Arts & Events

THURSDAY, OCT. 22 -more-

On a mostly-bare set—a couple of chairs at skewed angles across the stage, a cabinet with a broadbrimmed hat and a cap on the shelves and clothing on hangers at the sides—two men pose, seeming to lurch together as Irish music strikes up to open TheatreFIRST’s production of Marie Jones’ Stones in his Pockets—the first production in the company’s return to downtown Oakland. -more-

“With the expulsion of the Moors by decree of the Spanish crown, assisted by other European powers, 400 years ago, in 1609—at 5 percent of the population, the worst ethnic cleansing in modern Europe until the 20th century—the Moor became the template, the archetype for the alien, the universal minority figure in the modern world,” said Professor Anouar Majid, director of the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England, who will discuss his book, We Are All Moors (University of Minnesota Press), with Hamza Van Boom and the audience Saturday for the inaugural event in the Islam and Authors series at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California, near the main library in downtown Oakland. -more-

There are few more difficult tasks than writing an interesting biography, particularly if the subject is someone most people know very little about. -more-

Mick LaSalle’s SF Chronicle review of A Serious Man does the Coen brothers an injustice—although his little man was jumping out of the chair‚ because he fails to recognize the movie’s roots. And it’s set in the ’60s not to show, as LaSalle said, that “everything happened, and it all amounted to nothing,” but because the Coens are talking about, literally, the Religion of their Fathers. No other time—or place, a suburb of Minneapolis where they grew up—would do. The Coens are working with sacred material, on the level of what Tom Stoppard did with Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. A Serious Man is a retelling of Job, with its comic potential realized. -more-

Richard Schwartz’s montage of century-old newspaper stories from the Berkeley Daily Gazette, Berkeley 1900: Daily Life at the Turn of the Century, with a great wealth of pictures from a variety of sources, has been reprinted in a 10th anniversary edition of more than 300 pages, featuring hundreds of new photos (and six pages of acknowledgments), available from Schwartz’s RSB Books, as well as local bookstores. -more-

THURSDAY, OCT. 22 -more-