Arts & Events

FRIDAY, JULY 28 -more-

Are your kids gone at summer camp? Are you in need of some fulfillment from young people? -more-

What better way to appreciate and pay tribute to the songs of Leonard Cohen than to watch and listen as a cast of his less talented idolaters walk on stage and butcher them? -more-

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the world’s largest and oldest, returns to the Roda Theatre Saturday for a week-long engagement. It ran last week at San Francisco’s Castro Theater and will move on to San Rafael after the Berkeley engagement. -more-

The exhibit “Paul Robeson: The Tallest Tree in Our Forest,” has been extended through Aug. 26. at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, 659 14th St., Oakland. -more-

Mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, San Francisco native and a favorite among supporters of the Philharmonia Baroque, with which she sang during the 1980s and ’90s in Berkeley, died July 3 at her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. -more-

Julian White, pianist, composer, speaker on music and the humanities, and piano teacher extraordinaire, who died at his Kensington home on June 23, will be celebrated in a memorial gathering this Sunday, July 30, 4-6 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Road in Kensington. -more-

I was in Paris for just a few days. According to carefully devised calculations I had two hours to tour the Louvre. After two hours I was still there. I tried following “sortie” signs toward the exit but they kept directing me through galleries showcasing illuminating artifacts. Once inside I’d get sucked back into the viewing circuit. -more-

In 1974, the Berkeley Daily Gazette published the photo of a “mystery house” on the northwest corner of La Loma Avenue and Ridge Road. -more-

When I show up with my flashlight, there’s one item that most homeowners are holding their breath about and that’s their foundation. People generally believe that this is: a) the most important system of the house, and b) the most expensive. Well, this is close to the truth in both cases, although I can think of plenty of cases where neither is actually the case. -more-

It’s high hot summer and the mosquitoes are peaking, along with the rest of the annoying arthropods. -more-

FRIDAY, JULY 28 -more-

A photo caption on the front page of the July 14 issue misidentified the woman in the photograph. The woman is Clara Johnston. -more-

TUESDAY, JULY 25 -more-

Max Brand was the pseudonym of Frederick Faust, a pulp writer who had ambitions as a serious poet. Or as he preferred, a serious poet whose day job was spinning cowboy yarns. -more-

I just finished a book called Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions, which despite the title is not another pop-psychology tract about gender differences. The author, Richard Francis, is an evolutionary neurobiologist, and the book is a rousing polemic against the sociobiologists and their intellectual heirs, the evolutionary psychologists: scientists who believe that just about every aspect of human behavior is an adaptation to something or other. -more-

TUESDAY, JULY 25 -more-