Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of more than just chairs That’s not the title of the documentary being shown on Tuesday at the Crest Theatre, but it very well could be. “Eames: The architect and the painter” will be screened at 7:30pm (doors open at 6:30pm) in a special event to benefit the Eames exhibit at the California Museum. The director of the film, Jason Cohn, will attend the screening and the evening is sponsored by Hot Italian, Sactown Magazine, Lumens, and The Bridge District. I think it’s probably fair to say that for most people who are familiar with the work of Charles and Ray Eames, the primary examples of the prolific partnership that come to mind are their iconic chair d

I downloaded five Sacramento-specific mobile apps to review to find out if there is truth to the famous slogan "There's an app for that." I had a mixed bag of results, with some useful and some novelty. Midtown Sacramento Price: Free The app encourages its users to explore Midtown, helping them find parking, taxi service, restaurants, boutiques and other needs. It also keeps users up to date with neighborhood events, sales and friends' updates and tweets through an in-app tab for Twitter and Facebook. Upon opening the app, I was pleased by the clean outline showing 12 different icons representing the different options to choose from: events, eats and drinks, entertainment, galleries, h

Artist Daniel Douke, whose paintings of computer boxes are so realistic they cause visitors to do double-takes, will give a talk at the Crocker Art Museum at 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 14. More than 20 of the artist’s paintings are on display in “Daniel Douke: Bytes of Reality,” which is on view at the Museum through July 17. Douke’s work involves the photorealistic depiction of manufactured packaging—merging painting with sculpture and challenging our assumptions about reality and artifice. By making these discarded boxes art, he gives them permanence and value. At first glance, Douke’s boxes appear to be simply found objects. A closer look reveals that these are paintings rendered in exq

KVIE and PBS announced today the release of PBS for iPad and soon to-be-released PBS App for the iPhone and iPod touch. Both apps make PBS video and KVIE scheduling information available anywhere, anytime. These efforts continue KVIE’s transformation into a multi-platform media leader serving Northern California through television, mobile, the Web, and other platforms, including classroom interactive whiteboards. PBS is premiering the first episode of its multi-part series CIRCUS (www.pbs.org/circus) on PBS for iPad. The episode is available for streaming beginning today, in advance of the broadcast premiere on KVIE (ch. 6) on November 3 at 9pm. These new apps build on successful initiat

It's a blessing and a curse to be a wine lover living in Sacramento. After all, you're surrounded by hundreds of wineries producing some of the world's best vintages – from urban wineries like Revolution Wines and Rail Bridge Cellars here in the central city to Sacramento County, the Sierra Nevada foothills and beyond to Napa Valley. But when you want to do some wine tasting, that blessing can feel like a curse. How do you choose from all those tasting rooms? And with more and more of them charging tasting fees, how do you find the best deals: from free tastings and fees that apply toward purchases to private tastings well worth the extra bucks? A couple of local wine connoisseurs have

Andy Ihnatko is an amusing, sometimes irreverant, technology journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Andy's style is both self-effacing yet knowledgeable with a little theatre like presence in his style of delivering what can be sometimes abstract concepts about new media. He is a contributor to Macworld Magazine as well as a technology commentator on CBS’ Early Show. He also has written some books with his latest offering, Iphone: Full Loaded, available through Amazon. He was a featured speaker at this year's Macworld held in San Francisco. This is the year that Apple previously had decided not to attend leading many to muse as to what impact this would have to this long time event. It is a