MUSIC
Night of Blues
Saturday, 7:30 p.m., $8 (advance) | $10 (at the door)
Veterans Memorial Theater, 203 East 14th St.
The City of Davis, Community Services Department celebrates a night of blues with the sounds of Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith (to name a few). Blue Blazes and The Hucklebucks will lead in the performances and tributes to some of the greatest Chicago and Mississippi blues artists in history.

Jon Pardi
Saturday, 8:30 p.m., $15 (advance) | $20 (at the door)
The Davis Graduate, 805 Russell Blvd.
Relatively new to the country music scene, Jon Pardi is a recording artist from Nashville under the large record label EMI. On Saturday, Pardi will perform a high-energy set which will combine a unique combination of classic rock and country music. To purchase tickets in advance, visit davisgrad.com.

An Intimate Evening with the Glowmen
Tomorrow, 7:30 p.m., $7
Science Lecture Hall 123
In conjunction with The UC Men’s Octet of UC Berkeley, The Afterglow (all-male a capella group in Davis) will host a show dedicated to Valentine’s Day. As The Afterglow states: “Be prepared for a love-y, dove-y evenin’ of music, heartache and lust!”

AT THE MOVIES
Rocky Horror Picture Show
Saturday, 7:30 p.m., $2 (students) | $3 (non-students)
Giedt 1001
As a part of Entertainment Council’s annual event, the screening of the iconic Rocky Horror Picture Show will attract a large crowd of dedicated fans of the film. A cast of young performers will be acting out the movie as audience members watch the film to encourage public participation.

THEATER/MONDAVI
The Edge Festival Auditions
Today, 6-10 p.m., free
Wyatt Theatre
The Edge Festival is an annual event that takes place April 12 to 22. As usual, the choreographers and writers of these performance pieces (five-minute monologues, songs, scenes, etc.) need participants to make the devised pieces come alive. Auditions will be held today and all students and faculty are encouraged to audition.

Unity Clap Theatre: De Colores De La Educación
Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 9:30 p.m., free
Wright Hall 101, Lab A
Unity Clap Theatre, a relatively new student Theatre and dramatic arts organization, presents its first show with De Colores De La Educación. The show will be lead by an improvisation piece directed by Ashley Cook and then followed by a one-act comedy directed by Felix Cuma and Lupe Vergara.

ART/GALLERY
The Basement Gallery
Friday to Feb. 24, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., free
Art Building
Starting Friday, The Basement Gallery and the UC Davis art studio department will begin hosting the annual Winter Art Show. In this exhibition, students will display their best work for an opportunity to win various scholarships to attend various prestigious interdisciplinary art programs. However, the public is welcome to view the artwork while the gallery is open.

Tickets available for spring concerts:

DIM MAK’s Dead Meat Tour: Steve Aoki, Datsik & Special Guest
March 14, 6:30 p.m., $25
Freeborn Hall
Tickets are on sale now. The show is presented by Entertainment Council. Student pre-sale tickets have officially been sold out; however, general admission tickets are still available. Visit the Freeborn Ticket Office or ticketmaster.com to purchase tickets.

U.S. Premiere of Blanche Neige
March 17 at 7 p.m., March 18 at 3 p.m., $20/$32/$37.50 (students)
Jackson Hall, Mondavi Center
As the official U.S. premiere of the internationally acclaimed ballet, Blanche Neige, tickets will be sold out quickly. Make sure to get your tickets today. Visit the Mondavi Box office (hours: noon to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday) to purchase tickets in advance.

Bon Iver
April 17, 8 p.m. (doors open at 7 p.m.), $29.50 (limited student tickets) | $39.50 (general admission)
Freeborn Hall
Yes, the rumor is true: Bon Iver is coming to Davis! Tickets for this event will go on sale starting Sunday (general admission for $39.50) at 10 a.m. on tickets.com and Monday (limited student tickets for $29.50) at the Freeborn Ticket Office. For student tickets, you are required to bring a student I.D. and there is a maximum of two student I.D. cards per purchase; cash only. Be sure to get in line early since the show is anticipated to sell out quickly. The show is presented by Entertainment Council.

The Shins
April 23, 8 p.m., $35
Jackson Hall, Mondavi Center
Tickets are on sale now and can be purchased at the Mondavi Center Ticket Booth or on ticketmaster.com. The show is presented by Entertainment Council, Another Planet Entertainment and the Mondavi Center. Tickets for this show are also selling fast, so reserve your seat now.

On Feb. 17, your phone will become an art expert. Or rather, through the innovative method of embedded chips within sculptures, your phone will simply project the aura of a knowledgeable art expert by providing you with information about various pieces of art stationed in Davis by the simple touch of a finger.

The city of Davis will be the first-ever city in America to create a transmedia sculpture walk. California Senator Lois Wolk will personally unveil the 10 sculptures that make up the walk, which will be placed at key locations throughout downtown Davis, on Feb. 17. Additionally, from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m., John Natsoulas Gallery will host a launch party, which celebrates the transmedia art walk’s official opening.

The Sculpture Walk is a groundbreaking collaboration of modern art with the latest development in Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID). Similar to the audio devices that museums provide to its visitors so that they can learn more about certain paintings without needing a human guide, the transmedia sculpture walk utilizes groundbreaking cellphone technology that allows smartphone users to readily access information about a specific piece of art.

This monumental project was made possible by the hard work of three men who are advocates of the local Davis art community. John Natsoulas, local gallery owner, Dr. Monto H. Kumagi, software developer, and Finley Fryer, monumental sculptor and contemporarily renowned artist, are the figures behind the project. All three men live close to Davis. In fact, Kumagi grew up in Davis with Natsoulas, and Fryer regularly shows his work at Natsoulas’ gallery located on First Street.

Natsoulas had originally organized a sculpture walk back in the 1980s when it took a year to assemble everything. In that time, the three men decided to take Kumagi’s patented method of personalizing consumer products using RFID and apply it to the various pieces that constitute the sculpture walk.

Kumagi described in detail the many things that the technology can provide to the participants of the walk.

“The public can write links to music, photos and videos directly onto RFID-tagged items,” Kumagi said. “At a later point in time they can retrieve, display and share the information using RFID-enabled cell phones. The concept behind interactive transmedia art is to allow the sculpture to transform from one dimension into an opening to another world, to change the stone into a liquid, fluid, dynamic, interactive experience.”

Every Saturday starting at 11:30 a.m. through the rest of the year, guided tours will commence at the base of Fryer’s sculpture, “Stan the Submerging Man.” Stan is the tall, mostly-blue sculpture made from discarded fragments of plastic that is erected outside of the Natsoulas Gallery on the corner of First and E Street. Originally commissioned by the Black Rock Foundation for the 1999 Burning Man, Stan now stands outside one of the most progressive art spaces in the country.

Fryer, who created several pieces of art for the walk, wholeheartedly supports the intertwining of technology with modern art.

“The transmedia movement is a natural evolution, a marriage of art and science that will lead both the artist and the viewer down a path never traveled,” Fryer said. “With the embedded near-field chips acting as a kind of worm hole, it provides the connective link that places the viewer into the internal dialog. Absolutely a match made in heaven.”

For those who like to catch up on their much-missed sleep, Sculpture Walk maps are available at local businesses in Davis. Natsoulas hopes that this pioneering sculpture walk will be the beginning of more public arts projects to come later on. Working with the Cultural Action Committee, Natsoulas plans to set up an Art in Public Places Fund in which a fundraiser will be held every year to help a local artist create a piece of public art for the community, which will then be added to the Sculpture Walk.

“It’s wonderful to work with the community to make this happen. All of the business owners downtown and property owners have been most helpful, and the artists have all devoted a great deal of their time and energy,” Natsoulas said.

An online version of the Sculpture Walk map can be found at culturalactioncommittee.com.

MICHELLE RUAN can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.

Director and writer Oliver Stone spoke at UC Davis’ at the Mondavi Center last Friday as one among a series of distinguished speakers to come through Davis in the last year.

As a filmmaker, Stone is perhaps best known and revered for Platoon (1986), a semi-autobiographical account of a platoon’s foray into the metaphorical heart of jungle darkness, the Vietnam War.

But that was way back when Charlie Sheen was in movie star shape, let alone “Two and a Half Men” shape, which seems an alternate dimension ago and not just 26 years.

The inevitable question being, 26 years later, where is Oliver Stone now in 2012 when Platoon and other potent films like Born of the Fourth of July (1988) and Wall Street (1987) are so far behind us, and him?

That is to say, just what exactly does Oliver Stone and his work mean to the world today, so far from the Vietnam War and the ’80s?

There have, of course, been other Stone movies beyond the listed three that are in no way simply dismissible. Yet, despite his remaining presence in the theaters and the continued relevance of his name, there is a sense of uncertainty that has surrounded Stone and his work in recent years. A type of fogginess or obscurity, perhaps, induced by tonal unevenness, critical disapproval, sporadic subject matter and, for the young, generational disconnect.

So who is Oliver Stone?

In his talk at Mondavi, he started his discussion with some thoughts on creativity. He told a story of how when he was a boy he collected football cards, and how with those cards he made a game not unlike fantasy football — except done alone. To him, as he put it, it was a way to fill the void — the void being that vague sense of existential emptiness a creative type satisfies only with creative action.

He then talked about his daughter, a teenager, who is a standard member of, as Stone put it, the self-entitled generation. The audience, mostly of the baby boomer range, found this rather hilarious. It’s like a big joke among older people. But he wasn’t just making jokes.

His daughter likes to party. She’s 16, and she’s forgotten the importance of creative action. She’s been trying to fill the void in her life with something like a social life, he explained.

The story continued, and Stone told the audience how he grounded his daughter one weekend. He took away her phone, internet, TV and social privileges, and forced her to stay inside her room. She protested, of course, but when Stone got home after a stint of her isolation he discovered a striking mural on her wall. Without all those things, she’d found creative action again.

Later on, when he was taking questions, someone raised the notion of him being a political filmmaker, which makes sense enough. He’s done movies on John F. Kennedy, Vietnam, George W. Bush, Wall Street and Nixon, to name some of his more fiery politicized topics.

Surprisingly, he denied the label. History, he explained, is the best story ever. It’s not politics, but history.

As the presentation went on, he touched on many of his concerns with modern life.

Disgust with modern media, particularly mainstream news and reality TV, and Natural Born Killers.

Concern over financial inequity, two Wall Street movies and a “greed is good” omni-phrase that courses through our lexicon.

Curiosity, to say the least, as to how Bush managed to become our president, and then W was born.

The genesis of Oliver Stone is really not so baffling when one looks the man in the face. He is a storyteller. He liked football when he was a kid, and so he made a movie about football.

That is to say, perhaps, that there is a genuine artist detectable through all his sporadically themed obfuscation. Someone who wants to paint a real, if not dramatized, portrait of the world so we may grasp it just a little better.

And now, Stone is working on what he referred to as a 10-hour documentary on the untold story of America during the 20th century. It sounds ambitious to say the least.

He has a movie coming out this summer called The Savages.

That night, he was flying off to Indonesia for a shoot.

Stone is someone, for better or worse, with an ax to grind or not, who is striving for something. We may not realize it now, but he just might be one of our most valuable filmmakers.

JAMES O’HARA can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.

Editor’s Note: For the rest of this quarter, Aggie arts reporter Sasha Sharma will investigate the process of designing a runway collection from beginning to end. Check MUSE weekly to see Funmilayo Alabi’s progress as she continues to work on her collection for the Picnic Day Fashion Show taking place in Spring 2012.

With New York Fashion Week just around the corner, designers are gearing up for breathtaking runway shows. From finishing up the last stitch on a maxi skirt or scheduling fittings with models, the frenzy that surrounds a fashion show is crucial.

Likewise, designers from the UC Davis Design program’s fashion emphasis have been working hard for their very own spring fashion show that will take place on Picnic Day 2012 and in San Francisco on May 6.

To get a glimpse of what it means to be a designer, MUSE talked to one of the designers presenting their collection this spring. Funmilayo Alabi is a senior at UC Davis and says she has been subconsciously working toward this day her entire college career.

“I am Nigerian and I’m also not a follower — my designs are inspired by my culture and the Rio Carnivale,” Funmilayo said.

The Carnivale is an annual festival held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. With approximately 2 million attendees per day, the festival is a samba-style blur of bright colors. Additionally, The Carnivale is inspired by the dominant Yoruba tribe — Funmilayo’s ancestral tribe.

“You won’t see much ready-to-wear in my collection; it’s much more avant-garde. I am a drama major as well so there’s this costume element to my clothes,” Funmilayo said. She adds that her second source of inspiration are the Nigerian masquerades performances given by masked members of tribes during important events in the society.

The Yoruba tribe celebrates Gelede in order to honor the female elders of their society where the performances are colorful and use the famous Yoruba wooden masks.

“They use grass and twigs and even hair for costumes that are just really bizarre,” Funmilayo said.

Funmilayo hopes her collection will bring many of these elements into play with intricate prints underneath hair, the focus being primarily on movement. The colors in Funmilayo’s collection are a contrast to what’s on the runway — the spring pastels forecasted to dominate this season. Funmilayo’s collection is an amalgam of bright oranges, yellows, reds and golds.

The fashion show is the equivalent of a senior project for Design 179, a class offered as part of the Design major at UC Davis.The class is mainly for students whose heart lies in the world of fashion, students who desperately seek internships with Marc Jacobs, Giorgio Armani, Betsey Johnson and others.

“Michael Kors started his career interning for Céline,” Funmilayo said as she confessed her desire to someday work for Marc Jacobs.

Although the job sounds glamorous enough, it is anything but. Underneath the bright colors, there is an extensive amount of time and effort put in by the students.

It is a far cry from the popular TV show “Project Runway”. Students at UC Davis dye their own fabrics, make their own prints and finance their own collections from purchasing fabric, dyes, prints to finding complementary makeup, shoes and accessories.

The class is comprised of 18 students and according to Funmilayo, three students were fortunate enough to win the President’s Undergraduate Fellowship grant. The grant finances, in part, undergraduate research. Funmilayo, on the other hand, has been the sole financial backer for her project along with a $1,500 private scholarship.

“About two weeks ago, I dyed something and I forgot that I needed to steam it so the color would spread, and it turned out this wrong green color that did not work at all,” Funmilayo said of a dying mishap. She says she usually leaves campus anywhere between 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. to work on her designs.

As Funmilayo continues labors on her collection, MUSE will bring weekly updates of her personal, albeit more arduous, Project Runway.

SASHA SHARMA can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.