Arts & Events

FRIDAY, MARCH 24 -more-

Berkeley husband-and-wife filmmaking team Cliff Orloff and Olga Shalygin have taken several trips to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, and their most recent visit has resulted in a poignant film about the lives of Afghan women. Cut From Different Cloth: Burqas and Beliefs, a one-hour documentary, will air on PBS at 5 p.m. Sunday and again at 8 p.m. Thursday. -more-

Brian Jones seems all but forgotten these days, at least outside his native England. He founded the Rolling Stones, but they passed him by, leaving him to gather moss, or at least ingest a great deal of grass. -more-

In front of an enormous projection of the Bear Flag, alternately in full color and eerie x-ray blue, morphing into the view through the windshield of a fast superhighway, there’s a masked man seated onstage at “The Berkeley Rep of Alta California”—but he bears no resemblance to the masked man of the title, a kind of processed Latino Lone Ranger. This one’s not caped in black with black silk mask and mounted on a saddle. This figure’s in restraints, effaced (while a bitchy burlesque nurse tries to force m eds on him, then goes for the suppositories) mumbling “I’m the Wal-Mart price slasher! ... one man can start a revolution or recall a standing governor ...” And when a couple of Homeland Security-type spooks put him through whatever degree, demanding “Why did you threaten the governor? Who are you really?”, the man in a bind replies, “I’m bi-cultural, bi-curious and bipolar ... My California is now an endless series of strip malls ... I am Zorro! I must be Zorro! A muhajadeen Zorro! I have my own guitar flourish! There was a time when I was a normal Chicano ...” -more-

When you’re alone and life is making you lonely you can always go—downtown. -more-

What are those curiously attractive houses whose second floor, contained within a steeply pitched main gable roof, is far larger than the first floor? Why do we see them standing in clusters of two or three in Berkeley and Oakland but rarely elsewhere? -more-

I was visiting with a client today and got into one of those if/and/or discussions that soon feels like your brain is stuck in either molasses or honey (depending on whether the job will actually pay anything). One possible course of action involved changing a faucet, which would have eliminated a broken component and almost certainly have solved a problem involving the reluctant flow of hot water. The other solution would make someone happy but seemed for all the world like the wrong thing to do. -more-

We just returned from an excursion to a friend’s new townhouse in Vacaville. I won’t riff on her lament that she can’t find bulk olives or a decent farmers’ market or bookstore there, but I will say that the landscaping scares me a bit. Scared her, too, and then some: The week before closing on the new place, Alamo Creek and its local tributaries flooded her first floor and most of her neighbors’. She got off lightly though and the seller replaced the carpet with the tile she prefers. The block still rings with repair and construction noises, and piles of ruined wallboard and household stuff persist. -more-

FRIDAY, MARCH 24 -more-

TUESDAY, MARCH 21 -more-

Once it’s reached adulthood a Monterey cypress is easy to recognize, though it takes wildly different shapes depending on whether it’s near the ocean shore, its native habitat, or inland even only a few miles. Its native habitat, in fact, is the very small section of coastland between Monterey and Point Lobos. If it were only there, it would be rare—and most likely endangered—just because its range would be so small. But it’s handsome and easy to grow from seed, so it’s in cultivation and part of human-made landscapes all over the world. -more-

TUESDAY, MARCH 21 -more-