The Dark Room’s suckling at the boob tube is a mass cultural sub-phenomenon of questionable taste and, yes, abnormal staying power. Remember 2005’s Batman the TV Show: The Play? I still wake up screaming from that one. But the persistence of this peculiar fetish is perhaps best measured by the yardstick of one series in particular, to wit, Dark Room’s annual live staging of Twilight Zone episodes.

It continues this weekend, and every subsequent weekend in July, in the eighth installment of Twilight Zone Live, actual episodes from the hoary small screen perennial recreated with wry comic aplomb and mainlined nostalgia by a variety of guest directors and comedy-ready cast members. Better than TV in that it is slightly bigger. Need more enticement? Check out Sam Shaw and Dan Foley in this spiffy pitch-perfect video teaser from Crisis Hopkins, an (almost) faithful recreation of the 1983 teaser for The Twilight Zone: The Movie…

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Beat poet and Buddhist Allen Ginsberg inspires "The Worst Horse," a Fri/27 program of multidisciplinary work at the San Francisco Zen Center curated by acclaimed SF author and RADAR founder Michelle Tea.

If Ginsberg’s definition of poetry as “making the private world public” is one starting point, the other is the Buddhist parable of the fourth horse, related by Zen Center founder Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in his famous Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. In the story, the mere shadow of the whip causes the first horse to run swiftly away, while it’s the first touch of the whip that induces the flight of the second, and the whip’s tearing of the flesh that provokes the third horse’s flight. But the fourth horse does not run until it’s repeatedly lashed.

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