Arts & Events

Arts Calendar

Friday October 06, 2006

FRIDAY, OCT. 6 -more-


At the Theater: Carlin Guides SF Playhouse’s ‘Ride Down Mt. Morgan’

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Friday October 06, 2006

The late Arthur Miller’s last play, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, a kind of stereoscopic screwball marital comedy, just opened at the San Francisco Playhouse, a block off Union Square, with the fine direction of Berkeleyan Joy Carlin. -more-


Moving Pictures: Video and Film Festival at Oaks Theater

Friday October 06, 2006

The Berkeley Video and Film Festival makes its annual appearance this weekend, starting today (Friday) and running through Sunday evening at the Oaks Theater on Solano Avenue in Berkeley. This year’s program features more than 50 works, from brief clips by budding filmmakers, running just a few minutes in length, to full-length features by established directors. -more-


Moving Pictures: ‘Up Series’ Presents True Human Drama

By Justin DeFreitas
Friday October 06, 2006

Often the most compelling dramas are not found in novels or Hollywood movies, but in everyday life. This is the charm and allure of The Up Series, an extraordinary documentary film project now in its fifth decade. -more-


Jazz House Hosts New Series Every Third Friday

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Friday October 06, 2006

The Jazz House, formerly on Adeline, will present a bi-weekly “Free-Jazz” series on the first and third Fridays of the month, starting at 8 p. m. tonight (Friday), at 1510 Eighth St. in Oakland, a block from the West Oakland BART station. -more-


Restaurant Review: Way Down Yonder on Shattuck Avenue

By B. J. Calurus, Special to the Planet
Friday October 06, 2006

There was a time not too long ago when “Jamabalaya” was just a Hank Williams song. The rich cuisine of southern Louisiana—Cajun, Creole, and their hybrid offspring—wasn’t well known outside the region. Then, as fiddler Michael Doucet recalls, -more-


About the House: Having Good Boundaries

By Matt Cantor
Friday October 06, 2006

It’s funny that humanity ever had trouble identifying itself as part of the continuum of animal life on this planet. Anyone who has ever looked into the eyes of a dog or cat must realize that there is as much of a person inside that creature as can be found in you or me. -more-


Garden Variety: This Sonoma Nursery Is Well Worth the Detour

By Ron Sullivan
Friday October 06, 2006

I must have passed this place a thousand times without going in. I think it used to be called “The Windmill Nursery” and it still has the eponymous windmill, an old but still unrusted Aeromotor, evidently not in current use. -more-


Quake Tip of the Week

By Larry Guillot
Friday October 06, 2006

How’s Your Earthquake Knowledge? -more-


Berkeley This Week

Friday October 06, 2006

FRIDAY, OCT. 6 -more-


Arts Calendar

Tuesday October 03, 2006

TUESDAY, OCT. 3 -more-


Shotgun Tells Story of South Berkeley District

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday October 03, 2006

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’

By Jaime Robles, Special to the Planet
Tuesday October 03, 2006

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

By Joe Eaton, Special to the Planet
Tuesday October 03, 2006

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-


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday October 03, 2006

TUESDAY, OCT. 3 -more-