Arts & Events

FRIDAY, MARCH 2 -more-

PFA HOSTS ANTONIONI RETROSPECTIVE -more-

Le Bateau Ivre—“The Drunken Boat”—that unique coffee house, restaurant and bar will celebrate its 35th anniversary Monday with a special musical program in the recently inaugurated (and very eclectic) Monday night art performance series: Dazzling Divas, operatic arias and duets by Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, Bizet, Charpentier and others, sung by Bay Area favorites Pamela Marie Connelly, Tara Generalovich, Kathleen Moss, Eliza O’Malley and MaryAnne Stanislaw, accompanied by Jonathan Alford, piano. Admission is free. -more-

Mark Jackson’s new play, American $uicide, now playing at the Thick House on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill, locks horns with the old saw that it’s lonely at the top. Instead, the message seems to be that when you’re scaling the heights, everybody else is yelling, “Jump!” -more-

Few crime stories have captured the public imagination like the Zodiac murders that terrorized the Bay Area in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The case has become part of local folklore, transforming the mysterious killer who targeted couples in remote lovers’ lanes and threatened to bomb school buses into the de facto bogeyman for a generation of Bay Area children who came of age in the following decade. -more-

In March 1933, the Long Beach Earthquake destroyed 70 schools, and another 120 suffered major structural damage. The Great Depression was at its height, leaving 25 percent of the nation’s work force unemployed. Things couldn’t have looked grimmer, but one creative mind was busily churning out solutions. -more-

I have a terrible confession to make. I feel really bad about it, but it’s probably not going to change any time soon. I don’t care if your roof leaks. O.K., I know that I’m supposed to make a big deal about this sort of thing but I’m not going to. There, I said it and I feel a whole lot better. -more-

FRIDAY, MARCH 2 -more-

TUESDAY, FEB. 27 -more-

MYUNG MI KIM AT UC’S DOE LIBRARY -more-

It’s tough being king ... Ludwig of Bavaria is a proactive, very public monarch. Nothing, whether extensive engineering projects such as roads and canals, or grandiose museums and other monuments to the arts, is too good for his people, and the exchequer be damned. He’ll find a way to make Munich the envy of even Paris and Vienna. -more-

Berkeley has long been famous for starting revolutions—especially revolutions that come from the political left. The purpose of this editorial is to make the heretical proposal that Berkeley launch a revolution from the right—a revolution drawn from the heart of the free-enterprise system. -more-

A few columns back I touched on the chemical arms race between newts and garter snakes: the newts loaded with a fugu-like toxin to which the snakes have evolved resistance. Well, there are complexities to that story that I wasn’t aware of, some of which are described in a 2004 Journal of Chemical Ecology article entitled “A Resistant Predator and its Toxic Prey: Persistence of Newt Toxin Leads to Poisonous (Not Venomous) Snakes.” The lead author, Becky Williams, is a UC Berkeley graduate student; she collaborated with Edmund Brodie, Jr. of Utah State University and Edmund Brodie III, now at the University of Virginia. -more-

TUESDAY, FEB. 27 -more-

• The Feb. 9 story “Peralta Trustee Questions Financial Priorities of District, Debate Grows over Bond Funds” misquoted Peralta Trustee Abel Guillen following last week’s trustee meeting. Guillen said his vote against the audio visual contract for the renovation of the Peralta Administration Building boardroom was “on principle,” not “symbolic,” as was reported. -more-