Weekend Preview: Hot Vinyl, Moonlight Musicals, And An Art Walk South Of The Border

CAVANAUGH: This is KPBS Midday Edition. I'm Maureen Cavanaugh. Summertime art shows in San Diego seem to let their hair down. Arts, music, discussion, theatre, dance, crafts all get to mix it up. We'll be talking about a few summertime arts mixers and excursions, plus a summertime musical, and a retro record show. It's the weekend preview. My guest, Kelly Bennett, voice of San Diego reporter. BENNETT: Hi, Maureen. CAVANAUGH: Derrick Chin is an arts writer and founder of turista libre. Welcome. CHIN: It's good to be back. CAVANAUGH: The voice of San Diego is hosting another meeting of the minds Wednesday night at the Westfield Horton plaza downtown. What is meeting of the minds? BENNETT: It's our event to try to connect some of the disparate nearbies and neighborhoods in local arts. So there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. And a lot of times people get stuck in routines. Theatre people go to theatre stuff, dance people go to dance stuff. So that's a lot of interesting people, but they don't always know each other. We try to get them all in one place to have their minds meet. CAVANAUGH: Now, an example of what you're talking about is one of your six guest speaker, Alexandra Hubenco, and her topic is unpeeling a master piece mystery. Now, what is this? BENNETT: We have six speakers, and they each get 20 slides for 20 seconds each to talk about something interesting. She's going to be talking about a UCSD effort to search for a missing Da Vinci mural. And they have been using all kinds of technology that I don't totally understand, but I trust she's going to explain it better for us. And this is something that's happening right in our backyard. These people who are working on this research work at UCSD. So I'm excited to highlight work that folks locally are doing. CAVANAUGH: So that's speaking about the arts, and you're going to have people speaking about theatre and music? BENNETT: All sorts of stuff. And they'll all have these images to show in a really quick rapid-fire way. Each one of them is only up for 6.5 minutes. They'll have a chance to give you a taste of what they're up to. CAVANAUGH: To call the venue unique is really not expressing completely what we mean. BENNETT: This is going to be on the seven lemon level of the parking structure. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: At Horton plaza? BENNETT: Yes. If you go in on G street, you can go all the way up, park on 6 cherry and come up to seven lemon. This is a chance for us to reclaim a spot in the middle of the city that is typically used for cars, and all of a sudden, we're going to have people there having a real fun interaction, and also learning about arts and culture. CAVANAUGH: And foods and drink and all of that? BENNETT: We have partners from Carl Strauss and saint Petersberg vodka. CAVANAUGH: The meeting of the minds, is next Wednesday, August 1st at 7:30 PM. Derrick, a Tijuana artwalk is this Saturday. Remind us about this event. CHIN: It's a new event that started I believe a couple months ago. It's a typical artwalk. But what's more interesting is where it's happening. It's in a downtown alleyway, which sounds sketchy. But basically downtown Tijuana is made up of a lot of passages that used to be, like, covered arcades. And you'd find a lot of souvenir shops. But with the nosedive of the tourism industry over the past decade.5, a lot of those have been shutters and abandoned. So recently, it's happened that someone started a couple years ago with another space, but this is called passage Gomez, and it's in downtown Tijuana, it's between 3rd and 4th streets. You go down some steps, and it's a block CHIN of little shops and what not. What happened was a few months ago, they started renting these out to artists and designers at really low rents. They go for really, really cheap. But the idea was to start bringing in local tal not, that it needed a place to work, and they have that empty space downtown that's not being used. Instead. Waiting around for some big tourism book to come back, let's make use of this space. CAVANAUGH: And there's music. We have a sample from one of the people who are going to be presenting music. Tell us who that's from. CHIN: There's a few bands playing, but it goes from 12:00 to midnight. So it's an all-day thing. But we have a clip. (Audio Recording Played) CAVANAUGH: For those who are going to be crossing the border from San Diego, what's the best way to get there? CHIN: Would recommend parking your car in San Ysidro and just walking across. Once you get across, I'd hop in a yellow cab. Upon but the mistake that we usually make, we kind of grab the first one, the guys are,s like, tax,y, taxi! That's a line across the street by the McDonald's, and anyone will know there's a line, and next to the lineup is a sign that has all the prices to the different locations around the city. So if you do that, wait in line like everyone else, you'll see a bunch of other people doing it, you won't get the gringo tax. The food this is one of Javier's plasensia, the darling chef of the city. It was recently featured on no reservations. So go there, have one of the famous travel channel toftadas. There's a great photographer who has a studio there, Josue Castro. He's recently opened a new studio in passage Gomez, and it's called the Temptation. It's a classy take on fetish and bondage. I don't mean to scare you. Lots of tattoos and latex. CAVANAUGH: The Tijuana artwalk is this Saturday from 12:00 PM to 12:00 AM, wow, CHIN. Okay! Fiddler on the roof started in Vista at the moonlight amphitheater. Can you tell us what makes it so fun? BENNETT: Well, it's outdoor, which a lot of the stuff they want to do in the summer, when you think about going inside, that's it. It's so fun to do stuff outside especially when the sun sets later in the day. And this is an outdoor theatre that has been part of Vista for a CHIN time. Several decades. So it's a big draw in North County. But it's fun for those of us who live down south too. CAVANAUGH: We just had the founder of moonlight stage productions, Kathy Brombacher on this show, to talk about her retirement happening after this season. Is there something that sets this production apart from the other shows? BENNETT: Well, they're featuring another local theatre powerhouse, David EllenStein, he's playing Tevia in the classic play. He's one of the most loved characters. And it's kind of a fun bit of North County crossover for him to go up to moonlight and perform on stage. You can take a picnic, which is fun. They open the gates an hour and a half before the show. So if you've got lawn seats, you don't even have to bring your own chairs. And there's a restaurant there too. Of so you can get a glass of wine or something and hang out while the sun sets, then the show begins. CAVANAUGH: Sounds pretty. Fiddler on the roof at the moonlight amphitheater in Vista runs through August 11th. The San Diego record show Derrick is this Saturday from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM. CHIN: The name says it all, but it's an event that upons every three months. It's at the center in Hillcrest. It's basically just a traveling circuit of record shows that go up and downthe west coast, and it's a must for vinylphiles. I think they have more than 50,000 LPs under one roof. It's from 9:00 to 2:00. You pay $5 to get in. I sadly have never been. I really would like to go. I can't make it this time. You can bring $100, and these are people who see this as an investment. It's a hobby. And you leave with a lot more than 100 songs, which is putting into perspective with the digital revolution of music, you pay a dollar for a song on iTunes. CAVANAUGH: I was watching a documentary about vinylphiles? People who still love the records? CHIN: That's what I'd call them, yeah. CAVANAUGH: And the thing is, a lot of people swear by these vinyl records. You don't get any kind of sound quality to compare in digital music. CHIN: Right. If you think about it, vinyls are the main stay of music media, like from vinyl we went to 8 tracks, and from 8 tracks to cassettes, and from cassettes to CDs, and from there it was digitalized. The one medium that's still around and vinyl. CAVANAUGH: Exactly. San Diego record show, Saturday on center street in San Diego. Now, there's a huge event at the San Diego museum of art, part of the summer salon series beyond the banner. It's a 36-hour event? BENNETT: Yep. They're starting tomorrow morning and going through Saturday night. CAVANAUGH: Amazing! I guess you have to really plan on how you're going to tackle that kind of event if you plan to go. What would you suggest? BENNETT: Well, I'm excited about Alexander Jarmin's 3:00 AM tour of the museum. It's starting with a piece of art that they have that features a sleepwalker. But there are many ways that you can tackle it. The yes man is one of their featured guests this time. It's a really well-known provocative performance art conversation dialogue striker-type people. And they're going to be doing both a screening of their film at 5:00, but also a presentation of the yes man at 7:00 PM on Friday. So if you start in the evening on Friday, see how CHIN you last, and then you can come back in the morning or take a nap, they're going to have a nap station set up in the sculpture garden. And there's going to be a free concert by the nervous wreckords. If you're out on Friday night, and you just want to stop by Balboa Park, and see what's buzzing there, that'll be outside and you can hear it. CAVANAUGH: Is there a theme for this event? BENNETT: Well, it happens every Friday night throughout the summer, and it's fascinating. Alexander Jarmin works with David white to come up with some provocative and interesting sessions and this year, they're entering a lot of their discussion around how do messages get to us. When you think about media and consumption, and spin, are that's -- those are themes that go back centuries. And they look at that kind of theme. There are a few of the things they want to theme for this summer that are longer than a 2-hour event on a Friday. So they said what if we put those all together in one big event and give a 4-hour cyclical play the full hours it needs to play out. That's Catherine Brooke bringing in her American realism play. CAVANAUGH: And our last event is Charles Berquist's art show called maybe it's a trap. It's in Encinitas. What is his background? CHIN: He's a San Diego based director, designer, photographer. And what I've noticed about his work is that he's really skilled about mixing all three of those and keeping them very well balanced. You don't know whether to call him a videographer or photographer. CAVANAUGH: This is a strange place for an other show. CHIN: It's at an accessories boutique in Encinitas. They have a lot of cool stuff. It's going to be hipster central. CAVANAUGH: Maybe it's a trap is at Univ, is that the name of it? CHIN: That sounds right. CAVANAUGH: In Encinitas, goes on Friday from 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM. Thank you both very much.