Mistah Fab that anyone who listens to the radio even occasionally has probably memorized perfectly. This isn’t to say that the crowd was utterly out of control the entire time.The vigorous local and UC Davis student band Sex,Funk,and Danger got the audience moving and grooving benignly and not belligerently with their hybrid of hip-hop,funk and jazz.

If you’ve ever seen a bicycle as flashy as a scraper bike but too agile and swift to be one, you’re probably perplexed. You may wonder why the bike has no brakes or be reminded of an incident in the Quad during finals week involving a cop car, a student on a bike and some handcuffs. Well, I will not be talking about that. I will, however, give you the inside scoop on fixed gears – a flowering hobby set on wheels, mashing through traffic and holding onto the side of your car to stay balanced at a stoplight. It’s the fixie frenzy, and it has spread here to the platinum-rated bicycle city of the nation.

21 Directed by Robert Luketic Rating: 2 Perhaps you’ve seen the tantalizing trailers – dangerous action, clever counting and an evil Kevin Spacey in the seedy underbelly of Las Vegas. Sounds exciting, right? Too bad 21 was nothing like the movie the marketing team pretended it would be. 21 follows the plight of MIT star student and goody two-shoes Campbell (Jim Sturgess, Across the Universe), who, after receiving his acceptance letter to Harvard Medical School, finds that he is unable to pay for the school’s high tuition fees. Luckily, Campbell manages to impress his professor Mickey Rosa (Spacey) in his non-linear equations class and is recruited by Rosa to join his blackjack team. Using a system of counting cards, verbal codes and secret sign language, the team is able to strategically win gobs of money from the casinos – so much, that it’s only a matter of time until they are caught by the menacing loss prevention specialist Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne).