Arts & Events

THURSDAY, OCT. 9 -more-

It’s just before a matinee at the Julia Morgan Center and the theater is flooded with families, lots of kids. And the kids are being given a speech lesson. But it’s taught by pirates—eyepatches, hooks and headscarves, literally out of a storybook, mingling with the audience, saying “Aarrr!” and “Avast!” over and over, followed by a roar of youthful voices. The exclamations appear, projected on the pirate ship’s sail. -more-

At the time of the French Revolution, William Blake wrote, in “The Marriage of Heaven & Hell,” that Milton had been “a true Poet of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Several generations of Gothic tales and Romantic and “Decadent” works followed, transforming the devil into a modern creature, even an aesthete—quite a jump from medieval Satan or the Mephistopheles of the Renaissance. And before Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky assailed Progress by saying the cleverest trick of the devil was to convince mankind he didn’t exist, Jean-Paul Richter, well before Nietzsche, told of a dream in which a voice announced that God was dead. -more-

When novelist and educator Cecil Brown—longtime Berkeley resident and teacher at Bay Area colleges—was introduced for a reading and talk he gave a few weeks ago at Washington University in St. Louis, Prof. Gerald Early recalled when he was in high school in the ‘60s, “The three books that everybody just had to read were James Baldwin’s Another Country, John A. Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am and Cecil Brown’s The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger.” -more-

German Expressionism Collection -more-

Cooper-Moore, free jazz pianist, multi-instrumentalist and composer extraordinaire, makes his first Bay Area appearance in 37 years at 8 p.m. Tuesday at Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory, 1519 St., San Francisco (moved from the Noodle Factory in Oakland) on his solo tour, “Old & New Paths,” featuring his handmade instruments. A cohort of William Parker, who has played at the behest of Sonny Rollins, Cooper-Moore will play “a stew of Gospel, Bop, Free Jazz, Blues and Roots Music”—and tell stories. (There’s a grand piano on site, too.) David Gitin, KPFA music programmer of the 1960s and ‘70s, commented, “His appearances are so rare, they’re excited when he plays in New York,” where he lives. $12/$15. For tickets, contact Brown Paper Tickets at brownpapertickets.com or (800) 838-3006. For information on the show, call 547-8932 or see aumfidelity.com/cooper-moore. -more-

A friend of mine has a bass guitarist living upstairs who has been working out the chords to “In a Gadda Da Vida” for the past 12 years. My friend is a patient person but she’s begun to exhibit something of a tic and often looks dolefully into space for long periods of time, returning from her reverie only when the music has stopped for some short spell. -more-

High on Panoramic Hill, overlooking Berkeley and the bay, stands a pre-World War II house that became both a public architectural spectacle and a secret aerie. Next week, a scholar offers an illustrated lecture exploring some of the hidden dimensions and character of this striking structure. -more-

THURSDAY, OCT. 9 -more-