Switch costumes with political, scientific, or nostalgic consequence and Tuesday’s all yours:

On the anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death, contributors to In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology (City Lights, 2010) and members of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade will read poetry + prose on themes of war, resistance, and revolution.

Authors and translators: Jack Hirschman [you should watch this and hope he reads this second poem], Sharon Doubiago, Dee Allen, Judith Ayn Bernhard, Susanna Bonetti, Agneta Falk, Steven Gray, devorah major [here’s an intense example once you get past the intro] and Jonathan Richman. If you go, you should ask Steven to read one of these poems.

You should really read about Pasolini! That wiki article is fascinating. And thorough.

Free and open to the public, this event is scheduled for 7-9pm at Berkeley City College auditorium (2050 Center St, Berkeley).

One and Only: The Untold Story of On The Road

published by Cleis Press

Beloved by both Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, Lu Anne Henderson’s story has never been told. Lu Anne was a beautiful 15-year-old girl in Denver in 1945 when she met Neal, a fast-talking hurricane of male sexuality and vast promises. The two married, and soon they were hanging out with a group of young would-be writers, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. But Neal and Jack initially didn’t like each other very much. Lu Anne ended up loving them both, and she taught them how to love each other—in effect, making the Beat Generation possible, as well as giving Kerouac material for one of the seminal novels of the 20th century, On the Road. One and Only traces the immense struggles of Lu Anne’s own life, which ranged from the split-up of her family during the Great Depression, to the ravages of abusive men and the grief of losing the two most important men in her life; and shows how her life intertwined with Jack’s and Neal’s to the very end.

Gerald Nicosia’s biography of Jack Kerouac, Memory Babe, won the Distinguished Young Writer Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters while still a work-in-progress. It remains widely regarded as the definitive work on Kerouac. Also the author of Home to War, Nicosia lives in Corte Madera, CA.

Anne Marie Santos, Lu Anne’s daughter, lives in Arlington, VA.

This free event starts at 7pm at City Lights [261 Columbus Ave].

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Epic Fail.

Porchlight teams up with the Bay Area Science Festival to present Epic Fail: an evening of stories about ideas, experimentation and when it all goes wrong with:

• NPR’s “Math Guy” Dr. Keith Devlin is a co-founder and Executive Director of the university’s H-STAR institute, a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network, and a Senior Researcher at CSLI. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His current research is focused on the use of different media to teach and communicate mathematics to diverse audiences. He has written 31 books and over 80 published research articles. Recipient of the Pythagoras Prize, the Peano Prize, the Carl Sagan Award, and the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award.
• Neuroscientist Aubrey Gilbert
• Adam Savage is an American industrial design and special effects designer/fabricator, actor, educator, and co-host of the Discovery Channel television series MythBusters.
• Physicist and inventor Nicholas Sheridon
• New York Times bestselling author Scott Sigler is the author of Ancestor, Infected and Contagious, hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing. He also writes the Young Adult Galactic Football League series, published by Dark Øverlord Media, including The Rookie, The Starter, and The All-Pro (so far). [Watch a trailer of Ancestor and watch an interview]
• Machine artisan Kal Spelletich: Kal Spelletich founded Seemen, his interactive machine art performance collective, in 1988. Since then, Kal has performed, exhibited and lectured worldwide, collaborating with Survival Research Labs and countless others from a wide spectrum of people from punk rock bands to scientists, politicians to NASA, Hollywood television to film acting parts. He curates exhibits and is involved in politics. He now works on the waterfront of San Francisco in an industrial district where he scours junkyards and dumpsters for industrial items whose technology can be reapplied. He explores the boundaries between fear, control and exhilaration by giving his audience members the opportunity to operate and control some fascinating and frequently downright dangerous machinery. His work has terrified and thrilled tens of thousands of people all over the planet, gotten him in trouble with the law and thrown out of galleries. Does all of that sound awesome? It is. Watch a Spark segment for more.

Tickets for this event are $15 and you can get them in advance.

Doors at 7pm, show at 8:00 p.m.
The Maritime Museum [Fort Mason Center, Building E]