Arts And Entertainment
‘Birth of the Cool’ at Oakland Museum
By Peter Selz
Special to the Planet
Thursday June 05, 2008
Marshal McLuhan in his seminal book, Understanding Media (1967), differentiated between “hot” and “cool” media, the former requiring the viewer’s emotional involvement, while the latter is more abstract and detached.
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Fifth Annual World Music Festival On Telegraph Ave.
By Ken Bullock
Special to the Planet
Thursday June 05, 2008
I think the Berkeley World Music Festival has come of age,” said Gianna Ranuzzi, founder of the fifth annual free festivities along Telegraph Avenue, indoors and out, as well as at People’s Park. This Saturday’s day-long, overlapping series of performances of music, song and dance will both build on the previous festivals and reveal new ideas, new collaborations which promise to enrich future events.
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MOVING PICTURES:‘Death of a Cyclist’ Appropriates Hollywood Sheen
By Justin DeFreitas
Thursday June 05, 2008
It starts with a cold and cold-hearted opening scene. On a fog-shrouded road amid a desolate, Godot-like landscape, a cyclist appears in the foreground and heads toward the horizon where the road bends and vanishes. We hear a car swerve and a quick cut presents us with a close-up of the bicycle, twisted and broken with one wheel spinning. A couple steps from the car and the man kneels over the unseen cyclist as his lover stands at a remove, urging him to get back in the car. He does and the car pulls away.
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Altarena Stages Ernest Thompson’s ‘On Golden Pond’
By Ken Bullock
Special to the Planet
Thursday June 05, 2008
At a reunion, after years, between father and grown daughter on his 80th birthday in the family cabin on a Maine lake: “Look at our little fat girl!” exclaims Dad, and his daughter bristles. He later tells her divorced dentist beau, “Ethel is her Mommy. I’m not her Daddy. I’m ... Norman.”
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‘Full Monty’ at Masquers Playhouse
By Ken Bullock
Special to the Planet
Thursday June 05, 2008
Back in the late ’60s, a rather buff hardhat was introduced on a variety show on TV to sing a song. Expecting an amateur rendition, the audience ended up gaping at a cocky, tossed off “I Gotta Be Me,” rapidly escalating into a full-scale production number of a striptease, hardhat coming off to reveal a cascade of hair, jumpsuit coyly shed to expose the thorax of a workout instructor ...
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