We’re looking toward a long holiday weekend honoring resistance to state violence, so ORB graciously extends a belief in Monday to this week. And scroll through the calendar to find the first ever ORB Reader Poll on an Important Topic.
WH Auden wrote, of course, that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but people forget: that’s just the opening of the stanza, which ends, “it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” Or listen to local oracle Juliana Spahr: “It’s an open question if the revolution will still need poetry, / its tradition and its resistance to that tradition. / But it will for sure need the Vascular Plants of California.” Since it’s an open question, since it’s a happening, since we need singers in the looming vantablackness—turn toward the people who will get you through this, get together in person if you can (bring the bread you stress-baked). What we pay attention to thrives: the Formerly Incarcerated People’s Performance Project is storytelling all weekend at Berkeley Rep. McSweeney’s rediscovered irony and calendars, so San Francisco Is Dead, but it never was, not really, because SF Art Week begins in the West Bay this weekend too. Peter Hartlaub broke the important story that there is music on the ferries on Fridays in January (though this week only to Vallejo). There’s a book club in Berkeley for the next month discussing books about Islamic political prisoners in both the US and Egypt, and Future Finds at Bather’s Library is ready to blow your mind for the next month too (I got my pass!). If you still need to escape into a dark room for a while, Noir City’s showing movies and playing live jazz at the most perfect movie palace in all the land, and we like Sondheim and Seurat so much Shotgun Players is extending Sunday in the Park with George into February! If all else fails and your friends bail on you and the future still looks like hell... get to know the plants, either through VR and performance or by reading the Jepson or just by looking around you at the ribbony leaves of soaproot and at the budding ceanothus about to burst into blue joy. We’ll see you in the back row, the front row, wherever signs are being waved. And don’t forget the bread, we need it to go with the roses.—XL, MS, TC
Tuesday, January 13
Neighbors, 6pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). A poetry reading benefiting the Rapid Response Migrant Legal Defense Fund. The reading will feature the poets Jason Bayani (new book Everyone I Love, Alive from Omnidawn), Zeina Hashem Beck (her palindromic sonnets are incredible!), Sara Borjas (YES), and Matthew Zapruder (WHAT A LINEUP!). East Bay DSA's Migrant Defense Committee will also present other initiatives to help protect our immigrant neighbors, since you know. [Eventbrite]
Berkeley Youth Poet Laureate Kickoff Party, 6pm, Berkeley Central Library (Downtown Berkeley). An evening of poetry and celebration as Berkeley announces its Youth Poet Laureate, as well as the Vice Youth Poet Laureate, who presumably presides over the Poet Senate. [BPL]
Also: East Bay Civic Hub: Community & Co-Learning Potluck at Groundfloor Oakland (Temescal)
Wednesday, January 14
Fox Theater Tour, 3:30pm, The Fox (Downtown). Prospective tourgoers are promised, first, over a mile of walking in and around the glamorous Oakland landmark, and second, a guide named Scooter. [Humanitix]
Book & Wine Trivia Night, 6pm, Book Society (College Ave). Wine moms are the resistance. Knock back some chardonnay, impress them with your literary trivia prowess, and join the coup-against-the-coup. [Book Society]
WHB Book Club, 6:30pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). Discuss Simone Weil’s On The Abolition of Political Parties. Not exactly surprising that an anarchist mystic would be opposed to political parties, but the thoughtful and almost rhythmic care that goes into Weil’s now-classic essay is worth experiencing with a group. [Eventbrite]
Oakland Privacy: Fighting Against the Surveillance State, 6:30 PM, Secret Location (which is consistent with the whole theme; email contact@oaklandprivacy.org). If you were all like, fuck Flock and the Houston it rode in on, join Oakland Privacy to organize against the surveillance state, police militarization, and ICE, and to advocate for privacy, surveillance regulation of both corporations and the state, and government transparency, around the Bay and nationwide. [IndyBay]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Poolside Poets, 6:30pm, Saint Joseph’s Arts Society (SoMa). Deceptively named: there is no pool. St J’s though is the swankiest place you’ll hear poetry anywhere—former church, current art & design lair. Attendees are encouraged to wear “White Lotus-inspired-resort-wear,” but other White Lotus-inspired behavior is discouraged, at least the murdering kind. [Insta]
Designing the Lush Dry Garden, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (College Ave). Was the great agave death bloom of 2025 a sign of the times? Cricket Riley & Alice Kitajima share their book Designing the Lush Dry Garden: Create a Climate-Resilient, Low-Water Paradise, inspired by the legendary Ruth Bancroft Garden over in CoCoCo. [Mrs. Dalloway Said She Would Grow The Flowers Herself]
Wildfire Safety Presentation for High Fire Risk Areas, 7pm, Online (The Zoomiverse). Ask them which burns faster: a deck made of engineered wood or a living oak tree, and read John Vaillant’s Fire Weather if you don’t already know the answer. [Oakland Firesafe Council]
Script Reading Fundraiser, 7pm, 2727 California (Berkeley). Some people want to make a movie, and they’re providing mimosas and the chance to be a critic before the cameras even start rolling. [Insta]
Also: Bay Nature Talk: Winter Wildflower Roundup (Online) / Grown Folks Storytime at Alameda Main Library (The Island) / Reject Alameda County Health layoffs at Highland Hospital (Highland Park) / Sweater Repair Clinic at the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse (Temescal)
Thursday, January 15
[West Bay Bonus Event] Maya Shankar in conversation with Michael Lewis: The Other Side of Change, 6pm, SHACK15 (Ferry Building). Cognitive scientist Maya Shankar researches how we handle major disruptions, writes book. RSVPs are closed already, too bad, especially because we have a Berkeley Michael sighting! This triggers ORB’s first-ever reader poll: Rank the Berkeley Michaels. [Book Passage]
Poetry Circle, 6pm, Claremont Library (Berkeley). CANCELED. NO FRIENDLY POETS TO BE FOUND IN THE LIBRARY THIS WEEK. [BPL]
Sundial Reading Series, 6pm, Local Economy (College Ave). Hang with friendly poets here instead—and bring the cookies you rage-baked, this is a local community resilience hub and snacks are mutual aid. Launching this new reading series curated by Ben Gucciardi are Zeina Hashem Beck (if you missed her sonnets on Tuesday, come out Thursday!), Berkeley poet Armen Davoudian (“What else will you love me despite?”), and prose guy Chris Feliciano Arnold. Lauren Markham in conversation. Proceeds benefit local org Refugee & Immigrant Transitions. [luma]
OHA Annual Meeting and Love & Loathing in Oakland Chinatown, 6:30pm, Chapel of the Chimes (Where ORB’s Ancestral Ashes Lie in State). Lailan Sandra Huen is so local her Bay roots go back to the Gold Rush (our great-great grandparents might have known each other, no for real). She’ll share Oakland Chinatown’s exhilarating histories of love and loathing from the 1850s until now. These stories ask: Who belongs in Oakland? How did Oakland Chinatown survive 175 years of anti-Chinese movements? How do we build an Oakland that works for all of us? [Humanitix]
Wuthering Heights, 6:40pm, The New Parkway (Uptown). Jessica Ferri of Womb House Books is providing a special introduction to the 1992 adaptation of the greatest horny goth novel ever penned in English. Steven Spielberg cast Ralph Fiennes as a concentration camp commandant in Schindler’s List after seeing him in Wuthering Heights, later explaining that he “saw sexual evil” in his performance as Heathcliff. Okay dude! [Veezi]
States of Euphoria, 7pm, Bathers Library (Uptown). Hannah Baer (yes, that Hannah Baer), “psychedelics + raves journalist” Michelle Lhooq, and Arun Saldhana (geographer based in Minneapolis so even if ketamine isn’t your thing go ask him questions about what THAT’S like right now) in conversation about rave culture and the politics of collective pleasure. First of a four-part series, Poetics and Plant Medicine, co-curated by Stephanie Young and Ramsey McGlazer. [Insta]
Alex Busansky & Aishatu R. Yusuf discussing Eating Behind Bars, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's (College Ave). Everyone knows the food in prison is bad, but a recently released and rigorously researched book argues that it constitutes a full-fledged public health crisis. [Mrs. Dalloway's]
Also: ThursDates with Diana Gameros ft. Patrick Wolff at OMCA (The Lake) / Moving San Francisco: Views from the SFMTA Photo Archive 1903–Now at SF City Hall (West Bay) / Profs & Pints Alameda: How Money Shapes Minds at Faction Brewing (Alameda)
Friday, January 16
Poetry! 6pm, temporarily relocated to Woolsey Heights (DM Tamarack or Woolsey or Ask a Poet) Tamarack recently got smoked out in a bad way: chip in on their fire recovery GoFundMe to keep the poetry (and fine anarchist cocktails) flowing. But the show must go on! It’s conceptual poetry night and they’re flying in the big guns. Robert Fitterman (WHOA) and Maria Sledmere, who wrote, among other things, ”I am / ... wishing the trees good sex. / We have this ask, / to always have the right to go outside/ and keep people safe, including the rabbits/ and nudibranchs, the New Caledonian owlet-nightjar, / the Lactobacilli / and the rats of course,.../ this future ecology that/ we are inside of...” [Tamarack that is Temporarily Woolsey]
Poetry Lounge, 6pm, Golden Ratio (Downtown). Reno the Poet hosts the long-running, open mic-style poetry party. You have three minutes to speak your piece, so talk fast. [Eventbrite]
Noir City Film Festival: Black Angel & Blues in the Night double feature, 7:15pm & 9 pm, Grand Lake Theater. Noir City rolls into town with a song in its heart. The opening day of the festival features a classic Cornell Woolrich B-noir (starring Dan Duryea as a self-pitying drunk pianist, along with June Vincent and Peter Lorre) and an early jazz noir (this one starring Richard Whorf as a self-pitying drunk pianist, with Elia Kazan—booooooo!—in the role of a clarinetist when they really should’ve had him play a singer). [Noir City]
Erotikon, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). The story of an entomology professor whose wife is secretly pursuing affairs with two other men. You might assume this movie came out in the explosion of Hollywood sex comedies in the late 1950s and early ’60s, you cute lil film nerd you. BUT NO! This Swedish farce came out in 1920! Silent and sexy and pre-code, ooh la la—with live piano accompaniment today only. [BAMPFA]
When We Exhale Anthology Launch, 7pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Join Black Freighter Press to celebrate the release of an anthology of writing by Black women rooted in ancestral medicine. With readings from phenomenal contributors Ariel Ward, Raheem Divine, Alie Jones, and shah noor hussein who will also offer typewriter poetry on the spot. [Insta]
Also: BFP: B. Monét - Community Screening at the African American Art & Culture Complex (West Bay) / Salt of the Earth Artist Talk at the Brower Center (Berkeley)
Saturday, January 17
Volunteering at Lake Merritt, all day (The Lake). Help out at the gardens, the Rotary Center, the Lake Merritt Institute, or take a walk along the channel with a garbage bag and a trash picker. [Lake Merritt]
Rotary Natural Science Center grand reopening: The Story of Earth, Wind, and Fire, 10am, Rotary Natural Science Center (The Lake). Join City of Oakland staff & leadership, and special guests all day for interactive events, ribbon-cutting, and all new exhibits (come sit by me if you want to hear more about why it was closed for so long). [Facebook]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Bay Area Then and Now Poetry Series, noon, YBCA (SoMa). Intergenerational line up of local poets Kevin Dublin, Magick Altman, and past San Francisco poet laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin all take turns at the mic. [YBCA]
Grand Opening of Nomadic Bookshop, 1pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Celebrate the newest bookstore in Oakland with readings, music, snacks, and convivial bookishness all afternoon. [Insta]
Noir City film festival: To Have and Have Not & Nocturne double feature, 1:15pm & 3:30pm, Grand Lake Theater. Don’t miss the first one. It’s Casablanca but better. Bogie learns how to give a shit and fight the fash, and that’s all well and good and relevant besides, but all you’re gonna remember is Lauren Bacall leaning against Hoagy Carmichael’s piano, a vision in houndstooth, purring throatily like some big post-coital cat. She steals every scene she’s in, and Howard Hawks is always happy to let her have them. Nocturne is a detective noir about the murder of a womanizing composer, notable for George Raft in a non-ganster role trying heroically to play against type. [Noir City]
Inside the Free Speech Movement, 2pm, Berkeley Central Library (Downtown Berkeley). Check out a full cut of what bills itself as the “definitive documentary of the Free Speech Movement,” which appeared in pieces on YouTube back in 2024 and which is based on oral history interviews from the 50th anniversary of the FSM. Linda Rosen directed; she’ll do a Q&A at the event. Jai Jai Noire, Tonya Staros, and Melanie Mentzel handled the editing. [BPL]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Middle] Carter Lavin, If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight, 3pm, Book Passage (Ferry Building). The book is a primer on fighting car supremacy, from Oakland’s own Carter Lavin, a highly effective transit advocate hereabouts. Take BART or a boat. [Book Passage]
Benefit for Refuse Fascism, 4 pm, The Starry Plough (Berkeley). Musicians, poets and artists in support of Refuse Fascism, who are building forces broadly to demand that the Trump Fascist regime must go now. ”All actions are non violent"—because the state, as we well know, claims a monopoly on violence. [IndyBay]
[West Bay Bonus Event the Later] Karl Ove Knausgaard: The School of Night with Rachel Kushner, 6pm, Calvary Presbyterian Church (Pac Heights). Knausgaard is deep into his Novel Era, but provincial non-Nords like ourselves have had to wait a few extra years to get our hands on English-language copies of his work–this book was originally released three years ago, and he’s published two novels since! [Eventbrite]
[Bonus West Bay Event the Final] Reading: Brian Ang, Jean Day, Robert Fitterman, 6pm, Et Al (The Mission). Robert Fitterman swims across the Bay to read with fellow assemblage poet Brian Ang (poems in the new issue of Zyzzyva) and steadfast Bay Area poet Jean Day who has kept the scene ticking from Berkeley. [Et al.]
A message from Bosque Palestina Libre in the Cholulteca and Volcanoes region + Postcard Making, 6:30pm, EastSide Arts Alliance (Deep East). Part of the ongoing Third Annual Enero Zapatista Bay Area Event. Representatives from the Cholulteca and Volcanes regions will send a message reporting on their ongoing struggle to practice autonomía rebelde, and the gathering will conclude with the sending of postcards from the Bay Area in support of Bosque Palestina Libre. [Eastside Arts Alliance]
In the Name of Love, 7pm, The Paramount (Downtown). A powerful celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision and legacy through the music of Sly & The Family Stone. Living Jazz presents Oakland’s largest civic and cultural event, returning to the historic Paramount Theatre for its 22nd anniversary. [The Paramount]
Noir City film festival: The Man I Love & Gilda double feature, 7pm & 9pm, Grand Lake Theater. Ida Lupino on the undercard, with Rita Hayworth doing "Put the Blame on Mame" as the main event. [Noir City]
Also: Sand Dune Habitat Restoration & Beach Cleanup at Encinal Beach (Alameda) / Soleé Darrell’s Show “Pure Passage” at the Bolinas Museum (West Marin) / Free Community Meal with the Black Cultural Zone (Deep East) / Dick Evans and Hannah Hindley, In the Shadow of the Bridge: Birds of the Bay Area at Book Passage (Corte Madera)
Sunday, January 18
An Invitation to Talk About Death and Dying, 10am, Local Economy (College Ave). Scientists in the ORB Lab have recently determined that the optimal time to discuss death with strangers is 10am on a Sunday. Join “death doulas” Tracy Tingle and Ka Yun Cheng to talk ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Write a poem to process it all, then read it at Can I Get A Witness? later today! [luma]
Community Conversations in Radical Public Imagining, 1pm, OMCA (The Lake). In conjunction with OMCA’s recent exhibit Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain, a community dialogue on the displacement of and resistance within the East Bay’s Black communities. But this is much more than just another exhibit talk: it includes four “acts” that build a narrative arc; there’s even an intermission! [OMCA]
The Wings and Ingeborg Holm, 1pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). If Friday’s screening of Erotikon set your heart aflame for silent Swedish cinema, this double feature (with more piano) will leave you crying out for your mormor. Mauritz (née Moshe) Stiller’s The Wings is widely cited as the first film explicitly portraying homosexuality, while Victor Sjöström’s Ingeborg Holm inspired a national conversation about poverty that continues to shape Swedish politics today. [BAMPFA]
Noir City: Humoresque & Young Man with a Horn double feature, 1pm & 3:45pm, 6pm & 8:15pm, Grand Lake Theater. The first is some schlocky stuff from Warner Bros., but it’s cool because John Garfield and Joan Crawford are in it. Fun fact: Garfield didn’t actually play the violin in this; the hands you see belong to two professional violists hiding from the camera, one with his arm run through the suit jacket’s right sleeve to work the bow, the other through the left sleeve to handle the fingering. Young Man with a Horn has Kirk Douglas playing a character based on Bix Beiderbecke, with Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, Hoagy Carmichael, and trumpet playing dubbed by Harry James. The music’s good, at least. [Noir City]
Revolution, Counter-Revolution, & Critical Hope, 3pm, Oakland Liberation Center (Fruitvale). A workshop on the history of resistance and organizing for liberation and against militarism in Sudan, with practical first steps for doing more than just posting “Free Sudan” on social media from time to time. [Insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Lone Glen reading series, 4pm, Et al. (The Mission). Usually a reading series in an East Bay backyard, it flew West for the winter. This afternoon, hear Stephanie Heit (writing where “neurodiversity meets ecopoetic immersion”), Petra Kuppers (writing where “True Crime meets ecopoetry at the level of the soil”), Eleni Stecopoulos (poetry as pharmakon), and series curator Alexandra Mattraw, the arch-wizard of collaboration. [Et al.]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Latter] Light Jacket #25, 4pm, Glen Canyon Park (West Bay Hills). Celebrate Noa Micaela Fields’s new book, E, just coming out from Nightboat, along with local writers/musicians Lovage Sharrock and Fennel Flowers (Rosemary Campbell). Wear a heavy jacket. [Insta]
Can I Get a Witness? Open Mic, 5pm, Air Temple Art Gallery (Jack London Sq). Deborah Marie hosts this regular opportunity to share art and emotions and space and time. Learn more at the KQED feature! [Insta]
Thomas Carnacki, Petra Zélie & S*Glass, 7pm, Shapeshifters Cinema. A three-set program of avant garde A/V club chaos: granular synthesis, disorienting video projections, cabbage and dental floss used as experimental instruments by the kind of artists who describe themselves as “a variously-sized entity” in their bios. Guaranteed to be a cool, weird time. [Square]
Also: Valqueeries Watch Party at Golden Ratio (Downtown) / Wintery Wonders Hike at Anthony Chabot Regional Park (The Hills) / Alameda Record Swap at Faction Brewing (The Island) / Lucas Cantor Santiago with Adam Becker: Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence at Book Passage (Corte Madera) / SMARTBOMB Community Art Market with Irrelevant Press at SF JAZZ (Civic Center) / Lorax Fan Club at Long Haul (Berkeley) / PLACE Farewell and Closing Party at Saint Columba Catholic Church (Golden Gate)
~!*^+Monday, January 19+^*!~
Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 5pm, Oakstop at 1721 Broadway (Uptown). Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman discuss their new history of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The league was an independent Black radical workers' formation in Detroit, active from 1968–71, and its history contains all sorts of lessons about leadership, union bureaucracy, spontaneous action, political education, and the necessity of putting out a cool newspaper. The event will also be livestreamed. [Action Network]
