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Show PACKED POWDER Boisssonnault of Jeremy Ranch Elementary, Matt Davis of Heber Valley Elementary, Joanne Finley of Treasure Mountain Middle School and Tiffany Gregory of Wasatch Middle School. Come on out and root root root for the home team. | SLOC plans to use the art to decorate the Olympic village at the University of Utah and other Olympic venues, and will display the winning entries prior to the 2002 Games. No word yet whether there will be a medal ceremony for the wee artists, or if finalists will have a better chance of winning if they offer jobs to family members of the voting committee. | Call 649-8882 for more info. Powder at Cisero’s, Thursday, Oct. 14 A decade ago, they were just “the Wednesday night Cisero’s jam band”—not exactly a catch moniker, but appropriate for a rotating crew of musicians thrown together once a week for loose, good-time party music. According to Robbie Evans, : singer/guitarist/principal songwriter for the Wednesday night jam band’s more formalized offspring Powder, “When | first started playing with them seven years ago, it used to be that it changed every week.” Today, Powder looks and acts like a gen- uine band. The lineup has settled into a sextet featuring Evans, guitarist/vocalist Steve AUSTRALIAN | RULES GOOFBALLS McComb, vocalist Deedee Darby, bassist Andreas Przybyla, keyboardist Brian Hess and drummer Mark Williams, most of whom are featured on the band’s first CD, Face Down. It’s a project that has been a very, very, very—did we mention very?—long time in the making. we “We started [Face Down] five years ago,” says Evans, “and it has taken us this long to finish. We recorded it all once, then erased it and started all over again. This was probably the third go-round.” The third time became the charm thanks to the confluence of several factors, includ- ing the availability of River Ranch Studio in Woodland and the production skills of drummer Williams. Williams brought not only the band’s most noteworthy musical lineage—he’s the son of noted film compos- er John Williams, and the touring drummer with ’80s hit machine Air Supply—but a CO Ce Le en ae _ sense for production that had been missing. “We got it this time in about two weeks,” to recording the band’s original songs so — Now we're trying to interpret them live the way we recorded them.” ‘When your roots are in free-form jams, you learn those lessons in flexibility. You can decide if they’re succeeding by catching | magnificently—realizing they may have performed them live not-so-magnificently. Says Call 649-5044 for info. notes Evans. There was, unfortunately, one drawback Powder at Cisero’s, then picking up the CD. Evans, “You don’t reflect on a song until you're listening to it. We were listening to songs we'd played live for five years, and suddenly realized they sucked the old way. ART SCHOOL CHILDREN Kimball Art Center “Utah’s Cool Winter Games Art Project,” through Oct. 21 To paraphrase the popular expression, | may not know art, but | know what | like. | like the idea of youth being encouraged to explore the arts when most educational entities consider football more important. | like providing a public setting where the next generation of artists can taste the high that comes from sharing your vision with the world. | like a program that lets stu- FA| 6661 ‘yl YIdO190/8Z dents experiment with pencil, watercolors, inks, colored paper and collages (though you could give the tykes a little credit and _let them try to turn out a bronze or two). And that’s why I like the Utah Cool Winter Games Art Project, even though it’s sponsored by SLOC, because it shows that given an infinite number of typewriters, an infinite number of monkeys can still turn-out something worthwhile—and |’m referring to SLOC, not the children. The exhibit, which runs through Oct. 21 at Kimball Art Center’s Badami Gallery, fea- aTRaE ROR CCT tures artwork by 250.student finalists selected from schools throughout Utah. That includes Summit and Wasatch counties, which will be represented by five local students: Ryan Reilly and Anne Park City Film Series presents The Castle, Friday-Saturday, Oct. 15-76 au In Hollywood’s hands, you can bet The Castle would have failed. The voice-over narration would have become a crutch; the working class characters could never have been both sweet and grotesque; the courtroom finale would have been turned into a moment for a cheering gallery. — | Thank heaven it was made in Australia instead, because The Castle avoids virtually every possible pitfall on the way to raucous comedy. The premise of this 1998 Sundance entry finds proud but simple homeowner Daryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton, in a splendid comic performance) fighting the power when his family “castle” seems destined to become the location for a new airport runway—never mind that the “castle” in question is an eyesore built on a landfill. It’s no small task to laugh with characters and laugh at them simultaneously, but that’s exactly what The Castle accomplish_ es, turning the family’s smiling bad taste into perfectly pitched gags. The Kerrigans think they’re living a charmed life where meat loaf is a meal fit for a king, yet it’s exactly that skewed perspective that makes the film as endearing as it is hilarious. Caton’s beautifully sincere performance makes looking on the brighter side seem warm and wonderfully human; he makes | Daryl’s love for what he has—and complete lack of envy for what he doesn’t have—the film’s emotional anchor. Of course The Castle is also a David vs. Goliath story, but it’s never really about that battle in the ways that you expect. Sure, in some ways ‘it's‘a-one-joke film, and perhaps some viewers will grow weary of that one joke. It hap- pens to be a joke told with the kind of skill we don’t see very often, a comedy from Down Under in which comic expectations are turned upside down. Call 615-8291 for tickets and info. |