Zuoxiao Zuzhou in conversation with Michael Timmins. Moderated by Andrew Jones, chair, Center for Chinese Studies. The music of Zuoxiao Zuzhou, one of Chinese best-known rock musicians, draws playfully on rock and roll, Chinese folk and operatic sounds, and electronic textures. A leading composer for independent Chinese films, he has worked closely with Ai Weiwei and Jia Zhangke. He is also a novelist and memoirist, whose two published books feature wildly creative accounts of the artistic life in a country hell-bent on development at any cost. Whether in his books or his songs or his graphic art, Zuoxiao Zuzhou pushes the envelope artistically and politically, maintaining a tough, humorous, unflinching and clear-eyed empathy for those who have been silenced and marginalized. Michael Timmins is the songwriter and guitarist for the Canadian alternative country/blues/folk rock band Cowboy Junkies, formed in Toronto in 1985. Their second album, The Trinity Session, earned them both critical attention and a cult following. The band's version of The Velvet Underground song "Sweet Jane" was featured in the film Natural Born Killers. Their Nomad Series includes the 2010 album, Renmin Park.

Wildlife Ecology

Joel Salatin, alternative farmer at Polyface Farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, passionately defends small farms, local food systems, and the right to opt out of the conventional food paradigm. Edible Education is a lecture course at UC Berkeley, funded by the Edible Schoolyard Project www.edibleschoolyard.org and the Epstein Roth Family Foundation. Instructor Michael Pollan.

UC Berkeley professors, Robert and Sally Goldman, led the 40-year project to translate the Sanskrit epic poem Valmiki Ramayana to modern English. Robert Goldman was a graduate student spending several years in India in the late 1960s, when, just for fun, he and a friend read the epic Sanskrit poem, the Valmiki Ramayana. Goldman was captivated by the adventures of the Hindu god Vishnu, who comes to earth on a divine mission in the form of the human hero, Rama. “Think the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Bible in one package, and you might get a sense of it,” says Goldman, recalling the Ramayana’s simultaneously literary and religious stories of love and war, sex and violence, and mundane daily struggles sprinkled with multi-headed monsters and an army of shape-shifting monkeys. During his original reading of the Valmiki Ramayana, he wished for a more readable English translation of the nearly 3,000-year-old classic, with its 24,000 verses constituting some 50,000 lines mostly in a 32-syllable meter. It seemed a worthy idea, considering that the legend, translated and transformed from Sanskrit into all Indian and Southeast Asian languages, sheds light on an ancient world and still influences Indian art, religion, politics and life today. The translation saga ...