Everyone really decided Wednesday was the day to throw a cultural bash this week, huh? UC Berkeley is revving its engines, too, during the school day and into the evenings but never on Sundays. Most bookishly, CODEX X begins this weekend in Oakland, the most winsome and charming gathering of artists who make books that are less meant to be read than to appreciate (and be appreciated, with gloves on). I love the excess and obsession of artists’ books, and even though I don’t dare touch the high-end smut handbound in leather, I can tell it is just the way she likes it. The New Parkway has new movies and old ones (including The Voice of Hind Rajab on Tuesday), Sinners is Play it Again, Samming at Grand Lake, and there’s an independent movie festival happening in the West Bay. Also in movies, More Beavers at BAMPFA, including Talking Beavers, from Thursday on, and then there’s plays, plays! The Mountaintop by Katori Hall at Oakland Theater Project until the 15th and How Shakespeare Saved My Life at Berkeley Rep through the whole month of Feb. Topaz Toddlers: Children's Art from an American Concentration Camp opens at OACC, which is distressingly timely. Write all about this intense time of witnessing and jangling nerves at the Oakland Peace Center write-ins starting this week—come into community for the next few weeks in person, and/or find your writing family online. Environmental writers are on it: Zoe Young is teaching “Writing the Wild” at the Writer’s Grotto, and Amanda Machado is teaching “Reclaiming Nature Writing,” centering the voices of queer and BIPOC writers of the nonhuman. Be the raccoon you wish to see in the world, and knock over a few fash cans however your little dexterous paws can best do it.
Tuesday, February 3
One Village, One Book, 6:30pm, Montclair Branch OPL (The Hills). A book club that reads books set in Oakland and the Bay Area or by Bay Area authors is the best kind of book club. You might have missed discussing Robin Sloan’s Sourdough last month, but today, gobble up the graphic novel Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam by Thien Pham. [OPL]
[West Bay Bonus Event] A Very Cold Winter, 6:30pm, Italian Cultural Institute (North Beachish). Transit Books, your favorite East Bay translation press, is launching Julia Nelsen’s English translation of a midcentury feminist, anti-fascist novel by Fausta Cialente. The women are all living together, again, but in grim, desolate postwar Milan instead of on an unnamed failed terraforming project, in this “exquisite chronicle of frozen hearts and their gradual thaw.” [IIC San Francisco]
Patricia Albers's Everything Is Photograph, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's (College Ave). Art historian Patricia Albers on her new book Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész, in conversation by Renny Pritikin. Learn about the original street photographer and his Leica, and how he navigated commercial and artistic demands after fleeing to the US as a Jewish refugee from Nazis. [Mrs D’s]
Also: Plot Twists & Page Turners Book Club at Piedmont Avenue Branch OPL (The Street Not the Ethnic Enclave) / Launch party for Penetrating Whiteness by Ralph Remington at City Lights (North Beach)
Wednesday, February 4
Curators’ Tour of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings, noon, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Exhibition curators Victoria Sung and Tausif Noor guide visitors through "the multilingual, multisensory, and multivalent strategies at play across Cha’s oeuvre. The tour will contextualize Cha’s art alongside that of her artistic mentors and peers, and showcase her impact on a growing group of contemporary artists." [UCB]
Berkeley Book Chat with Jasper Bernes, noon, Geballe Room (Cal). Jasper Bernes (English) synthesizes from a history of failure the key criteria for success (aka how communism has failed will teach us how it can win). Bernes is joined by Charmaine Chua (geography), because the only department more Marxist than English is Geography. [UCB]
BN Talk: Mountain Beavers, noon, Bay Nature (online). This is a week of Beavers, all kinds of beavers, even ones that are more closely related to squirrels than to the dam-building or movie-making type. [Bay Nature]
Legalized Inequalities, 4pm, Social Science Matrix (Cal). Roundtable on the new book Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-Wage Workplace, with coauthors Patricia Campos-Medina, Darlène Dubuisson, Shannon Gleeson, and Kate Griffith. The coauthors "investigate the government’s role in perpetuating poor and dangerous work environments for low-wage immigrant workers of color, drawing on interviews with over three hundred low-wage Haitian and Central American workers and worker advocates about the ways many of these workers reclaim their dignity in the face of these obstacles." [Pegasus]
Infinite Jest 30th anniversary party with OakLit Book Club, 4pm, Oakstop (Downtown). No social media, no booze, possibly no book, but there is a livestream from NYC with DFW’s editor. The organizers say “Come for 1 of these 10 good reasons” and then list eight, so I’ll add a passion for footnotes as number 9, and you come up with the last one. [Eventbrite]
"The Poet’s Fire: Rethinking Political Art in African American Literature," 5pm, Wheeler Hall (Cal). A lecture by Lenora Warren (Cornell), on the legacy of Phillis Wheatley in works of Black women writers in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the relationship between artmaking, joy, and resistance. [UCB]
The Voice of Hind Rajab, 5pm, Eugene Jarvis Auditorium (Cal). If you couldn’t make the New Parkway screening yesterday, you can mourn collectively here what’s been done to children, families, and humanitarians in Gaza. [UCB]
"'Once We Were Somebodies': Refugees, History, and the Human," 6pm, Social Sciences Building (Cal). Mae Ngai "explores two central facets of the refugee experience—the refugee camp and resettlement, taking as subject the refugee camps of self-emancipated slaves during the U.S. Civil War and Jewish refugees settled in the U.S. after World War II." [UCB]
Book release: Solidarity Economics, 6pm, Local Economy (College Ave). Cynthia Kaufman, from De Anza College, is celebrating the release of Solidarity Economics: Building Sustainable Social Relations. In her new book, she chronicles the movements all around the world building new ways of managing resources that serve human and ecological needs. Small steps, but marching together. [Luma]
[FULL UP] The Black Studies Collective Community Reading and Discussion Series, 6pm, West Oakland Branch OPL (West Oakland, natch). Grounded in the book Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies, this (already totally booked up) series invites community members to reflect on how the ideas and traditions of Black studies continue to shape our communities, histories, and everyday lives. [OPL]
Adam Becker with More Everything Forever, 6pm, Main Library (The Lake). Adam Becker is a science journalist whose latest book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, is about how all of tech's futuristic claims are really just about consolidating money and power. Librarian Ian Hetzner joins for a discussion of how tech is manipulating our future for the worse and what we can do about it. [OPL]
Keeper of the Fire & From Here/From There, 6:30pm, The New Parkway (Uptown). Join the Berkeley Film Foundation for a special screening of two films with a discussion. First: Keeper of the Fire, a visually poetic movie about Alejandro Murguia, the first Latino poet laureate of the West Bay, and about the Mission’s literary and cultural traditions. Then, From Here/From There (De Aquí/De Allá), which showcases undocumented immigrants standing up for themselves in the court of law. [New Parkway]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Jeannette L. Clariond with Forrest Gander, 7pm, City Lights (North Beach). Acclaimed Mexican poet Jeanette Clariond in conversation with her translator, Pulitzer Prize–winner and North Bay poetry god Forrest Gander. They’ll be reading and talking together about poetry, language, exile, and the places we carry within us. “Like a mirror / that bleeds / like a wound that keeps seeping / I slip / down the volcano’s mouth / I slip / between / your legs / trying to hold myself together.” [City Lights]
American Carnage, 7pm, Clio's (The Lake). Sasha Abramsky (The Nation) and Adam Hochschild (cofounder of Mother Jones) on how Trump, Musk, and DOGE butchered the US government. Abramsky’s book follows 11 fired federal workers and looks at how bad things got and are still getting. Hochschild’s last name has a pronunciation guide, which we at ORB fervently appreciate. [Eventbrite]
Maps & More: Los Angeles, 7pm, Earth Sciences & Map Library (Cal). What visions of Los Angeles can we find in maps? And is Los Angeles America, or is America Los Angeles? Alexander Craghead, Lecturer in American Studies, is on the case. [UCB]
Long Haulers, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). BAMPFA’s annual Documentary Voices series launches with a double feature: First, Katarina Jazbec’s short film You Can’t Automate Me, an investigation into the labor of lashers, who physically secure cargo in the heavily automated environment of the port of Rotterdam. Then, hitch a ride with three long-haul truck drivers and filmmaker Amy Reid (who will be there to discuss). As the bumper sticker on a giant pickup I saw recently on the tule fog side of the hills said: “Don’t like trucks? Stop buying shit!” [BAMPFA]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Westernmost] Poetic Justice, 7:30pm, The Balboa (Outer Richmond). Road trip to romance with Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur, and Maya Angelou’s poetry gets involved? ’90s to the maxxx. [Balboa]
Also: Movie screening: This World Is Not My Own at Claremont Branch OPL (Berkeley) / Hebrew: From Sacred Language to Mother Tongue at Cal (Berkeley) / Frontier & Field: Black Cowboys from Gold Rush to Super Bowl LX (2026) at the Commonwealth Club of California (West Bay) / Unleashed Potential: A Conversation Between Fred Blackwell and Regina Jackson at the Commonwealth Club (West Bay) / The Liberation Lens: Indie Film Showcase at San José City College (Deep South Oakland)
Thursday, February 5
Free First Thursday, all day, BAMPFA (downtown). Tour yourself through the museum for the final stretch of your DIY PhD in Dictée and check out Present Tense (Roll Call) on the Art Wall too. [BAMPFA]
Cal Lunch Poems: Aracelis Girmay, noon, Morrison Library (Cal). Stanford prof? Fine, but only this one, because she wrote “You Are Who I Love”—you know it, don’t you? I'll try not to quote you the whole thing:
You who the borders crossed
You whose fires
You decent with rage, so in love with the earth
You writing poems alongside children
You cactus, water, sparrow, crow You, my elder
You are who I love,
summoning the courage, making the cobbler,
getting the blood drawn, sharing the difficult news, you always planting the marigolds, learning to walk wherever you are, learning to read wherever you are, you baking the bread, you come to me in dreams, you kissing the faces of your dead wherever you are, speaking to your children in your mother’s languages, tootsing the birds
[Pegasus]
Waterfront Walk and Talk, noon, Roaming Bean Coffee on the Bay Trail (Westest Berkeley). Walk for an hour across the new University Avenue improvements (does this mean the hostile landscape architecture around the freeway entrance—the giant pointy boulders?) with the city’s waterfront manager. [City of Berkeley]
Paola Bacchetta, "Co-Motion: Rethinking Power, Subjects and Feminist and Queer Alliances," noon, Social Sciences Building (Cal). "Co-Motion" addresses a wide activist, artivist, and social movement archive—group statements, banners, pamphlets, graffiti, posters, poetry, sit-ins, films, art exhibits—of the last 50 years to think and feel with the many ways that people, historically and today, come together to act. [UCB]
"Troubled Times: Writing the Present in Contemporary Literature & Theory," 1pm, Dwinelle (Cal). Short presentations and discussions on works that challenge linear conceptions of past, present, and future and explore alternative modes of temporal reflection and engagement with the present, led by a German prof. [UCB]
[SOLD OUT] Making Waves: The Rise of Asian America screening and panel discussion, 5pm, Berkeley Way West (Cal). Film screening and panel discussion with Joemy Ito-Gates, Jon Osaki, Donald Tamaki, and Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales on the political frontlines and fault lines of ethnic studies in California. The solidarity politics of Third World Liberation still are shaping Bay Area activism and are a model for how identity politics builds bridges and movements. If you missed out on tickets, there’s some good books on this, too. [Eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Performance: Building a Future, 5pm, SFMOMA and MoAD (SoMa). Inspired in part by the spirit of the 1972 Black Art Expo that Suzanne Jackson curated, poets and dancers will offer original responses to both exhibitions within the galleries. Judy Juanita (Gawdzilla and The High Price of Freeways and Manhattan my ass, you’re in Oakland) and the wonderful Oakland-grown Wendy M. Thompson (Black California Gold) read poems, while dancers dance. Travel between the two sites, follow the pathways of art and movement to create a new universe. [SFMOMA]
[West Bay Bonus Event Plus] More Than a Book: When Art, Literature, & Fine Craft Converge, 5:30pm, Alliance Française de San Francisco (Nob Hill). See a movie about a book that’s also a piece of art, and then you get to see the book itself, with French book artist Priscillia Leal Torres, to open the CODEX Book Fair. Slice the signatures with your paper knife. [AFSF]
Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, 6:30pm, Oakstop (Uptown). A biographical documentary of the first Black woman playwright to have her work performed on Broadway. (Maybe you saw Oakland Theater Project do a scorching version of her Les Blancs last year?) The screening is part of the Black Film Unscreened & Unstreamed series. NOT sold out for once—change that, won’t ya? [Eventbrite]
Reading: Sidework by Sasha Hom, 7pm, Bathers Library (Telegraph). ORB has real journalists at the helm, who do important investigative work and don’t just repeat rumors. So, we now have evidence from a trusted source (Justin), recorded on a closely held proprietary ORB video, that it’s "Bathers" with a long "A," the way you would probably assume, but this is all beyond his control now, and half the people out there are flat A-ing it up, and really, we’re all more into descriptive than prescriptive linguistics these days, right? This doesn’t count as a correction, we’re just adjusting a confusion foisted upon us, but possibly sowing further seeds of future evolving uncertainty. Yes, there’s also a new local book being read and discussed tonight. Waitress, eviction, Korean adoptee, Black Lawrence Press. [Insta]
Also: The Cookies & Comedy Social: An Afro-Indigenous History Month Celebration at Coco Mama Boutique House (Emeryville) / Kenny Stills at Books Inc. (Alameda) / Mac Barnett & Carson Ellis on Rumpelstiltsken at Copperfield's Books (Petaluma)
Friday, February 6
Love Poems: Writing Workshop with Margaret Ross, 1pm, Hearst Field Annex D23 (Cal). Only open to Berkeley students, so, “How do you do, fellow kids.” [UCB]
Writing Across Walls, 3pm, Zoom. Online to be sure, but I’m including this because it is a very Bay Area event that is specifically about connection through writing in absentia. Here you’ll learn how to break the ice and learn about starting and maintaining a correspondence with political prisoners, an essential habit that will likely grow even more important for us in the years to come. Presented by geographer Sharon Luk (author of The Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity) and filmmaker Adamu Chan, whose 2023 documentary about San Quentin State Prison (What These Walls Won't Hold) will serve as an anchor for discussion. [Workshops 4 Gaza]
Mutual aid pop-up event for Minnesota, 5pm, Open Test Kitchen (Old Oakland). If you want to support organizers in Minnesota but need a break from marching and chanting, this is a great place to start. Beats by DJ Brandon Allday of Minneapolis-based Mexican American duo Big Quarters, spoken word from Oakland-based artist Deyci Carrillo López (Pura Vida 510), and Michoacán food from Tsiri. [Eventbrite]
Works-in-Progress x MIPSLIP, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). The fact that you haven’t found the right way to end that short story is no excuse for not sharing it. Don Juan, The Trial, The Canterbury Tales, The Good Soldier: Švejk, Billy Budd...they are all unfinished manuscripts! It's okay! We vibe reported LE’s first Works-In-Progress event back in October in case you need to preview an event before committing, you coward. [Luma]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Biennial CODEX Kick-off Party, 6pm, San Francisco Center for the Book (Design District). The CODEX Book Art Fair & Symposium is happening from February 7–10 in Oakland, but the party starts at the San Francisco Center for the Book the night before. Attendees will have an advance look at the new SFCB exhibition, Who Is America at 250?: Artists’ Books in the Age of Democracy. [SFCB]
Poetry!, 6:30pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Jeremie Known (who insists on being unknown), Oakland poet Rae Liberto (“I love watching / you being watched I / spectacle you I / audience you I / love you”), Brendan McHugh (who brought The Butch Manual back into print and cohosts Light Jacket readings in the West Bay, we love a crossover), Charlie Stuip (“discomforting, romantic, and economical”). [Insta]
Also: Get-Hype Open-Mic at Discover Community Cafe (Dogtown/Clawson) / First Friday Dance Party at Tamarack (Downtown) / Black Panther Party 60th Anniversary Exhibit Opening at the 81st Avenue Branch OPL (Fitchburg) / Art of the African Diaspora exhibition opening at Rockridge Branch OPL (College Ave)
Saturday, February 7
Motherboard—Digital Literacy and Empowerment Info Session, 10am, 81st Avenue Branch (Fitchburg). Save the boomers from ChatGPT. Facebook and the bots are rotting their brains, but librarians are here to help. [OPL]
Lunar New Year x Black History Month Celebration, 11am, Oakland Asian Cultural Center (Chinatown). A joyous convergence of Asian + African American solidarity and celebration: Yellow Peril still supports Black Power, now with lion dancers and funk. [Insta]
The Word Barre, 11am, Lakeview Branch Library (The Lake). “A healing hub for hibernating creatives and visionaries” but also your inner language ballerina. [OPL]
Immigrant Justice Panel: Cafe and Community Convos, noon, 1951 Coffee (South of Cal). Hear from organizers, immigrant rights / legal advocates, nonprofit leaders & justice builders, including media compadres El Timpano. [Insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] "Puerto Rico Resistance: Todavía Estamos Aquí," 2pm, West Bay main library. An afternoon of film and conversation underlines San Francisco Bay Area connections and knowledge of community and resistance in Puerto Rico. Moderated by Javier, friend of ORB, sniffer of smells, explorer of explosions. [USF]
The Struggle to Save the I-Hotel, 2pm, San Lorenzo Branch Library (Far South Oakland). Watch the documentary The Fall of the I-Hotel, followed by discussion with the director of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation. "This is not just a story about old men in an old building, but of multiple tragedies: ethnic communities redeveloped out of existence, housing gobbled up by realtors, the shabby treatment of the elderly, and the betrayal of American ideals learned in the Philippines by its American pioneers." Snacks served to fuel your indignation. [Alameda County Library]
The Attack on Black Studies, 2pm, The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley). The Suds, Snacks & Socialism monthly forum, featuring Dr. James Garrett, Rekia Jibrin, and Gerald Sanders on the history of Black studies and the origins of Black History Month, and fighting the erasure of all of the above. [Peace and Freedom]
Poetry reading and discussion: Sam Sax, 2pm, Claremont Branch Library (Elmwood). Sam came up in slam and messes with form so beautifully in their recent books, yet still reads poems like they’re on Def Poetry Jam. Top Bay Area fave. GO. LISTEN. BECOME. [BPL]
The Wild Child, 4:15pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Sold out, you French cine-buffs. The weirdly beloved 1970 Truffaut film based on the true story of a feral child found in a French forest. The director saw the movie as a response to his masterpiece, The 400 Blows, with Truffaut now identifying with the civilizers instead of the child rebel. It was also, in a way, a response to May ’68, countering the anticolonial spirit of that great revolutionary moment with the story of a young savage ushered into civilization by his benevolent Western steward. Worth watching, but it’s all pretty fucked up. Since you missed out on tickets, might we suggest spending the afternoon reading Solidarity With Children instead? [BAMPFA]
California’s Food Sovereignty, 5pm, Bathers Library (Telegraph). Elias Aveces and Song Wu on the logistics of food production and distribution that underpins California, and how we can engage with a more local supply chain. Proceeds from this talk go toward land acquisition led by Plurinational Land Reform in CA Working Group. Move land into the hands of those working it. [Future Finds]
Strike Debt Bay Area Book Group: A Paradise Built in Hell, 5pm, Register for location. Finish Solnit’s case for why the worst days bring out the best in people. [indybay]
Erotic Poetry: Mental Penetration, 6pm, Studio V'Essence (Richmond). Organizers request that you dress in red, and there's a swag bag if you buy a VIP ticket. Have fun, be safe, and enjoy the sapiosexualing! [Eventbrite]
One & Only: Author Maurene Goo in conversation with Viv Chen, 7pm, A Great Good Place for Books (Montclair). Romance novel with fate fighting against attraction, matchmaking, and Korean LA. We can guarantee you the HEA, but it’s really all about the orgasms you make along the way. [GGP Books]
Codex Foundation Book Arts Fair and Symposium, 7pm, Oakland Marriott City Center (Old Oakland). It’s starting! Go look at handmade books, vellum, zines, giant volumes and tiny bejewelled ones, it’s so many books. This is really about book as object, and form, craft, and handset type. [Insta]
"beyond a thermodynamic energy future: taoist natural philosophy, ai, science (&) fiction," 7pm, Bathers Library (Telegraph). We love an event with a lowercase title. Kelsey Chen and Wendi Yan. Explore the energetic logics that underpin the many futurisms of the Bay Area. Ask them how they pronounce things. [Future Finds]
Also: Hemming & Mending Clothes By Hand at the Dimond Branch Library (Dimond) / Albany Bulb Nature Journal Club at Albany Bulb (The Bay) / Black Life: Memory as Miracle at BAMPFA (Berkeley)
Sunday, February 8
Symposium / "Multiple Offerings: New Directions in Research on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha," 12:30pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Your culminating Dictée moment. This symposium brings together graduate students and early-career researchers on the trailblazing Korean American artist and author. At last, you are ready to meet the peers in your field, your fellow deep divers into “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offerings.” [BAMPFA]
Cultural Food Traditions Project dinner featuring Palestine, 5pm, Lakeside Park Garden Center (The Lake). The second in Slow Food East Bay’s three-part series on culinary life in “countries in conflict,” this dinner includes not only a meal by Nikki Garcia of ASÚKAR (alongside wine from Bay Area Palestinian winemaker Terah Bajjalieh), but also brings Chef Garcia into conversation with Nadia Barhoum of Thurayya Seeds and AbdulRahim of Jerusalem Coffee House to discuss how Palestinians are creating and maintaining food lifeways through a period of calamity. [Zeffy]
An evening of weirdo Americana–adjacent sound, 7pm, Beauty Supply Arts (downtown/chinatown). A solid lineup of East Bay acts that sound more "Wichita Lineman” than “Rhinestone Cowboy,” from the lonesome, dreamy trio Aux Meadows to the hypnotic improv fingerstyle of Joseph Dee Bradshaw to the avant-garde cello/etc. workings of Captainmcsweeney. [Insta]
