Let there be light
That trademark Hollywood line is the theme of a ceremony Saturday at the Oklahoma River when the world’s first permanently lighted racecourse of its kind will be illuminated. The river-lighting marks the first large-scale MAPS 3 project to be completed, said Oklahoma City spokeswoman Kristy Yager. The ceremony, which is open to the public, begins…
Gimme the Loot
Equally affable as they are gruff, Sophie and Malcolm hustle the streets by day. By night, they’re a relentless tag-teaming duo. Literally, they tag the streets of New York, leaving their mark as would-be graffiti masterminds. When some Mets fans start spray-painting over their turf, Sophie and Malcolm come up with the idea to break…
Takeoff Eyeslow — The Prescription
So if Kanye wants to go off on his Alan Vega/Suicide jag, let him. We have a homegrown replacement right here in Takeoff Eyeslow, dropping an album that is a better follow-up to Graduation than anything West has done since. On The Prescription, the Norman rapper exudes sleepy passion. The first track, “Papa Robert,” doesn’t…
Maurice Johnson — Peace, Love & Jazz
“Hello My Brother” has a sweet flute interlude that, contrary to the title, leaves me wanting to say, “Hello, my lover,” as I lay her down on a down-filled bed. The Spanish-flavored “A Taste of the Sun” follows this idea up nicely with an aural frolic on a secluded Mexican beach, if only to…
Another Round — Just Walk Away
Norman band Another Round’s latest album, Just Walk Away, could be used on the next five National Guard ads, and in no way do I mean that as an insult. When I see those commercials, I admit to rocking out and all but walking out to sign up and defend my country. With impassioned vocals,…
Various artists — Woody Guthrie at 100!: Live at the Kennedy Center
One look at the artists featured on Woody Guthrie at 100!: Live at the Kennedy Center — a concert album/DVD recorded on what would have been his 100th birthday — and his far-reaching impact is clear. Who else could influence both Old Crow Medicine Show and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello to the same…
Full steam ahead
Photo: Tess Baez Seventeen years is a long time for anyone. For a rock band, it’s an eternity. Yet things haven’t gotten stale over the course of Traindodge’s nearly two decades together, thanks in part to a willingness to evolve that finds the Oklahoma City act chugging along as strong and excited today as it…
New frontier
Lord Huron Photo: Ben Schneider One gets the feeling that as inspired by Bob Dylan as Lord Huron ringleader Ben Schneider probably is, John Wayne might be just as influential. The cinematic compositions harken back to the golden era of Westerns, and even with a dash of Bollywood and stroke of lush, Northern landscapes (a…
Son also rises
Music just isn’t as political as it used to be, but don’t tell Jay Farrar. The Son Volt front man is a revivalist in many senses, writing songs from a different time and place than most other acts operating at the moment. There’s one figure, in particular, who has had a profound effect on Farrar’s…
Such a gem
Chuck Tweed By: Mark Hancock In June, Tweed celebrated his 40th anniversary working with Jewel Box Theatre, 3700 N. Walker, where he started as a part-time volunteer and actor. Now, as the community outlet’s most decorated production director for 35 years, he said he has no plans of retirement. “It’s in my contract that when…
On the road again
Initially discussed in 1996 as part of the Interstate 40 crosstown relocation, the would-be boulevard could take shape as a landscaped, four-lane, tree-lined gateway into and out of the downtown area, if city officials have their way. Oklahoma City Council recommended to ODOT — the agency responsible for the project — a boulevard option that…
Das tasty
By: Mark Hancock Das Boot Camp is like the little brother of Royal Bavaria who moved to Norman for college and just parties a lot. In a good way. It’s a restaurant where you can hang out with friends and watch a basketball game while enjoying some beers and sausage. Das is decorated with German…
Tap that
It’s not the equivalent of serving box wines, however. These are high-quality wines from respected producers like Charles Bieler, Joel Gott and Charles Smith, and delivered in a standard 5.17-gallon keg (26 bottles). Currently, Oklahoma City has a limited selection, but bar managers and wine brokers are planning expansion. Sauced on Paseo, 2912 Paseo, has…
Moore, please
By: Shannon Cornman While many are open for business, they face a host of obstacles getting people back in because of consistently congested traffic, closed roads and a general misunderstanding about what places have been forced to shut down. Customers are the lifeblood for hyper-local establishments without the benefit of a huge corporation behind them.…
Valley of the dolls
Delbridge Honanie’s Palhik Mana A Norman curator awakened six Native American spirits through representative paintings, textiles, jewelry, ceramics and carved figures for a Hopi art exhibition opening Friday at Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. As assistant curator of Native American and non-Western art, Heather Ahtone focused on half a dozen katsina spirits of the…
Open Prairie
John McBryde at Prairie Thunder By: Shannon Cornman Artisans of a midtown bakery will participate in their first international open house Saturday with hourly bread and pastry demonstrations, as well as free tastings. As a member of the Bread Bakers Guild of America, Prairie Thunder Baking Company, 1114 Classen Drive, invites audiences to see how…
Slumming it
In the past year, Feed the Children has changed both its focus and its leadership. Now it hopes to educate people about its mission by recreating the atmosphere of an African slum inside an Oklahoma City warehouse. After walking through a hallway lined with pictures of kids in Feed the Children programs, visitors see a…
Marrow minded
<span style="mso-bidi- line-height:115%”><span style=" mso-bidi-line-height:115%”> Marshall Matlock By: Mark Hancock Marshall Matlock’s life was saved by a stranger. Four years later, he is now Facebook friends with her. But in late 2009, after two rounds of chemotherapy to treat his acute myelogenous leukemia, all Matlock knew was that his chance for survival depended on finding…
Summer swank
Route 66 By: Heather Brown OK, so it’s not really shameless. It’s for charity and funds go toward making our great city more beautiful. That fancy event is one of the main reasons I seriously needed to consider the evening-wear situation in my closet. It was dire. After the initial “How have I let it…
OKG7 novel menus
Bistro38 Thai Green Cuisine2903 N.W. 36thbistro38.com948-2788 Thai food is delicious, and it might just be the perfect meal for a warm summer day. Try the seasonal dishes that include fruit, such as Bistro38’s papaya salad or sliced mango with traditional sticky rice. The teriyaki salmon with a side of greens is a good choice, too.…
Delicious when wet
Credit: Brad Gregg But it is evidently, and the results are promising for Oklahoma City water customers and connoisseurs. The local wet stuff that flows from your faucet recently was crowned “Best of the Best” at this year’s American Water Works Association’s conference in Denver. Knowing that, it seems like such a waste now to…
Buggin’
Credit: Brad Gregg Experts note that a wetter-than-normal spring has provided an ideal environment for mosquito-breeding. That can mean more than itchy skin. Over the last seven years, the Oklahoma City-County Health Department reports, the Sooner State has seen 318 confirmed cases of the West Nile virus, which can be transmitted via mosquito bite. Last…
Hey, bulldog
Credit: Brad Gregg The OKC Thunder big man took to the popular social-networking site last week to unload his pup — a rather adorable English bulldog — for the negotiable price of $1,500. “Hey I have a English bulldog and he to big to be around my youngest child he 10 months got his papers…
Tom nixed
Credit: Brad Gregg Wonder if his board liked the way they looked firing him? Closer to home, SandRidge’s board deemed Ward expendable just months after Aubrey McClendon, with whom Ward had founded Chesapeake Energy, was pushed out by his board. Shareholders these days seem to be more volatile than Glee fans. But don’t cry too…
Say you’re sorry
Credit: Brad Gregg On June 11, freshman U.S. Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Tulsa, took to the House floor to demand — nay, to demand! — that President Barack Obama apologize to Oklahomans for not spending more on weather research. “This president spends 30 times as much money on global warming research as he does on weather…
Thrown in the joint
Credit: Brad Gregg The new law — signed, sealed and delivered by Gov. Mary Fallin — makes it a crime to have any detectable amount of THC (or any other schedule 1 narcotic) and/or its inactive metabolites in your system while operating a motor vehicle. In other words, you could mow the grass on Monday…
Evolution revolution
Credit: Brad Gregg As evidence, the National Center for Science Education recently pointed out that two university departments in Oklahoma stepped back to Scopes “monkey trial” territory to defend evolution’s honorable status in higher education. The University of Central Oklahoma and Southwestern Oklahoma State University have separate, if equally unyielding, statements on the importance of…
LETTERS
Oklahoma Gazette provides an open forum for the discussion of all points of view in its Letters to the Editor section. The Gazette reserves the right to edit letters for length and clarity. Letters can be mailed, faxed, emailed to pbacharach@okgazette.com or sent online at okgazette.com, but include a city of residence and contact number…
LETTERS
Oklahoma Gazette provides an open forum for the discussion of all points of view in its Letters to the Editor section. The Gazette reserves the right to edit letters for length and clarity. Letters can be mailed, faxed, emailed to pbacharach@okgazette.com or sent online at okgazette.com, but include a city of residence and contact number…
Unfortunately, it’s all too conventional
In preparing the MAPS 3 campaign, those who advocated for intensive convention center expansion had two significant problems. First, polling showed overwhelming opposition of 75 to 80 percent. Second, the preposterous conclusion of a 2008 Convention, Sports and Leisure (CS&L) study (never released to the public) was that to triple our existing convention busi ness,…
Common sense needed on the court
Unfortunately, the result is a backdoor attack on the Legislature’s attempt to limit frivolous and expensive litigation and to improve our business climate. It is interesting to note the two dissenting justices — reviewing the exact same facts and legal theories as the majority — reached the opposite conclusion. This is significant. Judicial philosophy is…
Tough mothers
Nationally, Moms Demand Action has more than 100,000 members, with 90 chapters in 40 states. In Oklahoma, organizers say it is gaining more members every day. “We have been pleasantly surprised by the support we have received,” said Sabine Brown, a founder of the state chapter. “I think a lot of people have been afraid…
Cracking the code
“They asked me if I knew what his frame of mind was, or if even back then he had any anti-American sentiments,” said Radford, the editor and owner of the Crescent Courier newspaper. “They asked me if we had received any information electronically or in packages from him.” He had not. “As soon as they…
Kid stuff
Educare, a preschool program for at-risk youth, is credited as one of Oklahoma’s high points for early childhood education. Credit: Shannon Cornman Oklahoma was one of two states with the greatest gains in overall child well-being, moving from 40th place to 36th in the 2013 Kids Count Data Book, an annual study by the Annie…
The Tower
Set on Christmas Eve (thereby also making it akin to Die Hard), the film takes place at Tower Sky, a twin-towered luxury apartment building of some 1,700 units and 108 floors. The towers connect via a shivers-inducing “sky bridge” with see-through floor. If that makes your stomach do flip-flops, perhaps it can be settled with…
Saving Gold
The Gold Dome, which once housed a bank at N.W. 23rd Street and Classen Boulevard, will become the new headquarters for a national environmental consulting and engineering firm. TEEMCO, which is based in Edmond and has 65 employees, purchased the building from developer David Box for an undisclosed sum. “TEEMCO believes the Route 66 iconic…
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
Its joke is that Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell, Hope Springs) and Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi, TV’s Boardwalk Empire) are improbably coiffed stage magicians in Vegas à la Siegfried & Roy, but without the tigers. As glitzy and showy as they are painfully unhip, the two friends have been working together for 30 years, but a…
23:59
In the opening scene of writer/director Gilbert Chan’s film, we also learn that if someone dies at that time, one minute until midnight, his or her soul will not rest in peace. Tan (newcomer Tedd Chan) tells his fellow recruits this while regaling them with ghost stories on the floor of their barracks. They’re in…
Come Out and Play
Francis (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Lola Versus) and the very pregnant Beth (the genetically blessed Vinessa Shaw, Side Effects) rent a boat to explore the nearby island of Punta Hueca (can’t-be-accidental translation: Hollow Point). Under a sweltering sun, they find a few kids at the dock and seemingly no else along the village’s roads or in its…
The Best Film You’ve Never Seen: 35 Directors Champion the Forgotten or Critically Savaged Movies They Love — Robert K. Elder
Luckily for Elder and his readers, there’s plenty more. A companion of sorts to Elder’s 2011 book The Film That Changed My Life, the Chicago Review Press paperback operates on several levels, from learning tool to reference guide to Netflix queue-filler. As with the earlier work, the author leans on 35 directors to build its…
Jack the Giant Slayer
The film’s fatal mistake? Perhaps it was director Bryan Singer embracing the 19th-century nature of the story as tightly as he did Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie for his own Superman Returns. These days, to satisfy family audiences, it’s evidently not enough to revive an old-fashioned tale; you have to hip it up with nods…
World War Z
The Z stands for “zombies,” of course, but World War Z is an action-thriller, not a horror flick. Like TV’s ridiculously popular The Walking Dead or 2009’s more-fun-than-funny Zombieland, it’s a watered-down depiction of the days and nights of the living dead — a zombie film for who people who can’t handle a “real” zombie…
Anatomy / Anatomy 2
As Paula quickly discovers through her studies, there exists a crazy, frat-like organization on campus whose members like to perform autopsies. What’s so crazy about that? The surgeons of this secret society like to perform said autopsies on live humans. Naturally, that results in danger for her and creepy imagery for us. Slick, sick and…
6 Souls
See, he’s not your everyday schizophrenic, but a supernatural one, playing host to a half-dozen souls (hence the title) sharing one common thread: They were murdered. It’s an intriguing idea, and for a while, co-directors Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein (Underworld: Awakening) do it justice. Alas, it cannot last. Once the story moves into the…
Tower Block
The title refers to an apartment complex built post-WWII, a title card informs us. Once attractive and affordable, the place deteriorated over the decades into England’s equivalent of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green, to the point of demolition. As the thriller opens, only the top floor of Serenity House, aka Tower Block 31, awaits removal and rehousing.…
Terror on a Train
As the title has it, the film is more concerned with the work half of that equation. A terrorist has planted a package of explosives on a train — or, as one character puts it, “Some joker’s been monkeyin’ around with your load!” — and Lyncort is called into action to diffuse the situation. Meanwhile, an…
The Monk
Oh, well. Seeing the new film adaptation makes me feel as if I have. Obviously, I can’t speak to how closely it may or may not adhere to the book, but director Dominik Moll’s The Monk definitely is rich in its Gothic trappings. To me, that alone is a huge plus. In 16th-century Madrid,…
The Last Exorcism Part II
She even gets a job cleaning hotel rooms and attracts the eye of a boy who works there (Spencer Treat Clark, 2009’s The Last House on the Left remake). But she can’t escape everything — namely, the demon still inside her. Still produced in part by Eli Roth (Hostel) but directed by new blood Ed…
The ABCs of Death
Tapping the talents of 26 directors in 15 countries, the film represents a global effort in which the contributors were granted one letter of the alphabet and “complete artistic freedom,” and boy, do they ever take advantage of it. It takes a few letters to find its footing. The fourth bit, Deadgirl director Marcel Sarmiento’s…
