Arts & Events

THURSDAY, AUGUST 28 -more-

Thousands of glass art objects—strange, striking, beautiful, and combined in fantastic arrangements—currently populate the special exhibit galleries of San Francisco’s de Young. They range from palm-of-your-hand pieces to gigantic supernovas of glittering glass tentacles, singular, vivid, bowls big enough to float baby Moses down the Nile, and hallucinogenically hued “marbles” blown as big as sofa hassocks. -more-

“The initial idea I had for the play,” said Itamar Moses, a 1995 Berkeley High graduate and emerging playwright, of Yellowjacket, his play commissioned by Berkeley Rep that opens Friday, “was about what I did in school, hiding in the newspaper office. A simpler play, about the paper. I thought there probably was a play there. -more-

Before Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands—before Sam Shepard, for that matter—a prominent American playwright tied together a crime spree in the West, an offbeat sense of romance and the Existential angst of war babies and wannabe great artists. The result was The Petrified Forest, which launched both Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis when the Hollywood film version got made. -more-

“I came to be in the Bay Area for one year, in 1984,” said Thomas Simpson, founder of AfroSolo, the annual festival of African-American solo performance that includes tributes and art exhibits. “I was in theater, from Nashville, and this was to be a step between there and L.A. or New York. For my 39th birthday in 1991, I had a party and invited artists to perform who I knew from taking a workshop on developing solo pieces. It occurred to me it should be staged every year as a way for us to tell our own stories, form our own works.” -more-

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what crisis we should focus on: Global warming? Growing food shortages? The energy crunch? The looming danger of a deadly flu epidemic? -more-

Ten years after the release of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), the first and greatest of all vampire films, Carl Th. Dreyer released Vampyr (1932), the next great vampire film, and one that took the genre in a new direction. Vampyr is the vampire film reduced to its essence, to an unrelenting flow of eerie imagery, off-kilter camera movements and a hushed soundscape consisting of sparse, enigmatic dialogue and a muted, foreboding score. Less plot than impressionist montage, the film is an almost surrealist blend of unexplained actions and haunted faces. Imagine Dracula as presented by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. -more-

The Oakland Magic Circle, oldest stage magic club in the West, will hold their annual Interclub Competition this Monday at Bjornson Hall, 2258 MacArthur Blvd. near Fruitvale Avenue. At 7 p.m., a buffet banquet with close-up magic at the tables; the show at 8 p.m.—a competition of magicians and mentalists (mind readers) from all over Northen California, with illusions, sleight-of-hand, clairvoyance ... a warm atmosphere, everybody welcome. www.oaklandmagiccircle.com. For more information, contact David Sament at (415) 786-8365 or david@magicdavid.com. -more-

We’re all trying to do our part to be a little greener these days. I see you down at the market with your cloth bags, you Prius drivers (not to mention drivers of 25-year-old cars, another very green tack). Many of us, nay, most of us, are trying to do something and studies have revealed in the recent past that most Americans are even willing to pay more for items such as organic produce and cleaner energy. -more-

THURSDAY, AUGUST 28 -more-