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Literary Arts
Barry Gifford's Do the Blind Dream?
Bay Area writer Barry Gifford has long straddled the line between literature and cinema, writing screenplays as well as fiction that others have turned into film. He's perhaps best known for his association with filmmaker David Lynch. Lynch turned Gifford's characters Sailor and Lulu into the 1990 Palme D'Or winner Wild at Heart. Seven years later the two co-wrote the heavily underrated Lost Highway. More
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Museums
Intention to Fail
Celebrated film and video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila is a master at depicting the kinds of oppressive horror and despair that can only be unearthed from domestic matters. Ahtila depicts women who are imbricated in a web of phobias, fears, and dysfunctions. In a series of cinematic episodes entitled Intention to Fail, currently on display through September 5 at the Berkeley Art Museum, Ahtila reimagines conventions of film and video by removing her characters from traditional narrative and exploring insanity through multiple perspectives. More
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Baseball
Catching up
Tuesday night: Los Angeles is 66-45 and the Giants are 60-54. If the Dodgers go 25-26 (unlikely) the rest of the way, the Giants have to go 31-17 to tie them! San Francisco has 16 games left against awful teams (Montreal, Colorado, Arizona), five games against very bad teams (Pittsburgh, Milwaukee) and 28 games against teams that are basically as good as or better than they are, even if they've packed it in. The Giants are 20-9 against the Expos, Rockies and D'Backs this year, and let's say they keep that up - they'll go 11-5 in these games - and I'll give them 3-2 vs. the Pirates and Brewers. More
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Literary Arts
Veterans of S.F.'s Edinburgh Castle pub make a mean gin and tonic. Now they're on tap to become the city's newest independent publishers
Alan Black makes it all sound so easy. Maybe it is. In his thirteen years at the famed Edinburgh Castle, http://www.castlenews.com , Black has given a leg up to many writers and performers and is now ready to add "publisher" to his long list of credentials. No doubt his natural charm and wicked wit have also helped to knit together a group of people ready and willing to help out when called upon. More
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Baseball
Balls in Play Average Revisited
The loss of Mark Ellis has apparently hurt the A's defensive efficiency, but the variation is still small. But for Mulder, Hudson and Zito, the defensive efficiency while they're on the mound has varied wildly! It's difficult for the team defense to get that much better or worse from one year to the next, but the batting average allowed during a given pitcher's starts can change by 60 or 70 points. More
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Museums
Skateboards, Slang, and Symbols
Propounding the DIY ethic and jabbering about street cred are, by now, cliches, but something about the persistent vogue of skating culture makes me feel like a downright luddite. Beautiful Losers, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is a celebration of skateboard memorabilia and contemporary art inspired by skateboard culture. In the 1990s, a group of American artists barely out of their teens redefined youth subculture by connecting the dots between skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion, and music... More
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Galleries
Strangers in a Strange Land
White powdery footprints, detailed with an intricate Persian flower motif, mark the way up Intersection's black stairs and into the gallery, which has been transformed into a liminal locale - a traditional Iranian coffee - house spattered with hip-hop paraphernalia. More
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Museums
Adding Context to Myth
With her prominent white face makeup and elegantly flowing kimonos, the geisha is one of the most compelling and misconstrued icons in Japanese culture. The subject of the Asian Art Museum's current exhibit, Geisha-Beyond the Painted Smile, casts a decorous shadow on her own mythologized images; while there's an clear cultural context that attempts to dispel prevalent stereotypes about the geisha, the ritualized élan of her world retains its esoteric charm. More
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Galleries
New Work by Felipe Dulzaides and Robin Rhode
The exhibit features new works by Cuban-born artist Felipe Dulzaides (based in San Francisco) and South African-born Robin Rhode (based in Berlin). Both artists offer an international array of performance, video, photography, and sculptural installation that borrows from a diverse stable of influences and themes from Hip-Hop culture to family water parks. As appraisals of institutions, civic free-for-alls, viewer expectations, and the meaning we invest in objects, the assembled work transforms common objects and familiar places into stylish meditations on place and context. More
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Theater
More Body, Less Vagina
Five years ago, the word "vagina" kaboomed itself out of stagey whispers and into the very heart of the American milieu. With that, Eve Ensler went from being a theater nobody to a feminist playwright with global clout. Sometimes candid, sometimes tongue in cheek, and always extraordinary, Ensler's Vagina Monologues had a snowball effect being performed in more than 30 countries and translated into 28 languages. Now, after her infamous musings have accrued a gaggle of vagina aficionados and achieved a critical mass of performers (college drama classes and Hollywood debutantes alike), Ensler has turned her gaze to an area above... More
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