You are ORB if you like books, but also like getting out of the house (you can bring your book). So join us at our monthly happy hour and drink to ORB growing in the rain, like Alice eating mushrooms, on Sunday 2/22 at 4pm, at Temescal Brewery.
We’re also going to allow Mondays this week because Litquake is hosting a Literary Trivia Night on Monday 2/23 and ORB is assembling a team – join us so we can trounce the undefeated Pegasus team (or at least give them a run for their money). To quote ee cummings, “for springtime is lovetime and viva sweet love!” so don’t step (drive) on the newts, they’re seeking the annual pond orgy. In the West Bay, The Roxie is showing a movie about a poet several times, starting Tuesday, who starts off the film “in a drunken stupor, lamenting the state of literature in his home country” and hates being his own cliche (h/t Screen Slate). Max Blue told Hyperallergic the best art shows to see around the bay this spring and All My Sons is opening at Berkeley Rep this week. You can see the Oscar nominated shorts at the Landmark on Piedmont Ave or the New Parkway, but BAMPFA is mostly sold the hell out. I guess you might have to go talk to people this weekend instead. You can talk about your book, or the rain, or the way the rain looks on the flowers, all orbular and heavy. -MDS, XL, TC
Tuesday, February 17
Storytime for Caregivers with Minna Dubin, 10am, Local Economy (College Ave). Hang out with other caregivers and think together about how capitalism makes carework harder with the author of Mom Rage (and judge for yourself whether this blistering review calling on parents to have MORE shame [and questioning the ethical judgement of the long time feminist publisher, Seal] was done out of literary high mindedness or to position the critic as one willing to come for women writers and their feelings). [Local Economy]
Invisible Beauty, 5pm, Elmhurst Branch OPL (Deep East). A memoir-in-film of Black model Bethann Hardison’s groundbreaking career; after premiering at Sundance, the obvious next stop on the festival circuit is Oakland Library. [OPL]
Beware: The First Person and the Late Tudor Novel, 5pm, Wheeler Hall (Cal). If you want to make your Ren Faire character a little more 3-D, come to the workshop with Esther Yu (Stanford University) on the late Tudor novel, William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, which invented the first person narrator, so that means we can blame him for autofiction. [UCB]
Bloodfire, Baby by Eirinie Carson in conversation with Natalie Baszile, 6:30pm, Marcus Books (Longfellow). Eirinie Carson, author of the friendship and grief memoir The Dead Are Gods, has published her first novel! In Bloodfire, Baby, the North Bay author writes a novel of post-partum haunting that Savala Nolan says “weaves the frank, uninhibited sensualities of motherhood and body horror into a thick, powerful rope... a wild, transformative ride written in neon.” Natalie Baszile is the West Bay author of Queen Sugar and We Are Each Other's Harvest. The store is gonna be packed tonight. [Marcus Books]
Kiss And Tell Literary Salon, 6:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda). Authors Angela Montoya with Carnival Fantastic: a romantasy about a magical circus, and Kristen Alicia with You’ve Been Served: a romantasy about leaving the cutthroat life of restaurant work behind for the gentle nurturing love of law school. [Books Inc.]
Eyes of the Rainbow, 7:30pm, La Peña Cultural Center (Berkeley, but Oakland (or is it Oakland, but Berkeley?). First screening of a new series at La Peña, centering liberation and decolonization: “When We Win: Political Education,” this film by Gloria Rolando is on Assata Shakur’s life and political asylum in Cuba. Join us for the film and the collective dialogue! [insta]
Also: Black Authors Book Club: Model Home by Rivers Solomon at West Oakland Library (Across from Bobby Hutton Park) / Lakeview Book Club: Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 by Lynne Olson at Lakeview Library (The Lake)
Wednesday, February 18
Ruins, Ghosts, Mysteries: The Uncanniness of Western Landscapes, 4pm, Dwinelle (Cal). Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent) is the author of several books, including Playing Indian, and teaches somewhere back east. In a blend of memoir and landscape analysis, he will explore settlers’ encounter with the West as a space of haunting, of land shaped by people who had been killed or moved off of it, and the ghostly disorientation of encountering the past in the present. [UCB]
7th World Reads: Uses of the Erotic, 5:30pm, Kinfolx (Oakland). 7th world reads “aims to deepen the political education and literacy of people of color in Oakland” through somatics, plant allies, art, and collective learning. Tonight, get deep through Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic” while making herbal oils and collective altars to pleasure. Lorde: “the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.” [insta]
Planting seeds towards anti-imperialist action, 6pm, Somewhere in Berkeley (RSVP for location). Dinner and discussion with Miya Sommers (Nikkei Resisters) and Rev. Michael Yoshii, who will share how the history of mass incarceration of Japanese Americans led them to take action for a Free Palestine, ie, living the legacy of the Third World Liberation Front. [insta]
Real Talks with Jayna Dias and Ada Liv, 6pm, Real Time and Space (Chinatown). Eat pizza and hear talks by resident artist Jayna Dias, who likes to think hard about power structures and bodies, and visitor Ada Liv, whose material art practice makes feelings physical in paper and fabric and suchlike. This might be the last Real Talk for a while as a new space is being found for the studios, so come through for the local art community. [insta]
We (re)Member US: a public grief & joy ritual, 6pm, Black Panther Party Museum (Downtown). Be guided, be interactive, be rhythmic and vocal in this public ceremony by and for women & femmes coordinated by independent curator, public archivist, and artist Ashara Ekundayo. Through guided storytelling, journaling, and creative workshops, gather to collectively witness and transmute trauma, grief and rage into art. With some sound-poems playing through as inspiration. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Gioia Woods, City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore, 7pm, City Lights Bookstore (North Beach). Come hear a cultural history of the best place in the world and the man who started it all, right in the room where it happened. [City Lights]
Gaucho Gaucho, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). The Truffle Hunters directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw offer up a black-and-white documentary whose elliptical style and slow-mo tracking shots of cowboys riding the Pampas practically dare critics to call the movie something other than a “tone poem.” Honestly, this looks pretty as hell. [BAMPFA]
The Berkeley Slam ft. Darius Simpson, 8pm, The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley). Poetry slamming at three minutes until the hook since 1998 and tonight, the featured poet is local Living Poet Darius Simpson (taste “Early 2000s Fashion Was a Confusing Time for All of Us” and guzzle down more in person). Slam should hit like a pop song, like a sprint, like shivers up your spine: go be the judge. [Rich Oak Events]
Also: A Sister Circle Soul Salon at Books Inc. (Alameda) / Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest at Cal (Berkeley) / Anti-Repression Series: Working with Lawyers as Anarchists/Technology at Hasta Muerte (Fruitvale) / The Bike Fix at Martin Luther King Jr. Branch (Deep East) / Meet the Author: Shonda Scott - Give Me a Year: 12 New Things to Embrace Change and Live Your Best Life at Rockridge OPL (The Neighborhood Formerly Known as Shafter) / Fair-Trade Carceral Geographies. Migrant Labor and Transnational Agribusiness in Northwestern Mexico at Cal (Berkeley)
Thursday, February 19
Close, Distant, Embodied, Artificial: Modes of Reading Today, 12noon, Townsend Center (UC Berkeley). Dan Sinykin threw down for close reading, and two thirds of the talks today hang out on his side, but David Marno and Yael Segalovitz are going to argue for the osmosis method.
First of a two-day symposium on contemporary reading practices (and I am sure someone will more comment than a question that “audiobooks are reading too”). If you go, say hi to Farah. [UCB]
Mesoamérica Undone: Reframing the Conversation through Maya Understandings of Space and Time, 4pm, The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (Berkeley). Head to Cal to hear scholar Rita M. Palacios talk about how notions of space and time in contemporary Maya art, literature, and philosophy can destabilize colonizer definitions of place in Mesoamerica and Indigenous peoples’ position there. Then go to the 81st Ave OPL Branch to see artwork by Mayan people living in Oakland (up through March) and unravel, reframe, undo completely, and end up climbing a cosmic tree. Also read El Tímpano while you’re at it. [UCB]
Matériel for Thought: On Gaza and Sovereign Performativity, 5pm, Dwinelle Hall (UC Berkeley). Prof Ali H. Musleh on the way that making war on Palestine is a form through which Israel shapes facts up for the world out of lives turned to dust. All eyes still on Gaza. [UCB]
We Grieve Different: Healing Through Writing and Creativity, 6pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Maud Alcorn Farquhar leads an evening of writing, collaging, and letter writing to all the ones we miss. Make an altar of your words. [Nomadic]
Profs & Pints Alameda: Daredevil Democracy, 6pm, Faction Brewing (Alameda). Professor Felicia Viator alleges a nineteenth-century waterfall jumper invented modern celebrity and challenged American ideas about power. Young Sam Patch, who jumped waterfalls for fun, probably also invented hopfighting, despite authoritative claims to its recent provenance from ORB subscriber Frank. [Ticket Leap]
Film screening: Acts of Reparation, 6:30pm, Oakstop (Uptown). Friends and filmmaking partners, one white and one Black, travel the South to explore the possibility of reparations. Part of the Sarah Webster Fabio Center for Social Justice’s “Black Film: Unscreened & Unstreamed” series. NB: This is the Oakstop at 1721 Broadway. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] CraftTalk Series: Maya Kini, 6:30pm, Fort Mason (Way West Bay). A poet and goldsmith talks at Arion Press, where they still gild the edges of their hand-bound books with real gold sometimes probably, about gold’s luscious, soft, burnished entanglement with histories of labor, displacement, exploitation, and environmental destruction. [insta]
CA WFP Oakland's Pathway to Power, 6:30pm, Somewhere in Oakland (RSVP for specifics). The Working Families Party is your lefty giterdone alternative to just protest voting Green all the time, Join National Director Maurice Mitchell, Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato-Bas, Lieutenant Gubernatorial candidate Michael Tubbs (remember him from Stockton?), and ACCE Statewide Executive Director Christina Livingston to throw your weight behind candidates for real change. Unless you really want more Gavin Newsom. [Mobilize]
Book of Light Poetry Series: Aaron Hundley, 6:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda, Temporarily an Island). Intermissions: Poems is a collection by a local author and teacher and Steinbeck stan who “explores questions, rather than answers, childhood stories and the intimate relationship to both the inner and natural world.” [eventbrite]
Forgiveness Night, 7pm, Tamarack (Downtown). A poetry reading to launch willow wilderness hour’s second and final run of the spiral edition of her poetry book, Lord, the Boy is Naturally Queer. Featuring Princess Donna Dolore (remember the Armory...), Sasha Fuentes (showing up at Eternal Now on Saturday if you miss this one), Mourning Pages (good name). Who can you forgive, what do you need to be forgiven for? [insta]
Meat, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Here’s your chance to say goodbye to Frederick Wiseman, the fly-on-the-wall documentarian who died Monday at 96. BAMPFA had Meat on the menu already, with experts lined up to talk about agricultural policy and stuff, but it’s as good a pick as any to honor Wiseman’s whole body of work: a detached but still morally engaged look at the process (ca. 1976) whereby animals become commodities, with special attention paid to the workers who make it all possible. Jeff Griffith-Perham, BAMPFA's associate film curator, chats with UC Berkeley food smarties Jeanne Merrill and Ricardo San Martin. [BAMPFA]
Jazz & Pole, 7:30pm, Eli’s Mile High Club (Longfellow). Fun fact: there are no strip clubs in Oakland. BUT now there are Queer Fem Parties, who carry around a mobile pole and sometimes gyrate to live jazz, when their founder isn’t hanging out at Sultry Sessions. [Eli's]
Also: Dimond Book Club at the Dimond Branch Public Library (Upper Dimond) / Opening Reception for Craig Nagasawa Exhibition: J-town Express at Worth Ryder Art Gallery (UCB) / A Public Defender’s Search for Justice, with Emily Galvin Almanza at Commonwealth Club (West Bay)
Friday, February 20
Botanical Illustration: Spring Bulbs, 10am, UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley (Strawberry Canyon). Everything's blooming early, and daffodils and narcissus sprang to full attention this past week. Draw the flowers, keep them in the memory of your hand moving over paper, echoing the shape of your eye’s caress of petal, leaf, stamen. [UCB botanical Garden]
Close, Distant, Embodied, Artificial: Modes of Reading Today, 10 AM, Townsend Center (Cal). Again. Today, bodies, feelings, LLMs and how they all read. [UCB]
Aesop’s Fables Reading Group, 12 noon, Berkeley Institute (Downtown Berkeley). Have lunch and argue about the ambiguity of stories told for millennia about foxes and grapes, foxes and boars, foxes and leopards, foxes and crows, and maybe some other animals and plants whose moral judgement is even more questionable. [insta]
Reverse Card Market Community Jam and Mini Open Mic, 12 noon, Oakland Secret (Under 980 at 880). People making music together all day long, where hats were spotted not too long ago. We theorize that there will be either Tarot or Uno played to determine who gets to join the band. Led by Big Tractor, which is music. [insta]
Black History Month 100: A Fireside Chat, 6pm, Cal Alumni House (Berkeley). Mark one hundred years of celebrating Black History, and there’s a new book about it by Prof Jarvis Givens who will be in conversation with Prof Ula Taylor and Dr. Micia Mosely. We hear there will be “heavy hors d'oeuvres” and free books. [eventbrite]
Poetry!, 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). NO POEMS, only GAY PROSE. Things are getting wild on Friday Nights at Tam in the series’s sophomore year. Featuring Vera Blossom, Johnny Ray Huston, & Misty Ana (guest poet-organizers Sloane Holzer and willow wilderness hour are in charge). [insta]
Black History Month $500 Giveaway Competition, 6:30pm, 811 Parliament (Old Oakland).You get a chunk of $500 if the audience decides you’re the best poet, rapper, or singer at rhyming historically and metaphorically and allegorically and categorically. [insta]
Also: The Bike Fix at 81st Avenue Branch (Deep East) / Find Your Fit Community Closet Kickoff at 81st Avenue Branch (Deep East)
Saturday, February 21
Rocks and Roots: How Geology Shapes Nature and Culture, 10am, Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve (Antioch). “Every trail tells a story--written in the rocks, sung by plants, and carried by people” -- hell yeah EBRPD, you tell ‘em. Walk for two miles in the mud, wear grippy shoes. [ebrpd]
25th Annual Lunar New Year at OMCA: Year of the Horse, 11am, OMCA (Civic Center). On stage, lofi-hyphy musicians seiji oda. Other performances come from Korean, Pilipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese traditions. Welcome the Year of the Horse with neighbors and K-Pop dance lessons, wishing trees, and storytelling that honors the cross-cultural pull of the moon. [OMCA]
Black History Film Festival—Oakland, 11am, Oakland Public Library, West Oakland Branch (Oakland). The Black History Film Festival, hosted annually in Atlanta, DC, and Miami, has expanded to Oakland this year with a tidy lineup of shorts. Check out the full slate here. It includes a doc about the threat to Black Studies in American education; a history of the Black national anthem that makes the racists crazy whenever someone sings it before a football game; a portrait of Nancy Whittle, who plays Harriet Tubman in Civil War reenactments all over California; and a profile of the unfairly maligned Joe Barry Carroll, the former Warriors center, who always deserved better than the “Joe Barely Cares” nickname someone hung on him. [Black History Film Festival]
Oakland Noticing Club, 12 noon, Local Economy (Rockridge). Find your city in the details and your people here who get ecstatic about pavement stamps and the season of jasmine blooming through the chainlink. Start now and become a regular noticer. [luma]
News/Print Opening Celebration, 1pm, Oakland Lowdown (Lakeside). Five community college fellows hosted by the Oakland Lowdown and City Studio blend art and journalism in original screenprinted posters on everything from ballooning overtime pay among Oakland police to Chinatown’s seniors’ cool hangs. [eventbrite]
Three Films on Water and Tradition, 1pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). A program from Pakistan, Croatia, and Bolivia, about struggles over clean water flowing into reflections on culture: The Glacier Wedding, The Tempest of Neptun, and Qotzuñi: People of the Lake. [BAMPFA]
From Slavery to the White House: Introduction to Adaptive Script Writing, 2pm, African American Museum and Library (Old Oakland). More than just a writing workshop, the vignettes about slavery and oral folklore that participants will develop with workshop presenter Monica Mosses will be subsequently performed in a stage production at the library. [OPL]
Hemming & Mending Clothes By Hand, 2:30pm, Temescal Branch Library (Temescal, as you might imagine). Oakland-based textile artist Bea Byrne is big shot in the Bay Area quilting world, and she’ll be teaching the basics of clothing repair for anyone eager to fight their fast fashion addiction. [OPL]
Cairo Station, 4:30pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). To quote ourselves the last time they showed it: “Stay at the movies for this street-level exposé of sexual obsession and working-class madness in Egypt that’s as grimy and claustrophobic as its setting. ‘The fifties’ meant something different in Cairo.” [BAMPFA]
The Last Tea Shop: A Solo Journaling Game, Together, 5pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). WB Yeats used his wife’s automatic writing for inspiration, Philip K Dick used amphetamines, you can use dice. Fueled by tea, the beverage all the writers I know choose at five pm on a Saturday. [luma]
Film Screening: Crushing Wheelchairs, 6pm, Black Repertory Theater (South Berkeley). Houseless / formerly houseless people made this movie to honor “our ancestors of homelessness, eviction, false borders, gentriFUKation and sweeps on stolen land.” Celebrate resistance with danza, food, and each other [insta]
Enero Zapatista Poetry Night, 6pm, Eastside Arts Alliance (Twomps). Featuring poets Esperanza Cabrales, Arnoldo Calibri, Montezuma Zepeda, Nida Liftawiya, and Elizabeth Jimenez Montelongo, and who knows who will stand up for the open mic! [insta]
Future Finds: Date #0, 7:30pm, Bathers Library (Telegraph). A site-specific performance by K. Sid Zhang with Isabella Terrazas and Sam Howell Petersen. “Special exhibition: two people go on their first date at the end of the world” and become souvenirs of the future. Second performance Sunday at 8:30. [Future Finds]
Also: Once Upon a Time in San Francisco: A Photographic Journey at Book Passage (Ferry Building/Embarcadero) / Farima Berenji on Iranian Sacred Dance at Rockridge Branch Library (Rockiest of Ridges)
Sunday, February 22
Writing Together as Mothers, 9:30 (all day), Local Economy (Rockridge). Breakfast, lunch, and a focused space are provided to enable the impossible: an entire day devoted to writing without anyone yelling for you to wipe their butt. Join Sarah Wheeler et al. for prompts and companionship while you scritch-scratch and clickety-clack in peace and tranquility. [Ticket Tailor]
Third Annual Communist Manifesto Pancake Breakfast, 10:30am, East Bay Community Space (Temescal). Amazingly, this is exactly what it sounds like: a discussion of the Communist Manifesto over flapjacks with the East Bay chapter of the DSA. Let us eat (pan)cake! [East Bay DSA]
Creative Radio Club, 11am, Winslow House Project (Oakland Part of Vallejo). Community radio, from pirates of the airwaves to grassroots work to keep the dials tuned local after the destruction of federally funded public broadcasting under fascism. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Celebration: Muses and Melanin Graduation, 12:30pm, San Francisco Public Library (Civic Center). Hear the fellows of the 2026 cohort of the Muses & Melanin Fellowship for BIPOC Creative Writers read excerpts from their works-in-progress. Program headed up by Lyzette Wanzer, West Bay essayist, editor, and creative writing teacher. [SFPL]
9th Annual Black Joy Parade, 12:30pm, 14th & Broadway (Downtown). Oakland is still a Black town, and the biggest parade for Black Joy in the country is a time to celebrate and recognize. [Oakland Public Library]
Concrete Poetry with Lindsay Choi, 1pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Spend two hours writing poetry that plays with the spatial and visual aspects of words. Begin with explorations of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s writing-as-art and then make your own, led by poet Lindsay Choi. [BAMPFA]
Old Town Oakland in the mid-19th Century, 2pm, Pardee Home Museum (Old Oakland). Local history talk by Gene Anderson, fourth-generation Oakland resident whose great-grandparents lived in West Oakland (oh, near mine!). Learn from him about mid-19th Century Oakland, historic events, and high profile neighbors when the Pardee family came to town, and help keep up a historical Oakland house. [eventbrite]
ORB Happy Hour, 4-6pm, Temescal Brewing (Temescal). Our last two happy hours were in West and East Oakland, so this one will be in North (like King Lear perambulating between his three daughters, and going mad in the rain). Nothing special, just come meet us, talk to us, tell us our failings and things of that nature. We’re friendly, so come be friendly.
How to Build a Public Bank in the East Bay, 5:30pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). What if our economy were actually local? Imagine our community directing, using, exchanging capital amongst ourselves -- that’s the vision of Public Bank East Bay and they need community buy-in to bring it to life. [Local Economy]
Alameda Shorts Fest, 6pm, Alameda Brewing (Alameda). Go see local short films and drink a hazy at the afterparty. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Elder] The Bush Years Short Films Program, 6pm, Gray Area (The Mission). First of a six-part series. This one is short indie films made when we were still trying to figure out if we were saying “two thousand-and-seven” or “twenty-oh-seven.” And they made a zine of film criticism to go with! [Gray Area]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Wilder] A Happening: Brontez Purnell reading, 6pm, SutroFM (RSVP for address). Loyal readers of our vibe reports know that we are big supporters of reading unfinished work to your adoring public. But more importantly, our party line also supports the use of fog machines at readings. Brontez Purnell checks both boxes as he reads from his sci-fi novel-in-formation, alongside the dreamy space-age soundscapes of X Medianoche and Elias FS. The event listing specifies that both bigotry and outdoor urination will be prohibited, so expect a party. [SutroFM]
Also: Last Sunday Open Mic at Chemaki (Northgate) / Black History Month Bookmarks at 81st Avenue Branch Library (Fitchburg)
