Arts And Entertainment

TUESDAY, SEPT. 18 -more-

While General Betray-us tells us to “stay the course” and while the glaciers are melting, the museums in the Bay Area are doing great. The celebrated artist Fernando Botero has made a munificent offer to donate his powerful drawings and paintings of Abu Ghraib to the Berkeley Museum upon their return from their international tour. The Fishers are about to build a museum at the Presidio to house their significant collection of contemporary art. -more-

FRIDAY, SEPT. 14 -more-

“Motion picture stars bowing to admiring throngs and stopping before microphones to extend greetings. Dazzling klieg lights, brighter than a torrid desert sun. Powerful searchlights piercing the darkness above with sudden flashes. Music and flowers.” -more-

It’s only appropriate, after a play about Freud’s last days in England (“Freudian slips,” shots of morphine and meeting Salvador Dali), that what’s remembered breaks down to obsessive, recurrent actions and images, signaled by the insistent tapping of an unexpected visitor on a glass door leading from a study into a garden. -more-

The names and their general significance may still be familiar, but the details of the lives and trials of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti have faded over time. The names have become shorthand for injustice, for political persecution, for America’s tendency to at times fall disastrously short of its ideals. Yet while these two men remain potent symbols, symbols do not live and breathe. -more-