Aleksandar Cocek / Flickr

Dear would-be arts journalists and critics: We want you.

SF Weekly seeks two interns for its print calendar section (Night+Day), its online calendar, and this very arts blog (The Exhibitionist). Each position begins with data-entry but quickly moves to writing. The educational value will come in numerous ways. You'll get to know the various sectors of arts and culture in San Francisco through collecting data, interviewing performers and artists, attending events, and conversing with veteran journalists. You'll also learn a complex web content management system and work on various sets of deadlines that will transfer to any publishing job.

You'll also develop your writing skills. All items written will be subject to extensive feedback, editing, and rewrites. Eventually this could lead to a paid freelance arrangement for print and online. Our writers contribute some photographs as well, so it's a big plus if you're good at that, even if it's with your smartphone.

The internship requires 12 to 15 hours per week and will earn three credits over the course of the summer.

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This is news worth screaming about.

San Francisco isn't so much losing one of its best comedians (yet) as it is putting him out on loan. Which is to say, W. Kamau Bell will be spending a lot of time in New York later this year to film six episodes of a TV show for FX.

Last year he and a group of comedians produced two pilots for the show, which Bell describes as "my version of The Daily Show." One of the show's executive producers is Chris Rock.

Bell can't tell us what the title for the half-hour show is -- because one hasn't been chosen.

"It's all happening quickly, we're kicking around names right now," says Bell, who has written a blog column for The Exhibitionist -- Kamau's Komedy Korner -- since February 2011.

A statement from Nick Grad, an FX executive, calls it The Untitled Chris Rock/W. Kamau Bell Late Night Show.

It is set to be filmed and air beginning in August, Bell says.

Bell tells us the people hired for the show so far are the executive producers -- himself, Rock, and Chuck Sklar -- and he hopes to bring on board some of the comedians he has worked with closely in the Bay Area.

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A new comedy venue -- and a recognized Bay Area club name -- opens Tuesday night in San Francisco. The first thing on the calendar for Tommy T's Showroom at 1000 Van Ness is a recurring show called Tuesdays Are Jillarious, hosted by one of our favorite local comedians Jill Bourque. Her first lineup includes another local comic we're watching, Sammy Obeid, along with seven others.

Three nationally recognized names are on the calendar for March: George Lopez, Christopher Titus, and Andrew "Dice" Clay. Lopez had a sitcom called George Lopez as well as a talk show called Lopez Tonight. Titus, who was born in Castro Valley and grew up in nearby Newark, has made numerous television appearances including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. (We previewed a San Francisco appearance by Titus about a year ago.)

Clay rose to fame in the 1980s but eventually sparked controversy by his "red state" style of stand-up that some viewed as homophobic, misogynistic, and racist. Clay might not be as much of a draw as he was 15 years ago, but the fact that he's scheduled along with Lopez and Titus shows the venue has booking power.

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Gil Riego

Baldur Helgason

Thursday night at Artopia, SF Weekly announced the three winners of 2012's Masterminds Grants. Two individuals and one dance troupe each won $1,500 to further their work. They were among more than 100 applicants in the competition, now in its fifth year. Ten finalists were chosen, and each had work on display at the Thursday night event.

One winner was Baldur Helgason, an illustrator originally from Iceland. To read more about Helgason and his work, read his profile by our arts critic Jonathan Curiel.

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The Tony and Grammy award-winning Broadway musical The Book of Mormon -- co-written by the creators of South Park and featuring the lyric "fuck you, God" -- will run for five weeks at San Francisco's Curran Theater starting in November, according to a statement from SHN, operator of the Curran.

The play has been at New York City's Eugene O'Neill Theatre since March 2011, according to entertainment sources, and is competing with Broadway blockbusters Wicked, Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark, and The Lion King. The Book of Mormon is the first show to be announced for the 2012-13 season by SHN, which also operates the Golden Gate and Orpheum theaters and brings Broadway productions to San Francisco.

No specific dates have been announced, but considering the play starts in November, it may come just in time to give San Franciscans a way to process some anger and dismay if Mitt Romney, himself a Mormon, is elected to the White House.

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This coconut octopus has grown about five times its size since it was brought to the Steinhart Aquarium.

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

Where do aquariums get their fish? If you've given it any thought at all, you may imagine, as I did, that they primarily stock their tanks with purchases from some kind of special purveyor of exotic fish. While that is usually the case, the reality at the Academy of Sciences' Steinhart Aquarium is a whole lot cooler. Bart Shepherd, the director of the aquarium, along with academy botanists, entomologists, and marine biologists, braved various subaquatic dangers during an expedition to the Philippines, including leeches and whip-scorpions. The research they conducted resulted in the discovery of almost 300 species that are probably new to science, most of which are currently on display.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the large Philippine coral reef tank, which contains 2,500 fish and 700 colonies of coral; they represent 150 species of fish and 100 species of coral. Finding species that were otherwise unobtainable was not the academy's only goal, but rather a long-term effort toward conservation through husbandry. Nary a piece of coral was purchased for the tank.

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Updated with new extended deadline!

It's that time of year again: Not ski season (sadly!) but Masterminds, an annual competition held by SF Weekly to give leading local artists, designers, filmmakers, and performers cash grants.

Yes, you read that right: We're giving away good money to good local artists. (Emerging artists! That means, you aren't getting rich at it ... yet!) But to win, you have to enter by Jan. 23 noon on Friday, January 27.

Masterminds grants will be awarded in the following categories: Visual art, fashion/design, performing arts, and film/video/media. The exact size of the 2012 grants haven't been determined yet, but last year we gave out three grants at $1,500 each. Hit the jump for this year's details.

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Michael David Rose

Keith Burkland (left) plays Vladimir Jack Halton plays Estragon in Waiting for Godot.

"A country road. A tree. Evening." So go the opening stage directions of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, one of the most important plays of the 20th century. But if the set description seems minimal, Tides Theatre's interpretation of them is anything but.

"It's almost like you can see the tree pulsating, because the way set designer Richard Colman has painted it has so much energy," says director Jennifer Welch. It'll be a fuchsia tree against a black-and-white background, together with an angular, industrial soundscape, by Jon Bernson -- an unusual stamp on Beckett's existential "tragicomedy" and a bold beginning for a new theater company.

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Mark Richards

Marilyn Wann

An acquaintance traveled to Los Angeles recently and saw the ubiquitous 1-800-GET-THIN billboards. "It was like, 'Welcome to LA ... You're fat!'" said Jennifer Yendes.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration took note of the notorious billboards in early December. Regulators officially told marketing company 1-800-GET-THIN (and the eight clinics that take patient referrals from the ad campaign) that their ads do not adequately warn people about the risks of lap band surgery. They also found the billboards' existing warnings too small to be legible.

This is the same FDA that in February approved use of the gastric girdle (aka lap band) at lower weights, making major surgery available to people whose clothing tags carry more than one X rating.

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The Knowles Gallery / Flickr

Change is the only constant, and every movie marquee provides incontrovertible visual evidence: new movies, promising debuts and fresh succes de scandales, as well as vintage revivals and retrospectives. The silver screen winks and flashes at us, then moves on. Let's stop to acknowledge the year in Bay Area film, one of loss as well as reinvention.

Counting up in order of significance, here are the Top 10 events in Bay Area film for 2011:

10. The Galaxy Theatre is torn down. We begin the roller-coaster ride that was 2011 with bittersweet but hardly terrible news. Shuttered since 2005, the landmark at Van Ness and Sutter had shabbily devolved from a poignant reminder of good times movie-going and the lifespan of "modern" movie houses to an embarrassing homage to 1980s architecture. Even after the curtain rises on whatever takes its place, that corner will always be home to celluloid ghosts.

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