Mystics

Your choices in San Francisco hotels are overwhelming. The prices can be too. So during our staff visit to the City by the Bay, we looked for reasonably priced hotels that had charm, location or both. We came back with 14 ideas on places to bed down. It's not a complete list, but it is eclectic, like the city itself. Mystic Hotel. This property, which opened in April, stands on a tunnel-adjacent block of Stockton Street that you'll never see on a picture postcard, yet it has style, as do the Burritt Tavern bar and restaurant downstairs.

Your choices in San Francisco hotels are overwhelming. The prices can be too. So during our staff visit to the City by the Bay, we looked for reasonably priced hotels that had charm, location or both. We came back with 14 ideas on places to bed down. It's not a complete list, but it is eclectic, like the city itself. Mystic Hotel. This property, which opened in April, stands on a tunnel-adjacent block of Stockton Street that you'll never see on a picture postcard, yet it has style, as do the Burritt Tavern bar and restaurant downstairs.

SPARKS TONIGHT AT WASHINGTON When: 4 PDT. Where: Verizon Center. On the air: WNBA.com. Records: Sparks 11-15, Mystics 5-20. Record vs. Mystics: 0-1. Update: The Sparks end a three-game trip against the Mystics, who are in last place in the Eastern Conference. The Sparks are in fifth place in the six-team Western Conference, 31/2 games behind fourth-place Seattle with eight games remaining in the regular season. The top four teams in each conference make the playoffs.

Mysticism isn't new to art, having prompted (among other things) the emergence of pure abstraction into the Modernist lexicon more than a century ago. At Michael Kohn Gallery, a group exhibition of about 30 paintings, sculptures, video, prints and mixed media works from the past 50 years by 14 artists shows that it's alive and well today - albeit with a suitably altered consciousness. “Into the Mystic” takes its subject loosely, proposing that ultimate insight consists of contemplative, intuitive knowledge, not merely facts.

When: 5:30 p.m. Where: Staples Center. On the air: NBA TV. Records: Sparks 6-6, Mystics 2-10. Record vs. Mystics (2010): 1-1. Update: After going 2-5 on a seven-game trip, the Sparks will play Sunday and Monday at Staples Center before heading off to play four consecutive road games. The Sparks are on a two-game winning streak, and Washington has lost five in a row and is in last place in the Eastern Conference. The Sparks are led by DeLisha Milton-Jones and Kristi Toliver, who are each averaging about 13 points a game.

It was Joe Bryant's first loss since returning as head coach one week ago. And it was the Sparks' first loss at Staples Center this season. But the most painful part for the Sparks was that it happened during the greatest second-half comeback in WNBA history. The Washington Mystics rallied from a 24-point deficit and beat the Sparks in overtime, 89-85, Sunday night. In the locker room after the game, the players hung their heads and sat in silence. When prodded, Tina Thompson said she was disappointed "beyond words.

Robed and sandaled, they will come to chandeliered hotels in the resort city of Newport Beach to champion the spiritual. They will traipse down plush corridors into makeshift meditation halls to demonstrate compassion, forgiveness and universal love.

Flames from the bonfire leap into the chilly mountain air. Mystics dressed in bright robes of silk chant, beat drums and shake fists clenched around silver bells. As the fire begins to burn down, water is thrown on to convert the blaze into a pile of orange-hot embers, which the barefoot mystics rake into a smooth, glowing path. Then, with flames still burning around them, they walk the walk with nary a flinch or blister. Impossible? Hardly, say the skeptics.

Brad Stewart was a teenage stock trader in 1986 when he went to a West Los Angeles financial bookstore and stumbled across a strange, smoke-filled back room devoted to an odd science. The co-owner of the store, Jerome Baumring, sat with his cowboy-booted feet on a desk and chain-smoked while staring through owlish glasses at a computer screen filled with stock market quotes.

Two years ago Alexei Lubimov, the peculiar Russian polymath pianist, made a rare appearance in Los Angeles to open the season of Monday Evening Concerts at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall. He was back Monday to do the same. He proved no less strange this time around. Lubimov's program on Monday began with Satie and ended with Debussy, not a big stretch, it might seem, the two French composers having been friends and having influenced each other. In between came three short prepared piano pieces by John Cage from the 1940s that were written at a time when Satie was much on Cage's mind.

Conceived and underwritten by Ryuho Okawa, leader of a Japanese religious group known as Happy Science, the anime film "The Mystical Laws" is a strange mix of action-adventure and religious sermon, "G-Force" meets a Chick tract. Credited to director Isamu Imakake, the film's sincerity in breaking down its religious teachings to a level of digestible, childlike simplicity also makes it reminiscent of those Bible adventure kids cartoons that used to be a staple of Christian cable channels, albeit with a sci-fi twist and Buddhist underpinnings.

Sparks tonight AT WASHINGTON When: 4 PDT. Where: Verizon Center. On the air: wnba.com. Records: Sparks 19-9, Mystics 5-22 Record vs. Mystics: 1-0. Update: After winning a season-high nine games in a row, the Sparks have lost three consecutive games, matching their worst losing streak of the season, which happened in June. The Sparks are in second place in the Western Conference, four games behind first-place Minnesota and only one game ahead of third-place San Antonio.

Swimming with dolphins is one thing, but what would it be like to learn to work with a whale or a penguin? Mystic Aquarium , a division of the Sea Research Foundation, in Mystic, Conn., offers an opportunity for kids and adults to learn just that during a daylong marine animal trainer program. Participants spend seven hours getting up close and personal with the animals and doing everything from cleaning fish to cleaning up. "You inspect the fish, go out into the exhibit and sit there with a trainer and try to feed them," spokeswoman Erin Merz says of African penguins.

Sam Shepard's  “The Late Henry Moss” was first produced in 2000.  It's taken more than a decade for the play to receive its Los Angeles premiere. That may be for obvious reasons.  Although director David Fofi's current staging at Theatre 68 is often inspired, the play remains a motivationally murky muddle that falls short of the mystical weightiness it so obviously intends. The action is set in a desolate New Mexico shack, delineated with shabby specificity by scenic designer Joel Daavid.  There, viciously bickering brothers Earl (Ronnie Marmo)

  In writer-director David Fenster's new film “Pincus,” which had its world premiere as part of the narrative competition at this year's Los Angeles Film Festival, a young man tries to navigate through his own life while also caring for his father, debilitated by Parkinson's. The movie stars Fenster's former CalArts classmate David Nordstrom, as well as the filmmaker's own father, Paul Fenster, who has been living with Parkinson's for 13 years. In the film's own lyric, delicate way, the character played by Nordstrom - who also starred in Fenster's 2004 road movie “Trona” and had his own film “Sawdust City” at LAFF last year - seems to be on something of a collision course with himself.

They were an unlikely couple, the Latin American immigrant and the West Virginia divorcee whose paths crossed in mid-1950s Los Angeles. But, by Margaret Runyan Castaneda's account, she and Carlos Castaneda were kindred spirits whose time together helped turn him into a countercultural phenomenon. Carlos wrote "The Teachings of Don Juan," a 1968 bestseller that told of his peyote-fueled adventures with Don Juan Matus, a Mexican shaman who purportedly guided him to an alternate realm inhabited by giant insects, witches and flying humans.