Better Than Ezra

'Artifakt', the new album from 'Better Than Ezra', gets a full explication at the band's two-night stand at House of Blues. Coming after the indie successes of 'Deluxe', 'Friction, Baby' and the mainstream third album, 'How Does Your Garden Grow?', the new work is eagerly awaited by the band's cult-like following, the Ezralites. Although they call New Orleans home, the band tours continually, making this show a kind of early Christmas present for the local fans.

TRUMP

Snow scene

Whistleaires Big Christmas Special

Judy Garland and Bing Crosby eat your heart out, because the Whistleaires are here with their cure for the Christmastime blues. Alumni of the San Francisco Fringe Festival, the Whistleaires tailor their inimitable song and dance style to the holidays for the 'Big Christmas Special'. The variety show-style evening features dazzling Christmas costumes and ornaments, music, dance and comedy, as well as guest appearances by Santa, tiny elves and puppets. Of course no holiday special would be complete without an appearance by General Erno, the Talking Ape.

Open air cinema

For years, one of the main features of summer in the city has been the open-air cinemas. Starting around mid-June and running through until mid-September, two films can be seen each evening at each of seven screens; the first showing is usually a new release and the second often something a little more 'arty'. These places are also good hangouts generally with bars and even restaurants in some cases. Lots of fresh air is guaranteed.

Duran Duran + The Vegastones

The 80s revival continues as Simon Le Bon and the lads tour with their new album Pop Trash.

Ristorante Ricchi

A new fish restaurant has just opened in Piazza Santo Spirito under the same ownership as next door mythical Caffe Ricchi. Small and elegant with tables in the piazza, the restaurant offers a short menu of unfussy dishes using the freshest of the day's catch. Antipasti include mussels in a tasty tomato sauce and Beccafico, a delicious warm seafood salad and sardines with pine nuts, raisins and orange. Risotto is cooked with squid ink and papardelle with fat shrimps, baby lobster and courgette flowers. Locally-caught, succulent scampi is simply grilled while skate is cooked in the oven on a bed of potatoes, tomatoes and black olives.

Contemporary Hong Kong Art 2000

To mark the new millennium, this comprehensive overview of the past 50 years explores the identity of local art. The exhibition has five themes - Hong Kong School, Solitary Peaks, Roots From Design, Vision Beyond Forms and Transformation Of Heritage - and is curated by invited guests along with the curator Mr Tang Hoi-Chiu. It features selected collections of the Museum of Art and loaned works in different media and styles by various noted local artists. Various seminars and discussions will be held in conjunction with the show.

A japanese couple with baby

expo

expo is a shop cum gallery that offers modern Japanese curiosities. While there are a few traditional products on sale, such as divine tatami flip-flops with velvet strips, most of the space is taken up with cuddly akira-like knitted dollies whose names are scrawled on the walls in pencil alongside little flurries of verse in German and English. Owner Mana Furuyama also imports a wide range of impeccable writing instruments in amazing colours, stationary and postcards with yet more strange little creatures by Japanese artist Yoko Yamamoto.

Sam Francis

This show is a retrospective of a great American master of abstract expressionism. Starkly-entitled 'Painting 1947-1990', the exhibition contains Sam Francis's earliest abstract works, painted after his involvement in - and long convalescence following - the Second World War. In the 1950s he worked alongside the likes of Jean Paul Riopelle in Paris, accepting important commissions in Europe and Japan and perfecting a style that owes as much to Kandinsky as Pollock. Not to be missed.