Arts & Events

TUESDAY, SEPT. 25 -more-

The title character of Berkeley native Eisa Davis’ Pulitzer Prize-nominated play Bulrusher, as produced by the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage, says, “I guess I can tell everybody else’s future because I don’t know my own past ... didn’t die like I was supposed to, so I’ve got a one-way ticket to the Land of Could Be.” -more-

“If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filling dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.” -more-

Moe’s Books will host an event tonight (Tuesday) at 7:30 p.m. to celebrate the publication of Viz Interarts: Event, A Trans-Genre Anthology with readings by Laura Moriarty, who teaches at Mills College and helps direct Small Press Distribution; haiku poet and teacher Gary Gach; writer, editor and publisher Mary Burger and spoken word artist and Sister Spit promoter Michelle Tea. The anthology’s 250 large-format illustrated pages contain writers and artists such as Dadaist Tristan Tzara, the late Objectivist poet Carl Rakosi (whose poem is collaged by Anne Waldman), George Hitchcock of Kayak, well-known Beat and New York School poets, Situationists and Fluxus artists, Language poets and well-known Bay Area poets and writers of the present, like Michael Palmer, Norma Cole and Joanne Kyger. -more-

You old hippies, you probably remember sticking an avocado pit on some arrangement of toothpicks over a jar of water to make it sprout. The tree, if it survived to that stage, made a decent houseplant when it wasn’t turning sickly yellow and dropping leaves and getting all etiolated like a wispy fishing rod because it was stuck in a dark corner and watered too seldom and/or too often by turns and potted in a bucket of backyard clay in the first place and the only fertilizer it ever got was when the cat peed in the pot. -more-

TUESDAY, SEPT. 25 -more-

FRIDAY, SEPT. 21 -more-

I was on a break at the Public Theatre in New York,” said Eisa Davis, playwright, actor and South Berkeley native, “during the second week of rehearsing Passing Strange, when I got a voice message from the actress who played the lead in Bulrusher, and she was crying. ‘Have you heard the news?’ I jumped up and screamed!” -more-

At the turn of the last century, wharves, lumber mills, farms, breweries, tanneries, and Victorian residences dotted West Berkeley. The largest employer south of University Avenue was the Standard Soap Company, which had occupied half a block between the bay shore and Third Street north of Allston Way since 1876. -more-

This past Sunday I got a bargain, a cymbidium orchid in a gallon pot for five dollars. Nice healthy-looking thing, too. If I’d been willing to stagger around the crowded Sycamore Congregational Church bazaar conking innocent children on the head with a bigger pot, I could’ve had even more bargains. -more-

If you stop and think about it, the notion that old houses are better is just as silly as the notion that new houses are better. The truth is that both things are true. Older houses are better in some way and newer houses are better in others. Construction is fraught with misconceptions. Another one is that the framing or “bones” of old houses is better than that of newer ones. -more-

Is Your Child’s School Prepared? -more-

Jane Powell is a bungalow and old house zealot. Every community should be lucky to have even one person like her. -more-

FRIDAY, SEPT. 21 -more-

As part of an ongoing effort to print stories by East Bay residents, The Daily Planet invites readers to write about their experiences and perspectives on living in, working in or enjoying various neighborhoods in our area. We are looking for essays about the Oakland neighborhoods around Lake Merritt and Piedmont Avenue, Fourth Street in Berkeley, and the city of Alameda. Please e-mail your essays, no more than 800 words, to firstperson@berkeleydailyplanet.com. We will publish the best essays in upcoming issues in October. The sooner we receive your submission the better chance we have of publishing it. -more-