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OTHER CALENDARSABOUT THE CALENDARMORE RESOURCES |
Get a sneak peek at this fall's coming attractions >  Reading: Learning Mind with Jacquelynn Baas, Walter Hood, and Lawrence Rinder Friday, November 20 | 7:30 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum
Theater: The Walworth Farce performed by Druid Ireland November 18 – 22, 2009 every day | Zellerbach Playhouse
Theater: Seven one act plays November 6 – 22, 2009 every Sunday, Thursday, Friday & Saturday | Durham Studio Theater (Dwinelle Hall)
Group discounts and subscriptions available. Purchase tickets online 24/7, or by phone/in-person during TDPS Box Office hours: Fridays from 1-4pm. Buy tickets online, or by calling TDPS Box Office at 510-642-8827, or by emailing TDPS Box Office at tdpsboxoffice@berkeley.edu. 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
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
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
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
 Jazz: Taylor Eigsti and Julian Lage Duo Saturday, November 21 | 8 p.m. | Wheeler Auditorium
  Film history: Cinema pioneer Alexander Black Sunday, November 22 | 5 p.m. | Pacific Film Archive Theater
 New media: Mark Tribe on mediation, performance, and the public sphere Monday, November 23 | 7:30-9 p.m. | 160 Kroeber Hall
 Film: Urban Peasants, with introduction by Jeffrey Skoller Tuesday, November 24 | 7:30 p.m. | Pacific Film Archive Theater
Scandinavian movie night: Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning Tuesday, November 24 | 7 p.m. | B-4 Dwinelle Hall
Planetarium: Red Planet Mars Friday, November 27 | 2:45-3:30 p.m. | William K. Holt Planetarium Lawrence Hall of Science
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
 Film: Mon oncle d’Amérique Saturday, November 28 | 8:30 p.m. | Pacific Film Archive Theater
Film: Daisy Kenyon Sunday, November 29 | 5:30 p.m. | Pacific Film Archive Theater
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
 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
ONGOING: Exhibits around campus > Sign up to receive the coming week's event highlights emailed to you each Monday morning. Notify the calendar editor of a correction to Critic's Choice or the campuswide calendar. |
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The new publication Learning Mind: Experience into Art explores the contemporary art experience and its expanding presence in society through essays, interviews, and conversations with some of the most influential artists and educators of our time. Jacquelynn Baas, BAM/PFA director emerita and the book’s co-editor with Mary Jane Jacob, will introduce the book. Three contributors will read excerpts from their essays: Baas, from “The Unknown Child: Art Mediation/Mediation Art”; landscape architecture professor Walter Hood, from his conversation with Alice Waters, “Coming Back to Our Senses”; and BAM/PFA director Lawrence Rinder, from “Towards a New Critical Pedagogy.” 
Founded in 1975, the acclaimed Druid Ireland theater company stands proudly as one of the pioneers of the modern cultural development of Ireland. Back in Berkeley by popular demand, the company will perform Enda Walsh's tender and visceral The Walworth Farce, commissioned and first performed by Druid in 2006. In this brilliant gothic comedy (which somehow combines six cans of Harp, 15 crackers with spreadable cheese, and five deaths), playwright Walsh "has outdone himself with a new play more complex, dark, and emotionally rich than any of his previous efforts...a theatrical experience that claws at the imagination for days afterwards" (Variety). Following the November 20th performance, ticket holders may attend a post-performance talk with members of the company.
This 
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.
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. 
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.
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.
Already performing music "as electrifying and virtuosic as it was mature" (The Boston Herald), the exciting Eigsti/Lage Duo has captured the attention of jazz lovers everywhere. Two-time Grammy nominee Taylor Eigsti is only in his 20s, but the pianist/composer/bandleader already has four CDs to his credit, as well as an array of live performances with such luminaries as Dave Brubeck, James Moody, and Ernestine Anderson. Guitarist Julian Lage has added Herbie Hancock, Béla Fleck, and Gary Burton to his growing list of fans, and he is known for his blazing technique, musical wisdom, sophistication, and wit. 
Who invented the cinema? Was it Thomas Edison or the Lumière brothers? One important contender for the title of film forefather, often overlooked today, is Alexander Black. In this illustrated lecture, Kaveh Askari, assistant professor of film studies at Western Washington University, will explore Black’s work with motion picture technologies. The program will include selected scenes from Black’s early magic lantern performances and several new preservation prints from his experiments with 16mm film in the 1920s and 1930s. 
In 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?
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.
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.
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!
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. 
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. 
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. 
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. 
At 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.