"Let’s get out of this country, I have been so unhappy," Tracyanne Campbell sings on the title track of the third and most recent album by her band, Camera Obscura. If breaking out of its native Scotland was the cure for the malaise, the Glaswegian sextet has cause to celebrate. Since its release in June 2006, "Let’s Get Out of This Country" has been creating major waves in the American indie music scene.
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On Sunday, the Grammys enlisted a high-octave pop princess to pay tribute to the late James Brown, but had the Recording Academy considered doing the Godfather of Soul justice, Victor Sila would have been called upon instead.Let’s just say the "hardest working man in show business" and Sila, the Kenyan-born frontman of the San Francisco-based outfit Sila and the Afrofunk Experience, have a lot more in common than the "Genie in the Bottle" balladeer.
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For eight years I passed the turquoise sign of My Tofu House without noticing it — until I met Mi Ryung Song, a willowy, flute-playing administrator at the San Francisco Symphony. As often happens, conversation turned to food, specifically Korean restaurants, and Mi Ryung told me she liked the soft tofu at My Tofu House. That's all it took for me to join the nightly line waiting for one of the boothlike, partitioned-off tables in the very popular little restaurant.
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Think back to those days of yore when the melodrama of adolescence seeped forth from the pen and onto the pages of, like, your totally top-secret diary. Every awkward and utterly irrational thought you ever had was feverishly documented for your eyes only.
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The ninth annual San Francisco Independent Film Festival began in earnest with the regional premiere of David Lynch’s latest journey into the apparently bottomless depths of his teeming imagination, "Inland Empire."
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Early on in Mickey Birnbaum’s black comedy about contemporary American family life — and our angst-ridden times in general — two teenagers watch as their dog eats one of its newborn puppies. The play ends with nothing less than, well, the destruction of the entire universe. In between, it’s a fast, funny, frightening and utterly engaging journey, as staged by Crowded Fire Theater Company in this top-notch West Coast premiere.
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Just before the expected love fest for Peter O’Toole at the Academy Awards on Feb. 25 — whether he wins his first "real" Oscar in eight tries or not — his first big hit has been restored and re-released; "Becket," from 1964, is playing in Bay Area theaters.This suspenseful and moving historical drama, about the friendship and eventual struggle between King Henry II (O’Toole) and Thomas Becket (Richard Burton), received 12 Oscar nominations four decades ago, winning for Edward Anhalt’s screenplay (adapted from the play by Jean Anouilh).
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Was Anna Nicole Smith planning to legally wed her lawyer-lover Howard K. Stern? In a new interview with "Entertainment Tonight" and "The Insider," Howard says he and the late model had scheduled their nuptials for Feb. 27. (Their September commitment ceremony was purely symbolic.)"We were going to make everything legally binding in less than two weeks," Howard says. Interesting choice of words.
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Petula Clark is coming to San Francisco this weekend to sing her big hit songs, and it’s a pretty big deal."This will be the first time, as far as I can remember," she said in a recent phone interview from Wales, a stop on her current concert tour.Although she clearly remembers being in the Bay Area, appearing in productions of the musicals "Blood Brothers" and "Sunset Boulevard," she admits she doesn’t always recall where she has performed.
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Film festivals today are dime a dozen. In fact, there are well over a thousand in the world. San Francisco, however, has not one but two of the really significant festivals,and this year is of special importance for both, and for their participants and audiences. The San Francisco International Film Festival, the nation's oldest, will mark the half-century mark in April. Before that, in March, the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival will unspool its 25th annual edition.
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URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/archive/21?page=735
