Arts & Events

FRIDAY, SEPT. 28 -more-

I think I can’t be Mabel, because I know so many things, and she so little. Besides, I’m I, and she’s she.” Whatever you know—or think you know—about Alice in Wonderland, the Rev. Dodgson’s voyage into the mind of a young girl dropped down a rabbit hole into a dream world of playing cards, mad tea parties and hookah-smoking caterpillars—you’ll be delightfully surprised and newly enlightened by Ragged Wing Ensemble’s completely kinetic staging of Andre Gregory’s (My Dinner with Andre) adaptation (with “the Manhattan Project”—a bid to add Einstein and Oppenheimer to Freud and the Surrealists as Lewis Carroll knock-offs?) at Envision Academy in the Julia Morgan-designed old YWCA building at 1515 Webster in downtown Oakland. It’s going into its last two weekends with a full head of steam, as if the revved-up cast had eaten of the caterpillar’s mushroom and obeyed the tag on the little bottle that reads “Drink Me.” -more-

Subterranean Shakespeare’s CD, Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits (“Two years in the making!”) is something of an instant Berkeley minor classic, what with Michael Rossman (he of the Free Speech Movement) belting out “The Ballad of Tom O’Bedlam” (which Robert Graves and Edith Sitwell both credited to the Bard) or tootling flute on other numbers with The Rude Mechanicals, or funnyman Ed Holmes and poet G. P. Skratz doing up the Scottish Weird Sisters’ “Double, double, toil and trouble” with Andy Dinsmore as World Music. This 17-track wonder features a plethora of local names that have—and haven’t—trod the boards Bardic, in every musical style and sundry. And this coming Monday, Oct. 1, there’ll be a CD release party, 8 p.m. at the Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship Hall, Cedar and Bonita streets. Rossman will croon, Bob Ernst will wail on mouth harp, Tom Waits’ sidekick Mark Growden and his band rave up Will, Michael Peppe do the 129th Sonnet as Wm. Shatner, Ed Holmes get witchy. -more-

Ten years ago Robert Colescott represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Rarely was there a solo exhibition at the American pavilion and it was even more amazing that this honor was awarded to an African American painter. The show was very well received and after it closed at the Giardini Publici it travelled to museums in this country and was seen at the Berkeley Museum in 1999. -more-

Would a neighborhood by any other name still sell as sweet? An entertaining aspect of reading real estate listings in Berkeley has to do with the identification of neighborhoods. -more-

One of the limitations, frustrations, confusions, and overall learning experiences any gardener encounters here is water. Understand that I use “learning experience” as an expletive. -more-

How Do I Love Thee? -more-

I know you’re out there: you who fear tools. Confirmed abdicators of all things mechanical. Live prey to all members of the Phylum Contractazoa. You who hide in corners until the power is brought back on again by mysterious means. I am here to help but there IS a price. Immersion therapy is not easy but it is simple and you can only change if you really want to change. -more-

FRIDAY, SEPT. 28 -more-

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-