Arts+Events: February 2010 Archives

MUSIC:Gillian Welch and members of Old Crow Medicine Show will accompany bluegrass guitarist and harmony singer Dave Rawlings as part of the Dave Rawlings Machine at the Fillmore tonight. Rawlings will also play a free show at Amoeba tonight at 5:30. more ›

Surely nothing good can come of a natural disaster, i.e. the earthquake in Haiti. On the other hand, when devastating things happen to the world, the resulting musical collaborations and fundraisers can help to create a comforting, if temporary, relief. (Not to mention fun group shots like this.) In addition to the massive outpouring of relief aid, this Wednesday... more ›

MUSIC: The San Francisco and Shanghai Conservatories of Music will celebrate the creation of their sister-school relationship with their Shanghai Celebration Concert, which coincides with the 30th anniversary of the signing of the first sister city agreement between the U.S. and China. The concert will feature mezzo-soprano Zheng Cao, conductor Nicole Paiement, and cellist Emil Miland. more ›

This week's concert preview is being brought to you by Kevin Meenan of Epicsauce, providing detailed concert listings for the Bay Area every week. Follow them on Twitter. more ›

FILM: Indiefest documentary Oh My God! It's Harrod Blank! about local artist Harrod Blank, creator of interactive art pieces such as the Camera Van and the Flash Suit, showcases twenty years of footage of the "loveable boy-man in all his oddball glory." more ›

MUSIC: Obscure Canadian metal band Anvil, whose comeback warmed the hearts of America (and Japan), in Anvil! The Story of Anvil!, will be turning it up to 11 at the Fillmore tonight. more ›

We, the chosen ones, remember bar & bat mitzvah season clearly. There would be this six-month period where fat, shiny envelopes arrived in your mailbox by the pound, inviting you to share in the newfound adulthood of someone who probably ignored you in Hebrew School. So, you'd sack up, buy them a neon bubble chair, don your most impressive mini-skirt and dance all afternoon with the hired backup dancers while "Cotton Eyed Joe" blared in the background... more ›

MUSICAL: The Marsh presents the Marsh Youth Theater’s (MYT’s) Teen Troupe in the premiere of The Wave, a musical by Ron Jones, based on his real-life classroom experiment on fascism that he conducted at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto in 1967. The musical runs through this weekend and next. more ›

Assuming you've given any thought at all to such things, you may have believed, as we did, that the Timothy McSweeney who figures in the name of Dave Eggers' ten-year-old literary journal and website was a fiction. It turns out, the man was real, and died last month, and Dave now explains for the first time that he was a mentally ill member of a family with the same last name as Eggers' maternal grandfather, and who used to write letters addressed to both Dave and his mother when Dave was a kid. It turns out that Eggers' grandfather was the attending obstetrician at Timothy McSweeney's birth in Boston, and from the birth certificate Timothy assumed that he was related to these McSweeneys. He taught studio art at Rutgers before later being confined to an institution, where he presumably still lives, from whence he wrote the letters that entranced little Dave and inspired the name for his quarterly concern. more ›

FILM: The SF Independent Film Festival starts tonight with Opening Night film Wah Do Dem, about a solitary Brooklyn hipster on a cruise full of the middle-aged set en route to Jamaica. The film fest runs through the 18th. more ›

San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas looks like a laid back conductor on stage: he makes sweeping gestures which sometimes seem (to us, anyway) too vague to contain a beat; often enough, it looks like he's surfing over the musical waves of the orchestra rather than leading them. And he has a genial bonhomie in chatting up the audience to introduce a piece here or there, as Keeping Score shows. more ›

HISTORY: Check out the Authors' Forum at the Old Mint tonight and learn about Jewish immigrant, Isaias Hellman, "creator" of California; the Chinatown police department from the Gold Rush to present day; Juana Briones de Miranda, one of the first residents of what is now San Francisco; and how San Francisco transformed into a metropolis overnight due to the Gold Rush. more ›

Just in time for the (anti-abortion/anti-gay dating) Super Bowl, SF Beer Week kicks things off on Friday, ready to fill your belly with hops, brain with a buzz and liver with a bust. The week-long event kicks off at Yerba Buena with a party featuring beers from 30 Northern California craft breweries; a ceremonious tapping of the SF Brewers Guild collaborative brew, a barrel-aged Imperial Common; live music and more. more ›

After checking out SF Sketchfest's Celebrity Autobiography at Cobb's on Saturday night -- a glorious evening of comedians reading bizarre autobiographies of equally bizarre celebrities -- it's easy to see how Rachel Dratch held her own with Tina Fey, Will Farrell and Amy Poehler for years on Saturday Night Live. The former 30 Rock actress is hysterically funny. Not to mention mesmerizing on stage. Even while performing with the a taller and testosterone-rich trio of Steve Schirripa, Fred Willard and Jason Segel (replacing Neil Patrick Harris, who canceled) during a ho-hum Jonas Brothers autobiography reading, Dratch killed it as the "bonus Jonas." more ›

You, that's who. And you can, by participating in the Tech Search Party, which offers as a prize an autographed baseball by the Mayor. Other prizes include tickets to a Bon Jovi concert courtesy of the suddenly cuddly Sarah and Vinnie, or EA video games. more ›

CLUB: Without being facetious, it's safe to say Ishi Hideaki is huge in Japan. Under the moniker DJ Krush, he has released a dozen albums as a hip hop producer and electronic DJ... more ›

FILM: In 2009's Paranormal Activity, a young couple puts a video camera in their home to discover what's making strange noises in the night. And boy, don't they wish it was just an ordinary... more ›

There have been a lot of benefits for Haiti in recent weeks that we missed. Here are a few upcoming events, in which all of the proceeds will go to various charities. more ›