Arts & Events

FRIDAY, JAN. 26 -more-

IRAQI LIFE IN A TIME OF WAR -more-

An anxious detainee faces two cops in traditional configuration, tough and charming, for questioning in a bureaucratically, old-fashioned high-ceiling office—where? Everything seems timeless, and foreboding. But of what? The police seem sure, as usual; the suspect puzzled. -more-

Pulitzer and MacArthur prizewinner Suzan-Lori Parks’ ongoing national dramatic marathon, 365 Days/365 Plays, for which Parks wrote a play a day for a year, is in its 11th week in the Bay Area theater round-robin, to be staged Sunday by 23 acting students of the Berkeley Rep’s theater school. -more-

Every few weeks a group of about 60 film lovers gather at 9:30 on a Sunday morning in the lobby of the Albany Twin on Solano Avenue, to sip hot beverages while waiting in anticipation for the day’s mystery movie. It’s a small room and it fills up quickly with people and chatter and the aromas of coffee and tea and bagels. Enthusiastic as the crowd may be, they’re in no hurry to enter the theater; it’s a Sunday morning, after all, and much too early to move at anything but a leisurely pace. So by the time 10 a.m. rolls around they almost have to be cajoled and herded into the theater. -more-

The Save the Memorial Oak Grove tree sit-in is about to complete its second month. Among the campaign’s environmental supporters, which include the Native Plant Society and the Oak Foundation, the Sierra Club is the most powerful if not the most active. -more-

I am in love with old houses. When I get a chance to spend a few hours or a day in an older home that has been left unchanged over the decades, I’m really in something of a trance much of the time. -more-

We gardeners learn (or try to) that our work is worth doing despite disheartening setbacks. It’s the sort of nasty life lesson that somehow doesn’t stop hurting just as badly the tenth or hundredth time as it did the first. Still, we go on. -more-

It Won’t Be So Bad -more-

FRIDAY, JAN. 26 -more-

TUESDAY, JAN. 23 -more-

Kent Nagano, after a meeting with the musicians of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra to discuss his plans, announced Friday that he will step down as music director of the symphony at the end of the 2008-09 season. -more-

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” A series of blackout tableaux like snapshots: Prospero and Caliban; “Melted into air, thin air;” then Prospero alone, touching the rude crown, cloak and staff that accoutered Caliban; then crowning himself, taking up the feathered magic staff: “Our revels now are ended ...” -more-

By KEN BULLOCK -more-

If Chez Panisse were to serve up a menu to match its guardian bunya-bunya, it would include roast haunch of free-range sauropod and a salad of braised organic tree ferns. Maybe some wood-roasted hearts of sago palm and a gingko fruit crème brulee for dessert. If it ever gets around to producing its infamously huge cones—I’ve never seen the big ones here—the bunya-bunya’s seeds are edible, too. How about it, Alice? -more-

TUESDAY, JAN. 23 -more-