Arts & Events
Shotgun Tells Story of South Berkeley District
From an Ohlone woman’s menage with a zoot-suited Coyote, through a Japanese ex-houseboy and his picture bride eating pickled plums while awaiting relocation, a pair of Cain-and-Abel brothers who end up as Black Panther and strung-out Vietnam vet to the hip-hop kid of an interracial couple who bought a fixer-upper amid the drive-bys, the Shotgun Players’ premiere of Marcus Gardley’s Love is a Dream House in Lorin employs a cast of 30 to play 40-some characters that personify the story of the South Berkeley district in something like the narrative style of a WPA mural, all chromatic persona and event, motifs overlapping in time and space, recurring in gesture and song. -more-
Oakland Opera’s ‘Les Enfants Terribles’
The Oakland Opera Theater opens this Friday its third Philip Glass opera—the compelling dance opera Les Enfants Terribles. This final opera of his trilogy based on the work by French artist Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles has been described by Glass as Cocteau’s “tragedy”: -more-
Fritillaries, Passionvines and Chemical Warfare
One person’s ornamental is another’s weed. Like many other exotic plants, passionvine grows weedlike all over the Hawai’ian islands. It’s so much a part of the landscape that it has acquired a local name: lilikoi. Its fruit flavors the local specialty shave ice, and Queen Liliuokalani was so fond of it that she had a special set of dinnerware with a passionfruit motif. -more-
Moving Pictures: Tracing Childhood’s Alternate Realities
Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) is one of the most influential and iconic of Spanish films. Set “somewhere on the Castillian plain” in 1940, just after the Spanish Civil War, Erice’s film conjures a remote village where the echoes of war and repression resound in the lives of an increasingly fragmented family. -more-
Moving Pictures: The Evolution Of an Artist
Even today, 30 years after his death and nearly 100 years since he first stepped before a motion picture camera, Charlie Chaplin is still one of the most recognizable people in the world. The dandified Tramp, with his brush mustache, ill-fitting clothes, wicker cane and derby hat, is an iconic figure, but one whose familiarity has to some extent undermined his art. Chaplin today has become something of a two-dimensional figure, a static icon that means little to those born in the decades since his heyday; he exists as a fully formed entity, a known quantity, and is therefore just as easily ignored, an image from the past that no longer requires our attention. -more-
The Theater: ‘Mother Courage’ at Berkeley Rep
On the wall was chalked:/They Want War./The man who wrote it/Has already fallen. -more-
Playing The Updating Game: Part Two
If there is a phrase found in a real estate listing that fills me with even more horror than “updated kitchen,” it has to be “new dual-pane windows.” Dual-pane windows are probably one of the biggest scams ever foisted off on an unsuspecting American public. The lies and half-truths promulgated by window replacement companies should be right up there with other famous lies like “The dog ate my homework” and “Only one glass of wine with dinner, officer…” -more-
About the House: A Partial Upgrade for Reluctant Showers
This is one of those subjects that is both important and a real snoozer. If you’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, stop now, rip this page out and take it to bed with you. Guaranteed snoring in 10 minutes or less. -more-
Garden Variety: A Transitional Season: Late September in the Garden
This is a season that confounds naming, a season that also confounds immigrants, especially gardeners from eastern North America, who can be heard to complain, “There are no real seasons here.” Some of us figured out right quick that there are indeed seasons in coastal Northern California. After 33 years here I still haven’t come up with adequate names or even a satisfactory number for them, though. -more-
Quake Tip of the Week
Do You Know Your Elderly Neighbors? -more-