Culture
Love National Parks? Thank UC Berkeley, And What Transpired Here 100 Years Ago
Do the majestic vistas of Yosemite National Park make you swoon? Are you besotted with the equally splendid landscapes of Yellowstone, Zion, the Smokey Mountains, the North Cascades and Rocky Mountain National Parks? Thank UC Berkeley. “Cal alumni had a major influence on both launching and maintaining the National Park system,” says Steven Beissinger, professor […]
Resurrecting the Old UC Theatre: Will This Revitalize Berkeley’s Music Scene?
On University Avenue in downtown Berkeley, they’ve erected a shiny new marquee—black, blue and gold, with white lettering that almost seems too clean for the boarded-up building and the street beneath it. Dodge the construction workers and step inside, through a modest lobby and hallway coated in old grime and fresh sawdust, until a door […]
Death Goes to the Opera: Cal Historian Provides Words, Funds for ODC Production
In the ultimate game-changer for some biogenetic dreamers, death disappears and we live forever. Count on the artists to barge in and complicate everything. Portugese writer José Saramago’s cunning and incisive 2005 novel Death with Interruptions opens as the citizens of an unnamed country suddenly stop dying. What first seems a kind of divine deliverance […]
Lost Childhoods: First-of-its-Kind Museum Displays the Artifacts of Foster Care Kids
Buried in the garages of suburbia are boxes of stuffed animals, worn-out sneakers, and abstract crayon drawings—the detritus of ordinary childhoods. The items in a new exhibit at Oakland’s Warehouse 416, “Lost Childhoods,” are a little different: a makeshift menstrual pad constructed from wads of toilet paper stapled together. Underpants from juvenile hall. A tattered […]
‘Intergalactic Nemesis’ Blasts Back to Berkeley; Show Mixes 1930s Radio Drama With Comics
We may aspire to La Traviata, but at a certain point, our inner groundling is going to opt for the sludge monster. Space opera, in other words, will always win out over—well, opera—in the hearts of the masses. The American masses, anyway. So a performance Friday at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall may be ample cause […]
Justice, Not Retribution: “The Emphasis on Suffering Isn’t Getting Us Anywhere”
Initially the story seemed like something straight out of A Clockwork Orange: Sasha Fleischman, who as an agender youth doesn’t identify as either male or female, was dozing on a municipal Oakland bus. Nearby, three adolescent boys had been laughing mockingly, and then one touched a lighter to Sasha’s skirt. The garment exploded in flame, […]
Sky Shooter: Photographer’s Birds-eye Views Reveal Hidden Patterns in Cityscapes
Jeffrey Milstein grew up imagining what it would be like to fly—as a child he would take photographs of airplanes soaring overhead and fantasize about what it would be like to always be thousands of feet in the air, peering down on life below. Now, at age 70, the UC Berkeley-trained architect-turned-photographer is making quite […]
Celebrating with Bells On: How Much Do You Really Know About the Campanile’s Carillon?
Contrary to popular belief, “Big Ben” isn’t the iconic clock on the tower atop Britain’s Houses of Parliament; it’s the mammoth, 13.8-ton bell behind the clock, tolling the hours in a low E-natural. Big Ben’s counterpart at UC Berkeley is the “Great Bear Bell” in the Jane K. Sather Tower—aka the Campanile—which is home to […]
Co-Parenting Composition: Composers and Musicians Deliver Nascent Works to Berkeley
Part of the challenge and much of the fun of performing contemporary music is navigating relationships with living composers—as the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players have discovered as they are halfway through their grandly ambitious Project TenFourteen. Project TenFourteen, an unprecedented season-long collaboration between SFCMP and Cal Performances featuring 10 newly commissioned works premiering over the […]
One Fewer Radical at Berkeley: Emma Goldman Papers Forced to Go Elsewhere
Managing an archive is like herding cats: You think everything is moving in the right direction, and suddenly you’re out wandering around the suburbs, looking for a lost tabby—or in the case of the archivist, the dusty stacks in search of some elusive source material. In short, both endeavors take time, dedication, and a tolerance […]
My Brilliant Career? The Troubling Reason Why Women and Blacks Avoid “Genius” Fields
It’s no secret that women have been underrepresented in the academic disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics—but music composition, philosophy and even classical studies? Although the later subjects appear to be as a disparate from the STEM disciplines as Mozart and Thales, they have one thing in common, says a new study released by […]
Funny And/Or Die: When Did Being a Mocking Wiseass Become Life-Threatening?
Danger is part of the territory for war correspondents. From the U.S. Civil War on, anyone who covered conflict knew that they could be shot just as dead (or, more recently, beheaded) as the grunt walking point on patrol. But now it’s not just the dashing combat reporter at risk—it’s the editor, the receptionist, and […]
