Arts & Events

TUESDAY, JAN. 16 -more-

BLACK SUIT BLUES -more-

“What led me to a life of piracy on the high seas? ... It wasn’t a woman; it was a book!” -more-

Among other signs of impending geezerhood, I keep noticing that some birds that used to be common are harder and harder to find. I can remember winters when the bay seemed to be paved with surf scoters. -more-

TUESDAY, JAN. 16 -more-

FRIDAY, JAN. 12 -more-

ARIAS ABOUT MALCOLM IN HONOR OF RON -more-

Though Eve A. Ma traveled the world, she spends much of her time trying to bring that world back home to the rest of us. Ma is the entrepreneurial force behind Palomino Productions, a Berkeley-based company producing DVDs and television programs on the art of dance. -more-

Berkeley composer and retired UC Berkeley professor Olly Wilson’s Symphony No. 3, Hold On, which sets and responds to the old African-American spiritual of that name, celebrating its sense of spiritual tenacity and persistence, will be featured as George Thomson returns to the podium of the Berkeley Symphony, 8 p.m. this Sat. at Zellerbach Auditorium, with an eclectic program including Stravinsky’s Concertino for Twelve Instruments, Sibelius’ Violin Concerto and Matthew Locke’s Restoration era theater music for The Tempest. -more-

Silent film star Mary Pickford famously described director Ernst Lubitsch as a “director of doors,” a man more at home working with the choreography of entrances and exits than with actors and emotions. This acerbic remark, uttered in the awake of an ill-fated collaboration with the director on Rosita, his first American production, has a grain of truth but should be taken with a grain of salt as well. -more-

Fundraising for the modern university is increasingly dependent on skyboxes and suchlike mammoth public structures where the golden deal can be clinched amid resplendent surroundings. But it wasn’t always so. There used to be a time when personal magnetism was enough to accomplish the goal. -more-

It has come to my attention that the hard freeze predicted (as I write this) for late this week is the first some of my fellow Berkeley denizens have experienced here. If it happened on time, you’re reading this in the Retrospectroscope, that scientific instrument that gives us 20-20 hindsight. Still, this might be useful. -more-

I am something of a purist when it comes to our older housing stock. Well actually, let me revise that. What I really am is a lover of old houses and all the bits of antiquity that inhabit our cities. Buildings, signage, concrete sidewalk stamps and vintage cars. -more-

FRIDAY, JAN. 12 -more-