Arts & Events

TUESDAY, APRIL 22 -more-

What the eye don’t see, the heart don’t grieve.” Foxfire, now onstage at Contra Costa Civic Theatre in El Cerrito, is about the grieving of a vernacular culture for what’s gone, whether it’s seen or not. -more-

Last week’s column gave an overview of expansion plans by the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, including two huge new buildings in Strawberry Canyon: the Computation Research and Theoretical Facility (CRT) and the Helios Facility. A group called Save Strawberry Canyon is fighting the expansion for a whole litany of reasons: earthquake and fire risks; impacts on air and water quality and greenhouse gas emissions; damage to a significant cultural landscape; procedural flaws in the lab’s Long Range Development Plan (LRDP); and, not least, endangered species issues. -more-

TUESDAY, APRIL 22 -more-

FRIDAY, APRIL 18 -more-

Red means War,” said Harriet March Page of Goat Hall’s San Francisco Cabaret Opera to explain “The Red Horse,” the title of the second concert in the series Horsewomen of the Apocalypse, featuring all female vocalists Saturday at St. Gregory’s Church in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill. -more-

Poet Robert Hass won a Pulitzer prize last week for his most recent collection Time and Materials, a book that also won the National Book Award last year. -more-

First Run Features has released three provocative films on DVD that delve into the complex consciousness of the German people. From the atrocities of the Holocaust to the repressive post-war socialist government of East Germany, these films offer fascinating glimpses of artists and historians struggling to come to terms with their nation’s past while battling forces—in the form of both the government and the people—who would rather keep such horrors hidden. -more-

John Albert Marshall (1868-1924), commonly known as J.A., was a small and hot-tempered man. In 1906 he had two brushes with the law—one as a recalcitrant witness for the defense, threatening to thrash a much larger prosecuting attorney, the other when he was convicted of battery after pummeling John Koch, owner of a delicatessen at 2520 Bancroft Way. -more-

So I was licking nectar off the base of an orchid blossom the other night ... See?That’s why people keep pets, in which category I place houseplants. Most of us don’t live the wildlands any more, which of course is why they’re still “wildlands,” and there’s all this unpredictable, unrepeatable, unmediated experience we don’t get to have every minute of every day. -more-

As you go for that morning jog ( You are jogging every morning, right? Immediately after that low-fat, lemon, poppy-seed, caramel muffin and the soy latte) you probably note amidst the quiet and still of the neighborhood that there are little puffs of smoke that come from the tops of every house and business. -more-

FRIDAY, APRIL 18 -more-

It is wonderful and exciting that many businesses are waking up to the fact that “going green” can make a lot of green ($$, that is). It is not so wonderful that a whole bunch of products that claim to be green are actually far from good. -more-

World agriculture appears to be approaching a crossroads. The globalized economy has placed a series of conflicting demands on the 1.5 billion hectares of croplands. -more-

A friend who works for Solano County said that the Anna’s hummingbird nesting in her office courtyard was being harassed by county employees who’d been sticking their noses and cameras rather literally into the nest and even bending the branch it’s on down, for closer looks. The hummingbird has been tenacious but she’s clearly agitated, and diverting her even occasionally from feeding the newly hatched chicks endangers them. -more-