Today is the last day of CODEX for the next two years – dash over to the Marriott and smell that paper and ink. The Dictée events at BAMPFA are in a lull this week (did you know more than 75% of all research requests at BAMPFA are for Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s materials? Some hard-nosed reporting from our SF Review of Whatever friend Kelly revealed this to me, and then I double-checked that, responsibly), but there’s a brand new gallery in Eastlake for whom Dictée “operates as both reference and method,” and they have a show up, so keep on exploring the boundaries of language and geography until more happens back over at the museum. Later this week you can spend a whole two days on ASS play (Anarchist Skill Share you cute lil perv) at 924 Gilman, or moon around online thinking the unthinkable and writing the unreadable in Small Press Traffic’s poetry workshop. Vow to send your brief essays to the Bather’s mini mag, your vibe reports to us, and everything else to the brand new Rock Paper Scissors Collective’s “artists fanzine” Shoot! to be published monthly! If you didn’t catch it because it was buried in last week’s calendar, we tracked Justin down and he pronounced “Bather’s” exactly the way you’d expect it to sound, and he has no idea why such linguistic anarchy’s been loosed upon the world, but we are happy to have played a part in making it worse. More rain is coming, flowers bloomed hella early, petals and raindrops will slick our sidewalks soon. And ORB might actually publish books things this week, so if you’re feeling thirsty, know that soon you will be slaked and satisfied (though be sure your account is set to receive "The Full Review" if you want it in your inbox). -MS, XL, TC
Tuesday, February 10
Courtland Creek Community Clean-Up, noon, Corner of Brookdale and Courtland Ave AKA Sumpter Way (Courtland Watershed). Creek still not clean, even after Barbara Lee cut the ribbon, what the fuck. Somebody needs to look into this, there’s got to be– oh, I see there’s an industrial civilization spewing externalities into it, ok, we’re going to need to do this more than once a month. [Melrose]
The Rise of the Strongman Presidency, 4pm, Social Sciences Building (Cal). A book about how come the GOP got really into having a dictator for president. Alt text: Hoover Institution scholars discovering that the fruit of their tree is bad. In other news, rain wet and Carl Schmitt a nazi. [UCB]
May Day in the Time of Trump, 5:30pm, Oakland Community Space (Uptown). Watch labor historian Fred Glass’s short film “We Mean to Make Things Over: A History of May Day” and plan for a day of action on May 1. We can have a general strike, if we want it! [East Bay DSA]
Matt Biggar: Connected to Place, with Scott Sampson, 6pm, Pegasus Books Downtown. Move from corporate capitalism to place-based systems that regenerate nature, communities, and local economies, all with just one book. [Pegasus]
Silent Book Club Oakland, 6:30pm, Temescal Brewing (Temescal). A happy hour for introverts (I’ve heard of those reclusive creatures), where everyone can ignore each other in favor of the much more exciting life of the page. [eventbrite]
Octopuses, Ecstasy, and Human Transformation, 7pm, Clio’s (Lake). I think it’s nice that mollusks can do party drugs. Neuroscientist Gül Dölen gave octopuses MDMA and she’ll be chatting with Joe Dolce about molecules and what they do to all kinds of sentient creatures. [eventbrite]
Also: Sashiko Stitching Basics at Rockridge Branch OPL (College Ave) / Reading the History of Armenian-Kurdish Relations and Intercommunal Violence from an Environmental Perspective at Cal (Berkeley)
Wednesday, February 11
No Bioengineering Seminar Today, none of the day, not at Cal (definitely not in Berkeley). None. NOT HAPPENING. We will neither bio nor engineer today nor any other day. [UCB]
Shape of Thought: A Hands-On Display of Artist Books, 2pm, The Bancroft Library (Cal). It’s been a whole day since Codex ended and the Bancroft is here to hold you as you come down, and they’ll even let you touch the books a little. [UC B]
Visiting Author Tomas Moniz, 2:30 pm, Saint Mary’s College (Tule Fog Side of the Hills). East Bay novelist and forever rad dad will discuss his novel All Friends Are Necessary and to make the afternoon extra sweet there are cookies and coffee for everyone. [insta]
The Essential Work of Feeding Others: Connecting Food Labor in Public and Private Spaces, 3:30pm, McCone Hall (Cal). In Will Work for Food, the double-barrelled geographer Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern points out that an ethical food system means caring for the humans growing the food and also that keeping children from melting down with hunger every two hours is grueling, taxing, hair-pulling WORK. [UC B]
Rockridge Teen Advisory Board, 4pm, Rockridge Library (College Ave). Give teens an ounce of freedom and they’ll start running your library. [ OPL]
Film Screening and Conversation: The Alabama Solution, 5pm, Grand Lake Theatre (The Lake). When this documentary about systematic abuse and murder in the Alabama state prison system screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival a few months ago, the audience was initially stunned into a silence as the credits rolled. This screening helps cut through that silence with a panel discussion, albeit with a somewhat dubious selection of panelists, which includes a Contra Costa County prosecutor and the secretary of California’s prison system. JFC, Dorsey Nunn is RIGHT HERE, people. [eventbrite]
The Writers’ Meet Up, 5 pm, Kinfolx (Uptown). Scriptwriters making movies on the page, where they should stay. (There used to be two bookstores in the West Bay dedicated to selling scripts and plays only and I remember reading the script for Four Weddings and a Funeral -- it was so much funnier and better without Andie MacDowell in it.) [insta]
DIY: Black Culture Bookmark Making, 5:30pm, Golden Gate Branch Library (Golden Gate). Make tiny collages of Black heroes to mark your place and you’ll get to use the library’s laminator. [OPL]
A Vita and Virginia Valentine's Party, 6pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). A romance, a friendship, a literary inspiration – will you find your one and only love triangle at the feminist bookstore? [eventbrite]
George Orwell & Russia, 7pm, Clio's (The Lake). A reception history of Orwell looking at how he understood Soviet Russia and how Russians have understood his books, by Masha Karp, the translator of Animal Farm. Totalitarianism is roaring back, so probably a good time to reread Animal Farm and 1984 in whatever language you choose. [eventbrite]
Model, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Model (1981) is Frederick Wiseman doing his fly-on-the-wall thing inside the Zoli modeling agency. It’s a good one. There’s an excruciating scene in which a pantyhose model is made to adjust her leg inch by inch for a composite effect that will last no more than a few seconds in the final version of the TV commercial. We’re on what might as well be a movie set, with an assistant director and sound people and various stagehands scurrying around. Wiseman, his own camera trained on the commercial director’s, is having a bit of metatextual fun here, and the commercial director gets in on the action, too, delivering a gassy speech to the model—Apollonia van Ravenstein (whom he calls “Apples”)— about “the proscenium of the 30-second commercial" and the task of compressing so much meaning into so little time. As with hosiery ads, so with observational documentary films: It takes a lot of work (and workers) to make something that might seem like no work at all. [BAMPFA]
Also: Repair Advice with Fixit Clinic at Temescal Branch Library (Temescal) / Needlework Circle at the Main Library (The Lakeish) / Parenting On Purpose at Books Inc (Alameda) / Piece by Piece: Celebrating African American Contemporary Art at Dimond Library (Dimond) / The Bike Fix at Martin Luther King Jr. Branch (Deep East) / Write On! A Three-Part Writing Workshop Series at Book Society (College Ave)
Thursday, February 12
Introduction to Finding Grants, 10am, Main Library OPL (The Lakeish). They’re out there, and considering the government isn’t funding anything but ICE any more, you probably need to get on this. [OPL]
The Loft Hour, 12 noon, Arts Research Center (Cal). Prof. Chris Batterman Cháirez (ethnomusicologist) on indigenous music from Michoacan, Cathy Lu (ceramicist) on Chinese-American identity, and Alex Saum-Pascual, digital poet and Spanish lit prof, will somehow bring it all together. [UC Berkeley].
Baby Brigade Film Screening: Is This Thing On?, 3:45pm, The New Parkway (Northgate/Koreatown). As their marriage unravels, Alex and Tess face middle age and divorce, which is the perfect movie to bring your new baby to and say, But that will never happen to us. [New Parkway]
“Wuthering Heights,” 4pm, Grand Lake Theater (Grand Lake); 8:55pm, The New Parkway (Northgate/Koreatown). Horny stuff from Emerald Fennell, late of Saltburn, that will go down, so to speak, as the movie that got the phrase “cummy bathwater" into the New Yorker. Margot Robbie is Cathy, and Jacob Elordi is Heathcliff, a casting choice that suggests the adaptation will not be honoring the interracial cuckold fantasy at the heart of Emily Brontë’s novel. As an official matter, the movie is called “Wuthering Heights”, with quotation marks at either end, gripping the italicized title like a pair of hairy palms. You can see it at Grand Lake or at The New Parkway, but you have to make finger quotes no matter the location. [Grand Lake Theater, The New Parkway]
Author Reading: JaNay Brown-Wood, 4pm, Alameda Free Library (The Island That Was Once A Peninsula). Celebrate the natural beauty of Black hair with This Hair Belongs, by the Central Valley professor and award-winning author, plus the first 25 families get a free copy of the book to take home. [AFL]
Illuminate Literary Arts Magazine Launch Party, 5:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda, Temporary Island). The youth want to make magazines, and if ever there was a time to get kids off the internet and into making culture together, now seems like it. [eventbrite]
Meet the Author: Craig A. Johnson, How to Talk to Your Son about Fascism, 6pm, Main Library OPL (Lakeish). Start now, don’t stop, because the rightwing online recruitment of men is real and premised on turning feminist gains for society into perceived threats to young men and telling them that violence will get them back on top. [OPL]
[Bonus West Bay Event] Beloved By the Bay: A Romance Panel, 6:30pm, Mechanics' Institute (Financial District). Organized in collaboration with The Bay Area Book Festival, Taleen Voskuni, Sophie Wan, and Mara Williams will be moderated by Jasmine Guillory -- sparks will fly and everyone will get a happy ending. [Mechanics' Institute Library]
Zyzzyva Issue 131 Release Party, 6:30pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Issue launch with Tomas Moniz (you had coffee with him at Saint Mary’s), Suzanne Rivecca (author of Death Is Not An Option), and Maw Shein Win (poet laureate of El Cerrito, Omnidawn poet) at the mic, with Oscar the Eminent presiding, and all your Oakland literary types in the audience too. [luma]
Jasmin ‘Iolani Hakes in conversation with Susan Kiyo Ito, 7pm, City Lights Bookstore (North Beach). On The Pōhaku -- a new novel of historical magical realism rooted in research about multigenerational connections between California and Hawaii, going back to before the Gold Rush, by a local novelist with Hawaiian roots. Good interview with Hakes at Electric Literature on it all. [City Lights]
Two English Girls, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Sold out. Quel dommage. Truffaut returns to the world of Jules and Jim. Jean-Pierre Léaud has affairs with sisters Kika Markham and Stacey Tendeter, and some tenderly wrought 1970s French stuff ensues. An underrated Truffaut movie. [BAMPFA]
[Bonus Bonus West Bay Event] You’re Going to Die: Poetry, Prose, & Everything Goes Open Mic, 7:30pm, The Lost Church SF (North Beach/Russian Hill). You’re alive now, and eventually you won’t be, so bring all the sorrow and awe and poetry of that to share in a space for grief and gratitude. [insta]
Also: Reckoning the Racial Reckoning: A Post-Mortem and Way Forward at Berkeley Law (Cal) / Photography Workshop and Scavenger Hunt with Black Film Guild at OMCA (The Lake) / The Return of Ancient Epic: The Egyptian Book of the Dead at Clio's Books (The Lake) / Discussion with Tekoşîna Anarşîst on the current phase of the Rojava Revolution at Tamarack (Downtown)
Friday, February 13
Beat Makers: Oakland School for the Arts, 3:30pm, Golden Gate Branch OPL (Golden Gate). Catch the newest new local talents -- local young rappers and beat makers do their thing. [OPL]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Artists Live Here: Community Convening, 4pm, SOMArts Cultural Center (SOMA). Never not remembering the ‘70s, because when the institutions fail to serve the people, artists make their own. Come together to name recent losses and imagine our way out. Stella Lochman, who is the most San Franciscan person in the whole damn West Bay, and I will see you there. [eventbrite]
The Hate You Give, 5pm, 414 13th St., Floor 2, Oakland (Downtown). The teenagers of Urban Peace Movement’s social justice committee are screening this 2018 movie to drum up interest in their Stop Spraying Our Kids campaign. They’re calling for an end to the use of pepper spray in Alameda County juvie facilities. Read more about their campaign here or just go watch the movie and ask. [insta]
Tritone Poetry, 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). With a.avery (ungoogleable -- top results were AI slop answer “Avery Anna, a rising country-pop singer known for confessional songs and her album let go letters,” then Amazon’s “A. Avery - Humorous Erotica / Erotic Literature & Fiction,” “A, Avery, A fragrance with soft velvet notes” and "People also ask, Is it Avery or Avory?”), Jacob Kahn who his publisher declares is “smart yet chill,” and Carrie Hunter (whose collage-y poems are “nimble, punch-smart and quick” says rob mcclennan, and he would know). [Tamarack Poetry!]
Opening Reception: What We Sow, 6:30pm, Junior Center of Art & Science (The Lake). The streets of Oakland provide the material for the “Trash Falcons,” a collective of local artists who are noticing overlooked and discarded Oakland, and asking us to look at the treasures they've found. God I love the power of attention -- just noticing a city turns us all into art, artists, the place itself. [Junior Center]
Happy Together, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). More like “UNhappy and NOT Together” because this shit is sold out. [BAMPFA]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Depths of Wikipedia Live, 7pm, August Hall (Union Square). It’s all that’s left of the good internet. Hang out on bluesky if the city is too far to go for more internet. [ticketmaster 🤢]
East Bay Yesterday Has Pictures From The Sky But You Can’t See Them, Again, 8pm, La Peña Cultural Center (south Berkeley, north Oakland). Second time Liam planned to show you a bunch of aerial photography from the East Bay, yesterday--because the first time it sold out--and again it has sold out. People get excited when the podcast goes IRL. [LP]
Also: Language & AI Conference 2026 at Cal (Berkeley) / The Bike Fix at the 81st Avenue Branch OPL (Fitchburg) / Black Anime at the 81st Avenue Branch OPL (Fitchburg) / Lez Wrestle at Crybaby (Uptown) / Let’s Make Love Letters at Local Economy (Rockridge) / Symbiosis & Cocktails: Lichen Love at the UC Botanical Garden (UC Berkeley) / Author Talk: “Abortion and Reproductive Justice: An Essential Guide for Resistance” at UC Law (UC Berkeley)
Saturday, February 14
Feed the Hood 36: Black History Month x Valentine’s Day Edition, 9am, East Oakland Collective Hub (Eastmont). Show your love for your neighbors by working together to make meals available to everyone in The Town. [East Oakland Collective]
Nature Experience for Anxious People, 10am, Del Valle Regional Park (Livermore). Touch grass, etc. [Active Communities]
Club de Lectura en Español / Spanish Book Club, 11am, César E. Chávez Branch Library (Fruitvale). Esta semana, el libro es una metaficción sobre la invención del carrusel y otras cosas por el estilo; no lo he leído, pero el relato del autor sobre su tiempo con los sandinistas es un libro fascinante. Como siempre, las reuniones son en español! [OPL]
Preserving Black History Through Photography and Videography, 11am, African American Museum and Library at Oakland (Downtown). Turns out “pics or it didn’t happen” is actually kind of true, historiographically. [OPL]
Lion Dance Cafe Cookbook Signing, 11am, Oaktown Spice Shop (The Lake). They’re leaving us for Singapore, but before they go, there’s some pizza parties, book signings, and general boisterousness. Buy a cookbook, make your own Michelin-level food when they’re gone. [Oakland Spice Shop]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Author Talk: Phoebe Apperson Hearst: A Life of Power and Politics, 11am, Book Passage (Corte Madera). William Randolph Hearst’s mom, who shaped the Bay Area with her husband’s mining estate millions and converted to become Baháʼí? Wow, unexpected turn. [Book Passage]
Chalk a Haiku and Poetry Reading, 11 am, Moraga LIbrary (Tule Fog Side of the Hills Unless It’s Finally Cleared). SMC MFA poetry grads Alana Rodrigues, Damneet Kaur, Harleen Serai, Alice Marlow, and Angelica Figueroa read poems and then write them -- on sidewalks maybe? Or chalkboards? Why chalk when there’s spray paint. Make words you want to stay. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] “POPUP INTERNET CAFE,” 1pm, Bubblesort Studios (Hayes Valley). The ‘90s were 30 years ago, which is why the kid crossing the street in front of my old high school Sunday night was wearing wide jeans and a puffer like a full on ghost and why cute old skool websites are all the rage. Are you wearing your plastic lace choker to the show? Anyway: web poetry, instant messaging, obsolete programs, and “a browser-based interactive narrative made from scanned Risograph prints,” because media now is media then. [insta]
A Valentine for Black Stories, 1 pm, Central Library (Downtown Berkeley). Children's book fair celebrating Bay Area Black authors. With a collage workshop and Sistah Sci-Fi tabling! [BPL]
Alameda Writers Group, 1pm, Alameda Free Library/Zoom (Bridge and Tunnel). Come get prompts to write stories and make some friends along the way to your novel’s HEA. [AFL]
Roundtable Reading: A Whale of the Wild by Rosanne Parry, 2:30pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Kids read to each other about orcas, and you can bring a book home, but you have to leave the whales at the museum. [BAMPFA]
Does Wine Have a Gender? with WIRED's Jason Kehe, 3pm, Vintage Berkeley (Elmwood). ORB has decided that yes, it does, and that Zinfandel might be coded femme, and rosé has transitioned. [Vintage Berkeley]
Rockridge Book Club, 3:30pm, Rockridge Library (The Neighborhood Formerly Known as Shafter). Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange – local author love in the club. [OPL]
Cupid's Elixir Poetry Writing, 4pm, North Berkeley Library (North Berkeley, Unsurprisingly). Write love haiku: Your sleeves are wet with tears, your pillowcase is damp with morning dew, the frogs are chorusing in the marsh – now trim it down to 5-7-5. (Also, this is the second love-focused haiku event of the day when really the tanka would be more apt. If you’re going to appropriate Japanese poetic forms, don’t half-ass it). [BPL]
Sci-Fi Night: The Fifth Element, 7pm, Chabot Space & Science Center (The Hills). Extremely 1990s sci-fi movie with Bruce Willis and Chris Tucker and Milla Jovovich that some people swear by. Back in the day, the critic David Edelstein wrote that “it may or may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is one of the most unhinged.” Bet it’s pretty cool in a planetarium, though. Take a date. [CSSC]
In the Mood for Love, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Sold out, of course. Those unable to attend can pay tribute to Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece by not having any sex. [BAMPFA]
Love Fest 2026, 7:30pm, La Peña Cultural Center (Oakland part of Berkeley). Big anniversary of the self-love open mic Aya de Leon started 31 years ago. Tonight, it’s a reading hosted by Alie Jones, and featuring Duane Horton (Black queer fantasy writer), Berkeley’s Poet Laureate Hanan Masri, KQED culture journalist Pen Harshaw, bringing his poetry back (COME THROUGH!), Super Duper Lyric, a 28 year old local spoken word poet, and last but farthest from least, Lourdes Figueroa (Vuelta from Black Lawrence Press). [eventbrite]
Also: Future Finds Workshop: Handmade Pigments From Natural Materials at Bathers Library (Northgate) / Dancing Through the Decades: Black American History Edition at West Oakland Library / Learn Sewing at the Alameda Free Library / Science Friday with West Oakland Environmental Indicators at the West Oakland Library / Death Cafe at West Branch Library (Berkeley) / Valentine's Day Artist Workshop at NIAD Art Center (Richmond)
Sunday, February 15
7 Cups Echo, 12 noon Winslow House (Vallejo). A “quadrophonic participatory performance” by Emma Palm and Marc Merzo that “explores sound and movement in the context of an intimate tea ceremony”. Tea for two is served with an augmented tea set, and participants’ gestures “contribute to an evolving landscape of environmental sounds inspired by Vallejo.” [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive Party, 12 noon, Minnesota Street Project. Don’t let the history of art making in the Bay go poof. Celebrate a long arts legacy with alums, Kal Spelletich’s plant music, and “the unveiling (and eating) of Lindsey White’s legendary Big Sandwich” which sounds like some of the experimental art that we really don’t want to disappear. [humantix]
Spotlight Sundays: Total Praise—The Making of the Black Joy Parade, 1pm, OMCA (The Lake). In ongoing honor of the role of church in gathering Black community for refuge and resistance, the acclaimed Black Joy Choir is the center of the parade and of today's celebration, followed by a premiere screening of the documentary short Total Praise: The Blueprint Behind the Black Joy Parade, followed by conversation with the founders. [OMCA]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Traditional Arts Roundtable: Taking the Long View on Resistance and Resilience within Cultural Communities, 2pm, Art Farm at West Dry Creek (Far Northwest Exurbs of Oakland called Sonoma). The overwhelm of polycrisis is just what many communities have been living in for a long time, so listen up to how they keep on keeping on. With Pomo Song keepers Bernadette Smith and Precious Thomas, Latinos unidos del condado de sonoma, and Cambodian dancer Charya Burt. [eventbrite]
[North Bay Bonus Bonus Event] Author Talk: Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California's Fire Country, 2pm, Occidental Center for the Arts (Far Northwest Exurbs of Oakland, Drive Toward the Ocean). Readings by local writers who have lived with, run from, and had their homes destroyed by wildfire, and yet stay in community and in place. Dani Burlison, co-editor, will read alongside Manjula Martin, Hiya Swanhuyser Beatrice Camacho, and Amy Elizabeth Robinson. [insta]
Welcoming Mushrooms into Your Garden, 2pm, Curious Flora Nursery (North Richmond). Perfect weekend to get plants in your garden with the rain that’s coming. And with more rain, more mushrooms! They’re a good thing, it means the soil is full of plants talking to each other and growing together. [insta]
A Man There Was & The Wind, 4pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Film guys really can’t leave well enough alone. Ibsen’s epic poem Terje Vigen turned into a silent movie, what the fuck. Is nothing safe? NOT sold out, but we believe in the power of ORB to change that. [BAMPFA]
magma & mangroves, 5pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Downtown). For the third evening of the film series Africa is the World, two short films on AfroCaribbean storytelling, and a chat to follow, with snacks. [partiful]
My Blueberry Nights, 7:15pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Norah Jones starred in a movie! As a singer who takes a road trip and meets Jude Law! [BAMPFA]
Also: An Invitation to Talk About Death and Dying at Local Economy (Rockridge) / Martha Graham Dance Company: GRAHAM100 at Zellerbach Hall (UC Berkeley)
