Arts & Events

FRIDAY, OCT. 27 -more-

“All you need to make a movie,” Godard once pronounced, “Is a girl and a gun.” -more-

San Francisco’s Shelton Theater, near Union Square, is a busy place. With at least six theater companies sharing four stages, the house’s logistics alone are almost a bedroom farce. So with farce in mind, I caught two of the resident comedy troupes last week. -more-

Terry Gilliam’s Tideland is a stream of surreal images and literary references. Based on Mitch Cullin’s 2000 novel, the film is, in the director’s own words, something akin to Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho. The parallels to both are clear: A young protagonist uses her (hyper)active imagination to escape the brutalities of the reality she inhabits, at one point even falling into a rabbit hole; and the American Gothic quality of the film, along with a few gender-bending details and the disturbing drama surrounding a depraved family, readily call to mind Hitchcock’s 1960 psychodrama. -more-

If you’re looking for architecture inspired by precedent, there’s no better place to look than the University of California campus. Nowhere else in town is so much architectural variety concentrated within such a confined area. And the precedents are apparent in all manner of buildings, from the most prominent to the humblest. -more-

One of the toughest parts of my job has always been finding the justification to support large expenditures on my client’s part. While it may be fun to spend someone else’s money, you won’t make much of a reputation telling everyone that they need a new foundation. You have to parse the good-enough from the doesn’t-cut-it and that’s often disconcerting (for me and for my client). -more-

The older and bumblinger I get—and believe me, I’m starting from an advanced baseline of bumblitude—the more I appreciate how forgiving a process gardening is. Composting is one of the more forgiving parts of it, and cheapest. It can stink if you do it wrong—but, if you do it wrong, it generally still works. -more-

How’s Your Earthquake Knowledge? (Part 3) -more-

FRIDAY, OCT. 27 -more-

TUESDAY, OCT. 24 -more-

It’s not exactly High School Confidential, the interactive show Sausalito’s Antenna Theater is staging at Berkeley High through this weekend, but as an example of Antenna’s ‘Walkmanology,’ more of a tour through four years on campus compressed into 45 minutes, literally a walk-through of secondary education. -more-

I am waiting for a rehearsal, held in the living room of a beautiful home, to begin. It’s the first time I will hear the pianist and soprano who are performing an aria that I wrote the libretto for. Earlier I saw the composer, Peter Josheff, going over the music with the pianist. He was totally focused. What he was telling her matters. -more-

At the Friday night opening concert of the 24th annual SF Jazz Festival, Sonny Rollins performed a half dozen tunes for almost two hours with an astounding amount of passion, strength and nobility. -more-

Berkeley was a much different place 80 years ago. But then as now, it was prime barn owl territory. During the summer of 1926, E. Raymond Hall of UC’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology kept track of a family of owls nesting in the tower of the First Presbyterian Church that then stood at Dana and Channing. Hall, who habitually worked late, heard them calling while walking home from the museum between 10 p.m. and midnight. -more-

TUESDAY, OCT. 24 -more-