Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, August 25–August 30
Bathers Library Summer Symposium (BAY-thurz LIE-brer-ree SUMM-errr sim-POZE-ee-umm) starts Wednesday, goes all weekend! ORB has two panels on Saturday and if you want to join in on Piedmont escapades, it starts now. There’s also workshops on poetry and singing and flyering, there’s talks on technology and illness and my favorite topic, What Is Book? Go to as many as you can handle, then sweat and wash it all off at Good Hot on Sunday. If it turns out you like jumping into the bay once in a while, you might appreciate the entire autumn of celebrating fifty years of women doing that a lot with the Dolphin Club. Also this fall, read Paradise Lost at Clio’s over four weeks: I just learned Milton thought rhyme was trite and constraining so went for raw meter instead, but you go and then come back tell me all the other things you learn about Heaven and Hell. If you want to know about the best movies, read Screen Slate’s Bay Area listings and there’s too much happening all over for us to keep track of all of it so Devon on the best local arts & culture and Christina on West Bay book business are here to help. Do your part to keep stories alive and connect the youth and elders: get your local AAPI teens to participate in oral history collection with Chinatown Records! You can buy second-hand any time but especially this weekend on Solano, watch two different plays (Miss Thang and Iphigenia) at Shotgun Players on Ashby, or if you’re staying in despite everything, listen on Wednesday night to ORB’s Alex Park live on an Oakland music & politics podcast. We’re in the favorite season now of any Bay Area local: it’s time for layers and book releases and maximalist event calendars. We’re very excited for ORB to ride that B like it deserves, unbuttoning our cardigans when we start to overheat.
Thanks everyone who came out to Eli’s: we’re so glad we get to do this thing with you all.—MS, XL, and all the rest of the gang
Tuesday, August 25
[West Bay Bonus Event] Bust a Move: Matt Dike, Delicious Vinyl & the Hip-Hop Hits that First Conquered Pop, 5:30pm, Book Passage at the Ferry Building (Embarcadero). There are people who like listening to music and then writing about it, and Peter Relic and Jeff Chang are two of those guys. In particular, West Coast hip hop, which has lots of words in it, so we'll allow it. Low brow yacht it over on the ferry to make an evening of it. [insta]
Food & Bev, Vol 4: Josey Baker Bread and Rize Up Bakery, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Catch up with your local sourdough influencers: West Bay bread guy Josey from Josey Baker Bread (when we were all keeping yeast as pets because pandemic lockdown, Josey's reels on sourdough became my tiny video coach), and Azikiwee Anderson “Z” from Rize Up Bakery, an Oakland farmers market loafmonger, who is working on a cookbook. [luma]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Conversation with West Marin Photographer Ilka Hartmann, 6pm, Mill Valley Library (Foot of Mount Tam). Ilka Hartmann photographed the Red Power takeover of Alcatraz, the oil spill clean up in Bolinas, and more iconic moments of protest as this recent Alta Journal profile explores. Come see her work and hear her speak to Bay Area counter culture history! You'll probably find Marthine in the prettiest library in the redwoods, wondering if it's true that the '70s ended half a century ago already. [insta]
The Tough & Tannic Book Club: From the Dust, 6:30pm, Book Society (Elmwood). BAMPFA is doing French Noir on screen, but don't forget about all the gritty detectives on the page. Local mystery appreciator and writer Chris Deitch leads a conversation about From the Dust, a rural moody brood of a mystery. [Book Society]
Bay Area Film Premiere of In Times Such as These, 8:45pm, Grand Lake Theatre (The Lake-ish). Berkeley technically desegregated in 1968 and has always had one giant high school, but everyone knows that there's what looks like equality and then there's equity. This short doc about contemporary Black women leaders at BUSD looks at an ongoing problem of helping Black kids succeed in educational systems not necessarily built for that purpose. 7pm showing sold out, a later one just got added! [eventbrite]
Wednesday, August 26
[Science of Intelligence Seminar] What does it mean to learn a World Model?, 12 noon, Weill Hall (Cal). So I am mostly including this because I like the shade that the neuroscientists are throwing at the computer guys in this seminar description. And look, I don't know if this is technically a class that's open only to students or not but it's listed in Cal's calendar without any notes and I like to make Cal put the public in their University. Cal is opening their academic year by AI-maxxing and I had an interesting chat this summer with a former twitter tech guy who now is a VC about the absence of a Sand Hill Road equivalent in Berkeley, and I wonder if Cal sees a chance to change that in this new boom. Keep your eyes on the labs and the money, especially where they converge. [UCB]
GND Happy Hour feat. Thea Riofrancos, 3pm, Two Pitchers Brewing Company (Uptown). Drink with the optimists! Green New Deal happy hour with Thea Riofrancos, author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, which looks at lithium mining in particular and doesn't sound all that optimistic about green infrastructure actually, but maybe your pint of beer is still half full if you have enough of them. [evite]
Reporting on AI: Ethics, Accountability and Human Impact, 4pm, UC Berkeley Journalism (Cal). Hang out with local tech journalists Garance Burke, Khari Johnson and Lam Thuy Vo as they talk about their work as investigative reporters interrogating the companies that are pushing AI and algorithms down our throats. [UCB]
City on the Edge: How Tech Remade San Francisco, 6pm, Book Society (Elmwood). My goodness, talking politics at Book Society! Jonathan Weber, author of City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco, and Frances Dinkelspiel, co-founder of Berkeleyside will look over at the West Bay and how it became a center for tech and its money (short version: '08 crash meant Wall Street got out of mortgages and all the finance guys moved from NYC out to SF to pour money into start ups, were Manhattan guys so didn't want to live in the suburbs, and so they took over the city). But I am sure there's more and you should pour a big glass of wine and hear about it. [Book Society]
SOLD OUT Let's Talk About AI: A Conversation with W. Kamau Bell, 6pm, J-School (Cal). Not sure why Kamau's weighing in with the Dean of the J-School but ChatGPT's qualifications can be described with the phrase “my friend in the improv group” so there might be some unexpected overlap. On the other hand, it's sold out — so go in for the deep dive to Khari, Garance, and Lam earlier instead. (I will say that in my experience, sold out rarely means that for real anywhere and you can usually go in on standby if you are patient and a little persistent). [eventbrite]
WAITLIST Tiny Lessons From Obituaries: Stories That Could Change Your Life, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Some of us want to live big big lives in order to feel like this whole breathe-in-breathe-out thing we’re doing has purpose, but meaning is where you make it. Find it in the stories people tell after we’re gone, with Vanessa Li and Mary McGreevy. Say hi to Marthine here and at the Bathers opening after. [luma]
Bathers Summer Symposium Opening Night, 6pm, UNTITLED VOL.2 (Temescal Alley). Brittany Newell & Sasha Fuentes will read, Eternal Now will provide the soundtrack, there will be Art and Art People! [Bathers]
WHB August Book Club: The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford, 6:30pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). Jean Stafford, who E.B. White singled out as an exemplar of good prose in The Elements of Style, is enjoying yet another upswing in public recognition. Did you know she left her entire estate to her housecleaner?? You can celebrate the waning hours of Hot/Lonely Stafford Summer at Womb House with this discussion of her 1947 novel about growing up across the isolating spectrum of the American West, The Mountain Lion. Be sure to tip your Book Domme well. [eventbrite]
Sultry Sessions—Awkward, 6:30pm, Zanzi Oakland (Uptown). Sometimes sex is all hot and sultry but come on, we love the awkward stories too. Like that guy who called you on faking an orgasm and knew what he was talking about but still, RUDE, and also, if you know your way around women's anatomy that well, you can solve this problem Niall. Tell the truth but tell it slant and use your three to five minutes very, very well. See also. [eventbrite]
Collapse Press at Lyrics & Dirges, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). Small poetry press Collapse Press presents local poets they publish: Kim Shuck, Debby Segal, Han Raschke, Richard Loranger, Taneesh Kaur, and Paul Corman-Roberts. Support Local Poetry! [facebook]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Vagabonds author talk: Decolonizing Money & Community Safety in the Fourth World War, 7pm, Medicine for Nightmares (The Mission). Julio Linares is coming from Berlin to launch his new book: Decolonizing Money. Super radical talk, and at times theoretical, but Julio will tell compelling histories of people who have organized value differently than what we now know, along with the super legit, brilliant folks who wrote Community Safety in the Fourth World War. You’ll definitely catch Cassie Thornton, ORB agent of revolution and Chair of the Feminist Economics Department, here with Julio today and at Tamarack later in the week. [Medicine for Nightmares]
No Straight Lines, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). In the 1954, the mainstream publishing industry adopted a strict anti-LGBT censorship policy in response to books like The Seduction of the Innocent, which accused titles like Batman and Wonder Woman of the high crimes of subtly and insidiously acknowledging the existence of homosexuals. The Comics Code Authority managed to push queer comics artists to the margins for decades, but ultimately failed miserably. Today, the world of comics is arguably more queer than any other part of the publishing industry (yes, including small press poetry). Even Robin finally came out as bi a few years ago. No Straight Lines, the directorial feature debut of documentary veteran Vivian Kleiman, helps chart this transition through conversations with pathbreaking artists like Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For, Fun Home) and Howard Cruse (Gay Comix). This special screening, fittingly, ends with an in-person conversation between beloved weirdo UC Berkeley professor Mel Y. Chen and Kleiman herself. [bampfa]
Also: Europe, the U.S. & the Future of the Transatlantic Relationship at The Faculty Club (Cal) / Women's Wednesday at Dear John (The Laurel)
Thursday, August 27
Bathers Summer Symposium: Daytime Dinner, 1pm at TwoTwo (Grand Ave). Eat your feelings and each other’s minds only. Then ramp up to workshopping and attending talks at Bathers HQ at 5:30pm. [Bathers]
Thursday Features, 4pm, Tarea Hall Pittman South Branch (Berkeley). So the listing had three movies without any kind of indication as to whether they're going to show all three or just one of them, but they all look good so if you want to watch a crime thriller at the library, today might be your day: You could get Baby Driver, The Usual Suspects, or The Town — two Spaceys and an Affleck, if you're counting. [BPL]
Writing the Liminal Body, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Ali Lawrence leads a writing workshop for women on the edge of a nervous breakdown I mean parenting teens I mean the sales opportunity that is perimenopause I mean that midlife confrontation of mortality I mean knowing everything is changing, thickening, thinning, heating, dissolving all of the time, for everyone. [luma]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Paris Portraits, 6pm, SFMOMA (SoMa). I put this on the calendar because it was Stein related and I wanted to prep you for the Bathers Panel ORB is hosting on Oakland's most famous Moderniste, but then realized it's a live interpretation of one of the most offbeat books Heyday has published, which I found on the shelves of Green Apple one day and then in the Heyday archive room: Paris Portraits: Stories of Picasso, Matisse, Gertrude Stein, and Their Circle, by Harriet Lane Levy. Harriet Lane Levy who moved to Paris with her friend and West Bay neighbor Alice B. Toklas tells her stories of life in the Parisian salons: compare/contrast with Gertrude's later Autobiography and Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. [sfmoma]
Transit Book Club Salon: Slow Elephants of Milan, 6:30pm, Transit Books (West Berkeley). Head over to the sweet scene at Strawberry Creek Park to hear executive editor Lizzie Davis and publisher Adam Levy discuss Transit's new short story collection Slow Elephants of Milan, translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman. "Bizarre and brilliant" says one reviewer of the Argentinian fictions of Ángel Bonomini, and even better, Borges liked 'em. [luma]
The Family Tree, 6:30pm, Grand Lake Theatre (The Lake-ish). Filipino-American filmmaker Cedric Crisologo explores themes of grief and psychological turmoil through the story of Shelton, recently widowed, who pins all his need for an anchor on a bonsai tree. The director said this started in concept as a horror movie but turned into one about hope, which is a trajectory I want for all of us right about now. [GLT]
The Book of Light Poetry Series: Leeann Pickrell: TSUNAMI, 6:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda The Once and Future Peninsula). Local poet Leeann Pickrell breaks out of line breaks and into prose for her memoir: Tsunami. Vignettes of what it was like to survive the 2004 tsunami and its aftermath become "impressionistic, sharp, and riveting" says Foreword Reviews. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] In Bed with the Right Presents: How to Become a Silicon Valley Creep (In 10 Easy Steps), 6:30pm, Cafe Du Nord (West Bay). Podcasters Moira Donegan (forever shero of the Shitty Media Men list) and Adrian Daub lead you into the depths of hell and ORB’s Megan Wachspress will be in the audience if you need a Virgil to guide you back out of West Bay weirdness safe home to the East Bay. Will Megan wear her sequins again, like at Eli’s? They’re shiny! [ticketweb]
On Speculative Futures, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). This is the literary event of the week outside of everything Bathers!! Radhika Singh will be going to various places in the Bay while she's here, but we know Oakland is the true home for a book of queer sci-fi communist anti-imperialism, so come out to Clio's tonight. Alexis Pauline Gumbs says Singh's new novel of ideas (and also of Punjab, Queens, and plants) Earthly Playing Field is "a library of revolutionary possibility." In conversation with Omar Zahzah because Free Palestine. [eventbrite]
Book Talk: Thea Riofrancos, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, 7pm, Social Sciences Building (Cal). Hey, in case you didn't get to hang out over beers with Thea on Wednesday, you can slip onto campus and learn about extraction of rare earth metals and ways we can ensure a just transition despite, you know, capitalism and governments trying to gum up the works. Supply chain freaks, geographers, and green energy girlies and guylies: this one's for you. [UCB]
Also: How to Host a Free Breakfast Program at Location on RSVP (West Oakland) / Repulsive Reads: Herculine by Grace Byron at North Branch (North Berkeley) / Dopamine, Doomscrolling, & Digital Design at Lost and Found Cocktail Bar (West Bay) / Graphic Novel Group at Rockridge Branch OPL (College Ave) / The Poet’s Bookshelf Reads Incendiary Arts by Patricia Smith at Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown) / QTPOC Book Club reads The Sons of El Rey by Alex Espinoza at Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown)
Friday, August 28
Black August Film Screening: The Strike, 5pm, Eastside Cultural Center (Deep East). Solitary confinement in the "Restrictive Housing Unit" is among the cruelest practices in the California state prison system, and the prisoner-led 2013 hunger strike to curtail it was among the greatest moments in the state's prison rights movement. This special screening of the 2024 documentary about the eponymous strike is accompanied by a writing workshop, a prison letter writing station, performances, and a community dinner. Be sure to check out the classic anthology Hell is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement to learn more about what we are all fighting for. [insta]
The Indie Media Renaissance, 6pm, Bathers Library (Telegraph). Ana Tuazon brings together your local indie rags, Bay Area Current, Oakland Review of Books (hi Tommy!), and Coyote Media, to talk about what the hell we’re doing and why and how. It’s an ecosystem, and we like to go to each other’s parties, for one thing. But find out more! [Bathers]
Poetry!, 6:30pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Went last week, the poets packed the room, I bet they do it again this Friday. Readers are Valerie Hsiung bringing her new hybrid poem/novel from Nightboat, The pedestrian, in which "the poet/speaker is a detective is a trickster is a passage" says a blurber; Oakland poet 최 Lindsay (their book Transverse blurbed by Brandon Shimoda, Lyn Hejinian, and Trisha Low); and West Bay poet Talia Fox comes over too, and you can blurb her at the afterparty we hear is to follow. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event the Rockridgest] Annie Lowrey & Ezra Klein, 7:30pm, Sydney Goldstein Theater (Hayes Valley). Husband and wife journalists talk to each other about government red tape, and whether they can tie up some of their thirds with it instead. [City Arts & Lectures]
[West Bay Bonus Event the Daly Cityest] Solidarity Cinema, 8pm, KALW (FiDi). Three short films by queer Filipino filmmakers on the medium screen! Yakap (dir. Margo Manalo) is a coming out story, Trixie (dir. Allen A. Prodigalidad) is a coming of age story, and Oliver (dir. Nick Deocampo) is a go go dancing story that has a note that it's both very gay and very explicit, so enjoy along with the tamarind soup being served! [eventbrite]
Also: Most Best Open Mic at KALW (West Bay)
Saturday, August 29
Ceramics Scavenger Hunt, 9am, The Lake (The Town). Merritt Ceramics is playing hide and seek with you, and I saw this on a pole while pasting up some ORB party posters, so it goes on the calendar obviously. Have fun funding mugs and bowls and other breakables! [insta]
Wildchoir Farm Workday + Community Sing, 9:30am, Planting Justice's Mother Farm (Deep North Oakland). Weed, plant, do the work at the farm that supports formerly incarcerated people connecting with plants and community, and then sing together the songs of protest that have held working people together for a long time. [Google Doc]
BOSS Black August: Arc of Liberation Commemoration, 11am, Oakland City Hall (Downtown). Gather intergenerationally to celebrate the legacy of Black August: resistance, solidarity, and Marxist analysis that begins from inside prison walls and continues outside. Khariyyah Shabazz hosts, artists speak, elders are honored, and George Jackson is remembered. Listen to this playlist to get in the mood for revolution. [BOSS]
Summer Meetup with Affinity Lit Collectives, 12 noon, Two Pitchers Beer (Uptown). The Bay Area Book Festival has affinity groups for readers and writers led by Kristina Canales (she's the author of a queer jellyfish erotic novel, and you are not), poet MK Chavez, and novelist Michaila Oberhoffer. The three groups merging for one night only, kind of like a jellyfish and their lover. [insta]
Poetry for the People, 12 noon, The Mural House (West Oakland). A Black August block party in the Bottoms with poetry, free books, face painting, and more! Party starts at noon, performances at 3 pm. [insta]
Xicana Moratorium Block Party, 12 noon, EastSide Arts Alliance (Deep East). Mark ten years of The Xicana Moratorium Block Party, celebrating the youth-led Brown Beret resistance to war and colonialism that was the Chicano Moratorium and giant community protest in Los Angeles in 1970. Hang out with Oakland's Mexican immigrant community alongside the Fruitvale History Project, La Onda Bajita, tacos, tres leches, screen printing, and poets of course! [ESAA]
Edit Your Town: The Oakland Wiki Edit-a-thon, Analog Edition, 1pm, Main Library (The Lake-ish). The Oakland LocalWiki is a treasure of a website full of answers to "what's the deal with that line of palm trees on Ninth" and this delightful page of meta-wiki discourse. Ask “What was Oakland like in 1951?” and then find the answers on microfilm. BYO Laptop, and if you like history, don't forget to send an email to the OPL administration about local history expert and former librarian Dorothy Lazard's event being cancelled. The thing about technological innovation is the inevitable lossiness as you transfer information from one medium to another. Entropy! It's everywhere! [OPL]
Oakland Chinatown: Cultural Resilience & Resistance, 1:30pm, Exact meeting point sent after registration (Chinatown). OHA walking tour of our local Chinatown so you can learn some not that ancient history about migration flows, anti-Asian racism, and how the Bay Area has connected to Asia for more than a century. Maybe you can also buy a bouquet of flowers and find Oakland's famous people doing the same. [humanitix]
Seize Piedmont: The Art Project, 1:45pm, Bathers Library (Telegraph). Artist Cassie Thornton and the Oakland Review of Books are curating a class war. Come learn the history of enclaves within cities hoarding resources at this teach in and join in brainstorming the shape to come of the "Seize Piedmont Community Art + Design Perennial” that will forever continue. [Bathers]
America 250 Anniversary, 2026: The Celebration Continues, 2pm, African American Museum and Library at Oakland (Old Oakland). Watch a film of a fashion show by Oakland designer Henry Delton Williams, whose atelier served Motown stars and who is the inventor of the "jazket." [OPL]
[West Bay Bonus Event] W(h)orl'd Action reading, 2:00pm, Artists Television Access (The Mission). Laura Moriarty invited everyone to solve contemporary poetry last weekend, and now to mark the closing of Laura's W(h)orl'd Action installation at Right Window, the poets are going to complicate the situation by making even more poetry. Readers: Susan Gevirtz ("Is person place or person" she asks and we all want to know), Louisiana by way of West Oakland poet Tonya M. Foster (I really like this section of her poem "In the After"), Violet Spurlock (In Lieu of Solutions from Futurepoem, Tamarack Friday poetry organizer and host), Diane Ward (poet turned geographer, we vibe reported her Bathers reading last year) and Laura herself, who walks, but divinely. [insta]
Nolawit Ketema + Rachel Dunn, 2pm, Claremont Branch (Fancy Berkeley). The 2026 Berkeley Youth Poet Laureate, Nolawit Ketema, and Vice Youth Poet Laureate, Rachel Dunn, read their poetry then sit for an interview and discussion. There will be zines! [BPL]
Creating Utopia: Designing an Ideal Society, 2pm, Lakeview Branch (The Lake). I saw a flyer on a pole, and the word "Utopia" is on it so here you go. Everyone's utopia is a little different, but this one cited Elinor Ostrom and David Graeber, so at least we share a baseline. Come ready to think, workshop, and imagine what a liberated, collaborative, truly democratic world looks like, with fellow Oakland dreamers. [A Flyer on a Pole on Grand]
People Explain Gertrude Stein to Me and The Other Way Around, 3:00pm, Bathers Library (Telegraph). ORB editors Pauline Kerschen and Marthine Satris with honorary ORBiters for one hour only Paul Ebenkamp and Gertrude Stein. Alternative titles considered: Gertrude Stein Explains People to Me, I Explain People to Gertrude Stein, Paul Explains Pauline to People, and Pauline Explains Me to Gertrude Stein, or People People Explain Explain Gertrude Gertrude Stein Stein to to Me Me. But mostly we’ll talk about the language play of Stein and also her connection to Oakland. And hopefully we’ll all leave a little less befuddled, or more, if you prefer. [Bathers Library]
Arboretum Cycle, 3pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Seven silent short films the subject of which is light and the location of which is the West Bay's GGP arboretum. Sitting under the trees and looking up at the sun seems like something you can just go do but if you want a curated reproduction of that experience, here you go. [bampfa]
Open Door, 4pm, Confloptus (Chinatown). Show by artists from the Winslow House Project July 2025 cohort, usually in the Oakland part of Vallejo, but today in the Vallejo part of Oakland. [insta]
Mic Check Oakland, 5pm, Cafe Xochi (Eastlake). Share a poem, story, song, in round one, if the audience likes you, you get to perform a second piece. First ten folks to sign up only, with a little honeypot prize at the end for the winner! [eventbrite]
Book Launch: Birth Language by Aimee Suzara, 5 pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Local Filipina poet Aimee Suzara is fully dilated and her new collection of poetry (pubbed by Tia Chucha) is emerging with an amphibious squall full of so many languages! With back up dancer-poets David Maduli and Yaccaira Salvatierra, too. [Nomadic]
Tongues Untied, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Marlon Riggs’s poetic documentary about Black men loving Black men brings together the words of gay poets, personal testimony, rap tableaux, dramatic sequences, and archival footage. [bampfa]
Julio Linares: Decolonizing Money, 7pm Tamarack (Downtown). Cassie says: “In this conversation, we will speak about the abolition of prisons and the abolition of the dollar in tandem, and observe the diffractions that emerge. What would it take to live in a world where wealth is shared in common? Where those who care for and defend life have the right to the means of livelihood, unconditionally just because they exist?” This is for everyone who hates that the world is being treated as if it is an economy and not a planet, which is all of us. [Tamarack]
GHOSTS ACROSS THE SEA · A Ghost Festival Drink Night, 8pm, Location upon RSVP (Oakland). Now Place comes to the East Bay, hauntingly: "Some hide in the accents we are losing. in the names we’ve learned to let others mispronounce, Some followed us through customs and never left. People cross the ocean. Ghosts cross with them." Listen to stories from the zine reimagining the Chinese hundred ghost tradition, Ghosts Across the Sea. [luma]
Also: Drawing Meetup at Temescal Park (Temescal) / Bon Marché 2nd Hand Market: La Fête de la Rentrée at Abrams Claghorn Gallery (Solano Ave) / Berkeley Frog Fest at Genetics & Plant Biology Building south lawn (Cal) / Luminesce Lounge: A Ballroom Function at SOMArts (West Bay) / The Cure Ate Her at Church of Clown (West Bay)
Sunday, August 30
Suds n Stories Bookish Car Wash, 11am, 100 Grand Avenue (Uptown). $25 will get you a scrub down by some bookworms and all the proceeds go to Nomadic Bookstore. People have tried the cafe+bookstore combo before, but his might be the first ever carwash+bookstore. [insta]
Cape and Cowl Con, 11am, Faction Brewing (Alameda, A Peninsula in Our Hearts). At some point (nobody can agree on the year) ComicCon grew too large, too expensive, and too Marvel Movie Industrial Complex to attract many rank-and-file comics folks. But out of the comics supernova along the San Diego waterfront emerged a shimmering constellation of smaller cons stretching across the continent. Oakland's own Cape and Cowl Comics (winner of the 2023 Will Eisner Spirit of Retailing Award, if that means anything to you) is once again hosting their own con, with FREE admission. The lineup of panelists looks great this year, including Bay Area comics legend Julia Wertz (Bury Me Already (It's Nice Down Here)) and Pornsak Pichetshote, who has recently been reinventing Green Arrow as a mysterious serial killer targeting billionaires. [capeandcowlcomics]
Revolutionary Poetry Reading Circle: Liminal Spaces, 12 noon, The Park That Already Exists Around Lake Merritt (The Lake). Circle up poets, ready to read and talk and write about liminality and blurred lines? Host Sohini and Yoko Tamada, poet and filmmaker, will help. [insta]
Rooted in Solidarity: A Jewish Anti-Zionist Arts Showcase, 2pm, South Berkeley Senior Center (Berkeley). Anti-Zionist Jews are raising funds for the Oakland People's Arms Embargo with PUPPETS of course. I bet these were the ones Coyote Calendar maker Reo sang along with on the topic that ACAB in Yiddish recently. The puppets will unite us all. [insta]
Something in Our Pocket, 6:30pm, Tally Ho Bookstore (Piedmont the Avenue). We don't know what this is but an artist named epli will lead an activity and you can bring a friend. Really curious what you will all end up doing in the cutest little bookstore! [insta]
Also: Dimond Park Shines! at Dimond Park (The Dimond District) / Stand By Me 40th Anniversary at The New Parkway Theater (Uptown) / Jazz on Sunday at Golden Gate Branch (San Pablo Corridor) / SOLD OUT Eyes Wide Shut at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley)