Arts & Culture
Hot dog summer
In the not-too-distant past, downtown Chico was a wiener wonderland. It used to be possible for us hot dog fiends, at reasonable and even unreasonable hours, to find a fix within a few block radius […]
Arts & Culture
Arts & Culture
Hot tomato
It’s May, and the initial tomato frenzy has died down. The nurseries have sold the bulk of their tomato starts, and most are likely in the ground, already showing several blossoms. Your tomato plants no […]
Arts & Culture
Art in the machine
At first glance, the rows of square, ceramic tiles laid out across two tables inside Idea fab Labs (IFL) look fairly similar: saturated, black-and-white designs vaguely resembling asymmetrical Rorschach images. A closer look, however, revealed […]
Arts & Culture
Arts DEVO: Amish Rake Fight, et al.
If you’ve ever played music in a group with others you’ve made the band-names list. Perhaps, like Arts DEVO, you are a little obsessive about such things and you save that list and continually add […]
Arts & Culture
Tutti Frutti and a Cannes nominee
France In this Palme d’Or-nominated French production from 2021, offbeat auteur Bruno Dumont constructs a puzzling, ironically attractive portrait of a TV star, a celebrity newscaster named France de Meurs (strikingly played here by French […]
Arts & Culture
Arts & Culture
Basketball diary
And the seasons they go round and round—Joni Mitchell December, 1891, the YMCA International Training School, Springfield, Massachusetts. It’s cold, northeastern-U.S. cold, and the association’s young Christian men need a way to work out indoors […]
Arts & Culture
Art on two wheels
This feature is part of the CN&R’s 2023 Bike Issue. To coincide with the Wildflower Century bike ride in Butte County (April 30) and National Bike Month (in May), the subject is bicycles for the […]
Arts & Culture
A tasty scene
The value of a windowed storefront in downtown Chico is—pardon the pun—clear, to business owners and patrons alike. This is especially true for eateries, as it offers built-in curb appeal and a natural sense of […]
Arts & Culture
‘I’m D.B. Cooper’
What if we make a mumblecore play about D.B. Cooper? This is the kind of question that an artist can pose in Chico while having a legitimate expectation that the idea could be realized as […]
Arts & Culture
Filmspring
Women Talking—A major critic claims that Sarah Polley’s Oscar-winning screenplay “improves” the esteemed Miriam Toews novel on which it is based. Writer-director Polley and her engagingly devoted cast do generate an incisive and moving portrayal […]
News
A home for drag
When Kar Solorio Ocegueda was five years old, he donned a wig made from yarn and got on his school swing set, relishing the feeling of his new locks blowing freely in the wind behind […]
Arts & Culture
Arts DEVO: Light the beam!!!
Music and basketball. That’s it. The extent of Arts DEVO’s passions. Longtime readers of this column already know this, even if the music has gotten far more play in this space. That’s mostly because my […]
Arts & Culture
Big top terror
Though commonly advertised as “wholesome fun for the whole family,” there’s an air of spookiness surrounding the circus. For one thing, clowns. On a deeper level, mystery, a touch of the supernatural and a peculiar […]
Arts & Culture
End of the five-buck meal?
I miss Zot’s. When the Chico News & Review was still downtown (I miss that a lot, too), Zot’s Hot Dogs & Deli was the closest restaurant to our building. It was just a short […]