Sweet iced tea, iceberg lettuce wedges with ranch dressing and dry-rubbed pork ribs are items you’d normally expect to find on menus south of the Mason-Dixon line. But the new Linwood Grille & Barbecue, a restaurant adjoining the Linwood Grille bar and rock club, offers a somewhat upscale, yet uniquely authentic version of such fare right in Boston, just a couple of blocks from Fenway Park. The homemade pies are quite good, too. Average meal in the $7-$12 (£4-£7.50) range.
October 29, 2008
October 28, 2008
Tout Truffaut
François Truffaut digested four decades of cinema history, and then with his brilliant 1959 opus on childhood, ‘The 400 Blows’, began a film-making odyssey that changed the way we look at film. The Film Forum’s comprehensive retrospective explores all of Truffaut’s finest work via brand new 35mm prints, capturing both the self-awareness and transgressive energy of the ‘nouvelle vague’ and the deep humanity of the men, women and particularly children who populate his films. This two-month festival revisits everything from Truffaut’s radical appraisal of relationships in ‘Jules et Jim’ to his hilarious meditation on cinema as a medium in ‘Day for Night’.
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October 22, 2008
Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke’s huge, striking paintings are being given their first major exhibition in Budapest since winning a number of awards in Europe and America. Born in 1945, Polke studied at the Hamburg Art Academy. Her work first made an impact at the Venice Biennale in 1986, and her canvases, which feature powerful juxtaposed images and a punchline at the bottom, have also been seen at the Liverpool Tate and the Munich Art House.
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October 16, 2008
Underworld + Rinôçérôse
Underworld’s new album ‘Beaucoup Fish’ has been racking up the column inches on both sides of the Channel, yet quirky Rinôçérôse might just steal the show with their hands-in-the-air house-with-a-twist – and they do virtually everything on real instruments. Led by sassy Jean-Philippe Freu and Patou Carrie (mild-mannered social psychologists by day), the hottest scene-makers on the circuit are currently riding high on new album ‘Installation Sonore’, which is as good as anything the formidable Underworld have ever turned out.
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October 10, 2008
History of Writing
It is worth taking a short trip out to the neighbouring town of Granollers to see this excellent exhibition on the history of writing and its relationship to modern art. ‘Els rastres de l’alfabet’ (‘Tracing the Alphabet’), which includes reproductions of the very first known samples of writing, shows the way in which the Roman alphabet has developed, and the use made especially by twentieth-century artists of written forms, with originals by Tàpies and Miró.
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October 7, 2008
Gaixample
A popular area of Barcelona has recently become firmly established as a centre for gay nightlife, thanks to the opening of several new clubs, bars and restaurants. Located in the eastern area of the Eixample district between Aragó and Gran Via streets are no less than 11 gay venues. These include the popular Dietrich bar, the two Arena bars – which give seven per cent of their take to help the fight against AIDS – and the Aire, a male gay restaurant which has now become a bar for both gays and lesbians.
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October 6, 2008
High Times Cannabis Cup
It’s harvest time, and time for ‘High Times’ magazine’s annual Cannabis Cup, where all things related to wastedness are celebrated. There are banquets, bands, product expos, cultivation seminars and a competition where hundreds of judges – including you, if you so wish – try to ascertain which of the hundreds of wicked weeds are the wickedest. The event is scattered (as are the minds) all over town but is focused around the Melkweg and the Pax Party House. This year’s theme is ‘Beat Poets’.
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October 3, 2008
October 2, 2008
Metropolitan Opera: Madama Butterfly
Julius Rudel conducts a classic rendition of Puccini’s tragic exploration of sex, love and otherness, in which a 15-year-old geisha falls in love with a US naval officer, who marries and impregnates her before sailing home to find an American bride. An outcast in Japan, she waits for ‘la Yankee vagabondo’ to return, but when he comes back with his new wife and lays claim to the child he has fathered, she kills herself. It’s a classic operatic melodrama transposed with themes of coloniality and conquest, driven by one of the composer’s finest musical achievements.
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