Arts & Culture

It's the start of a new quarter, and spring is in the air. The sun is shining, flowers are blooming; a new season is upon us. Why not take the chance to capture the spirit of spring with a hyphy show right on campus?

The ASUCD Entertainment Council is presenting a show featuring Bay Area hip-hop group The Federation. The show is free and will take place Friday on the Quad at noon. In the case of rain, the show will be moved to Freeborn Hall.

For anyone who has lived in northern California over the past couple of years, the hyphy subgenre of hip-hop has established itself as a Bay Area mainstay. Rapper Stressmatic of the Federation described the appeal of hyphy music.

Nine Inch Nails

Ghosts I-IV

Self-Released

Rating: 5

Nine Inch Nails' creative architect Trent Reznor consistently works to shake the norms of the music industry, whether it be through strategic resistance to the clutch of major record labels or an indirect jab at Fred Durst's musical capability. Reznor has similarly worked to alter the direction of his own projects, and NIN's seventh and latest release Ghosts I-IV, released Mar. 2, offers no evidence to the contrary.

Reznor's style has developed ever since the angst-filled years of Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral, and Ghosts expresses a positive and mature shift to a new brand of experimental, minimal and predominately electronic industrial music. Ghosts is largely a conceptual album, consisting of 36 nameless instrumental tracks broken into four volumes and spanning a length of nearly two hours - a time that would surely bring miserable tears to a 21st century MTV loyalist.

Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Sally, Woodstock, Shroeder, Linus and Lucy - do these names revive a feeling of childhood nostalgia? Starting tonight, Studio 301 will be giving everyone the chance to revisit those days by performing You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown at the Wyatt Pavilion Theater on Old Davis Road.

The student theatre company will perform a series of musical vignettes best described as a day in the life of Charlie Brown, starring sophomore theater and communication major Matt Escarcega.

Rating: 5

Super Smash Bros. Brawl picks up where its predecessors left off: your favorite Nintendo characters jumping around familiar Nintendo places using their special moves to fling their enemies into the distance.

The gameplay has not changed appreciably. In fact, the controls are so similar that Brawl is not only backwards compatible with the Gamecube controller, but one might also be hard-pressed to find players who are willing to play with the Wii remote. I grant you that I am not the most skilled player of Super Smash Bros., but when I tried to play with the remote I found that the majority of the match was given over to asking which button did what. Sticking with the Gamecube controller is far easier for those who have played even a small amount of Melee.

Live Music

UC Davis Student Chamber Ensembles

Today, 12:05 and 4:15 p.m.

Music Building Room 115

Free noon concerts are a blessing in disguise. Pick up some lunch at the Silo or the Coffee House, both nearby, and bring it to the music!

With finals come the inescapable bouts of procrastination. Offering another excuse not to study is Double Dollar Feature Night, presented by the ASUCD Entertainment Council and Campus Cinema. The event will screen the filmsAcross the Universe at 6:15 p.m. and Shaun of the Dead at 9 p.m.

Tickets can be purchased at the Freeborn ticket office or at the door for $1. There will be an intermission between the movies, and free refreshments will be provided.

Finals are on our heels, chasing us into misery. I am stressed, you are stressed. We are practically biting each other's heads off because of all this stress. So let's face it: we all need a little bit of TLC - both the physical kind and the musical kind.

Stress is building in my shoulders, turning my muscle to stone, but all my friends are too busy to give me a full-blown massage for tension relief. My heartbeat won't seem to slow down on its own, so I thought maybe some mid-tempo, mid-90s slow jams would do the trick.

The gaming world lost one of its guiding lights last week as Gary Gygax passed away Mar. 4. Gygax is best known for his role as co-creator, with David Arneson, of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.

Dungeons and Dragons, or D&D for short, is a game without winners and losers, played in the imaginations of those participating. Known in popular society for its many sided, multicolored die and its vast array of rulebooks, what started as a hobby has become a profitable industry, boasting over $1 billion in estimated sales. Similar estimates place the number of people who have played the game at over 20 million.

Covering the history, evolution, social significance and musical aspects of rock music through the ages - spanning from the blues to punk and new wave - this relatively new course has been consistently popular with students, as shown by its lecture hall-sized class and high attendance despite its morning time slot.

The freaky, fantastical world of Nights at the Circus, originally a novel by Angela Carter, will be brought to life for the first time in the U.S. tonight at the UC Davis Wyatt Pavilion Theatre at 8 p.m. Performances will continue through Sunday.

Nights at the Circus is directed by UC Davis Master of Fine Arts Candidate Patricia Miller, adapted for the stage by Emma Rice & Tom Morris and originally premiered in London in 2006.

East meets West and movement meets art at the Mondavi Center. As part of the Dance Series, the Mondavi will present Re- (Part One) and Folding, two pieces from contemporary dance company Shen Wei Dance Arts.

The company will perform the pieces tomorrow at 8 p.m. at Jackson Hall. Tickets can be purchased at the Mondavi Center ticket office or online at mondaviarts.org. Student tickets are $14 and general admission is $37. A post-performance question-and-answer session will be offered with choreographer and company founder Shen Wei.

After featuring more than 1400 music acts over a five-day stretch in 2007, South by Southwest is back again in March 2008 as one of the premier music festivals in the world. Held in Austin, Texas, the festival gives the music industry a chance to bring all its constituents together in one huge event. Besides hundreds of bands, SXSW also includes a film festival and numerous music industry conferences that draw even more people into the heart of Texas.

This Sunday Varsity Theatre will host Davis' 4th annual United Nations Association Film Festival.

This year's theme, Camera as Witness, advocates the whole notion of the democratization of the camera, said Jesse Drew, a technocultural studies professor at UC Davis. It is a more authentic and realistic view of the world shot by everyday people.