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CANCELED: New media: Mark Tribe on mediation, performance, and the public sphere
Monday, November 23 | 7:30-9 p.m. | 160 Kroeber Hall | Canceled

Armory Sam Horine TweakedIn 1968, protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago chanted “The whole world is watching,” and shortly thereafter their images appeared on the evening news. These days, protesters bring their own cameras and post their clips on YouTube. Has participatory media effected a structural transformation of the public sphere?

Mark Tribe, artist and professor of modern culture and media studiess at Brown University, will discuss recent work and current projects, including a video archive of police surveillance of activists, a Skype video remake of a scene from a Godard film, a video installation that reimagines a cover performance of Jimmy Hendrix’s famous Woodstock rendition of the US national anthem, reenactments of Vietnam-era protest speeches, and panoramic video installations that reproduce these reenactments.

 Free

Photography: Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape
October 22, 2009 – January 8, 2010 every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday with exceptions | 8 a.m.-5 p.m. | Library North Gate Hall

Beyond the proliferation of big box chains, car dealerships, fast food joints, and the nameless sprawl located along California State Highway 62 the desert opens up and after signs of familiar habitation seem to fade from view, new signs of habitation appear: small, dusty cabins—mostly abandoned—scatter across the landscape. The majority of the existing shacks, historically found throughout the larger region known as the Morongo Basin, lie east of Twentynine Palms in outlying Wonder Valley. Kim Stringfellow's photographs depict the remaining derelict structures along the highway once inhabited by people who paid Uncle Sam a nominal fee for land in 1938.



Exhibit: Development of written language in the ancient Near East
October 13, 2009 – February 26, 2010 every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday with exceptions | Bernice Layne Brown Gallery Doe Library

The wedges of the cuneiform script carved over the relief sculpture from a 9th century BC palace at Kalhu ("Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East,"  page 10-11)Scholars speculate that ancient civilizations developed witing systems to keep track of their livestock and wealth. But as societal structures became more sophisticated over many centuries, writing systems also grew in sophistication to accommodate and record ancient peoples’ mythologies, history, beliefs, poetry, laws and administrative records. This exhibit explores the development of writing systems in the ancient Near East beginning with Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Proto-Sinaitic through the Medieval Islamic period. On display are books, manuscripts, and artifacts.


TuesdayBack to top

Film: Urban Peasants, with introduction by Jeffrey Skoller
Tuesday, November 24 | 7:30 p.m. | Pacific Film Archive Theater

In Urban Peasants (U.S., 1975) Ken Jacobs constructs a picture of Brooklyn in the thirties and forties from fragments of home movies. "One day—saying, 'can you make copies of these?'—(my wife’s aunt Stella) pulled out a frozen stack of 16mm black-and-white film! Home movies, of course. . . . I chose not to follow the carefully penned chronology, but instead connected uncut one-hundred-foot rolls picked at random. . . " —Ken Jacobs. Shown with Ernie Gehr short Untitled (Part One) 1981.

Part of the PFA series Jesters and Gestures: Performing Yiddish Culture from Silent Cinema to Avant-Garde Film/Alternative Visions.



Scandinavian movie night: Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning
Tuesday, November 24 | 7 p.m. | B-4 Dwinelle Hall

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning combines world-class visual effects, a rough-and-ready sense of humor, and passion that provide the basis for the first-ever Finnish science fiction adventure. It is the story of Emperor Pirk – a star fleet commander who declares himself a global overlord and decides to expand his reign beyond the farthest reaches of the universe. Star Wreck was put together by a group of 5 Finns along with over 300 extras, assistants and supporters. The film pits Star Trek against Babylon 5, and while some knowledge about these two cult science fiction franchises will help, previous knowledge is by no means mandatory. In Finnish with English subtitles.


WednesdayBack to top

Video installation: Omer Fast / MATRIX 230
October 25 – December 17, 2009 every Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday & Saturday with exceptions | 11 a.m.-5 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum

Omer Fast: Production still from Nostalgia, 2009; courtesy of the artist; Arratia, Beer, Berlin; gb agency, Paris; and Postmasters, New York. Photo: Thierry Bal.Omar Fast’s new commission for MATRIX comprises two films that work together to break open the uncanny relationship among internal imagination, external reality, and the images we consume through media and popular culture. Fast again uses a metafilmic construction to tie together multiple narratives and comment on the mediation of images. In one film, the filmmaker interviews a Nigerian refugee seeking asylum in London about his experiences as a child soldier. The other adapts fragments of this story as stylized science fiction, the asylum-seeking process imagined as a bizarre dystopian system of processing and competition.



Beer: Global brewing traditions, 2500 BC - the present
October 3, 2009 – September 30, 2010 every Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday & Saturday | 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. | Hearst Museum of Anthropology

Corn beer tumbler, gold. Peru, Ica Valley; Late Intermediate Period (1000-1476)Drawing from a collection of over a thousand beer-related items, this exhibit of about 130 items focuses on the material aspects of beer production and consumption: objects for brewing, storing, transporting, serving, and drinking. This rich display reveals the striking unities and diversities of human cultures as they come together to celebrate the fruit of the grain.


FridayBack to top

Planetarium: Red Planet Mars
Friday, November 27 | 2:45-3:30 p.m. | Planetarium Lawrence Hall of Science

The "Red Planet" has always held mysteries for us, even from the most ancient of times. To unravel some of these secrets, learn how to spot Mars in the night sky inLawrence Hall of Science's interactive planetarium. Study Mars through a telescope before learning how space probes have updated—and changed—what we know about our planetary neighbor. With missions operating on and around Mars right now—and more to come—there is a lot to discover! (Recommended for ages 8 to adult) Programs are approximately 40 minutes, and are presented live with activities. Questions are encouraged!

 $4
Tickets are sold at the Front Information Desk on a first-come, first-served basis. Everyone must have their own ticket. Planetarium Passes must be exchanged at the Front Information Desk for tickets.


Film: Fallen Angel
Friday, November 27 | 8:50 p.m. | Pacific Film Archive Theater

In this drizzly darko, Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews), a down-and-out hustler, disembarks from a bus in Walton, near penniless and far from his intended destination. In the local spoon, he meets Stella (Linda Darnell), a curvaceous oasis in a dried-up town, who pushes hash and java to her desperate admirers. Hoping to score with Stella by scoring a bundle, Stanton turns his attention to June Mills (Alice Faye in a rare dramatic role), wooing this wealthy but unwise spinster.

Part of the PFA series Otto Preminger: Anatomy of a Movie.


SaturdayBack to top

Film: Mon oncle d’Amérique
Saturday, November 28 | 8:30 p.m. | Pacific Film Archive Theater

Mon oncle d’Amérique is a wickedly intelligent character study from childhood to adulthood of three individuals whose lives will intersect in love and business, and incidentally illustrate theories of behavioral psychology cheerfully presented by one Professor Henri Laborit and his existential lab rats. (“A being’s reason for being is being.”) The three are Gérard Depardieu as a farm boy turned factory factotum, and Nicole Garcia and Roger-Pierre as a failed actress and self-centered intellectual, respectively.

Part of the PFA series In Time: The Films of Alain Resnais.


SundayBack to top

Film: Daisy Kenyon
Sunday, November 29 | 5:30 p.m. | Pacific Film Archive Theater

Daisy Kenyon is a delirious melodrama, tipping toward noir. Joan Crawford—with Mildred Pierce just behind her—takes on determined Daisy, a successful illustrator living solo in New York who has grown weary of her affair with Dan O’Mara (Dana Andrews), an arrogant Park Avenue attorney. Henry Fonda’s damaged war vet, Peter Lapham, soon appears and whisks her away to wifery. From this stock-sounding threesome, Preminger builds an off-kilter “women’s film” that stumbles like a broken high heel.

Part of the PFA series Otto Preminger: Anatomy of a Movie.


MondayBack to top

Author talk: Roger Thurow on ENOUGH: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty
Monday, November 30 | 6-7:30 p.m. | Library North Gate Hall

For more than forty years, humankind has had the knowledge, tools, and resources to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet at the start of the twenty-first century, 25,000 people a day -- and nearly six million children a year -- die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases. Malnutrition kills more Africans than AIDS and malaria combined. We in the West tend to think of famine as a natural disaster, brought about by drought; or as the legacy of war and corrupt leaders. In this compelling investigative narrative, co-authors Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, explain through vivid human stories how the agricultural revolutions that transformed Asia and Latin America stopped short in Africa.

Roger Thurow has been a Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent for twenty years and has reported from more than sixty countries, including two dozen in Africa.


WednesdayBack to top

History: Colonial hotels in the Asian city
Wednesday, December 2 | 4-6 p.m. | 6F Conference Room Institute of East Asian Studies (2223 Fulton) | Note change in date and time

Strand Hotel RangoonAt the turn of the last century, when imperialism oriented the axes of European expansion and hence the geography of international travel, a new building type made its appearance in the cities of South and Southeast Asia: the "European hotel." Such hotels represented not only a qualitative improvement over earlier travel lodgings, but also prominent sites for the naturalization of modernity in the colonial urban milieu. Maurizio Peleggi, author and associate professor of history at the National University of Singapore, will discuss the rise and decline of colonial hotels and how they stand today in Asia's postcolonial cityscapes as monuments to an otherwise deprecated past.



ONGOING: Exhibits around campus >


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