Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, July 14–July 19
Themes this week in the Oakland Bay Area are: movies, anarchy, Andy Goldsworthy, Stanley Kubrick, history, lake hangs, sunscreen, books mostly made of prose, and learning about the shapes our cities will take in the near and coming future. It’s also the first ever Temescal Alley Book Festival on Saturday (12-6 and beyond), at which ORB will sell swag and talk to you about Oakland, Reviews, and Books. The sunsets have been spectacular, the humidity ticked up strangely (monsoon tendrils from the Gulf are responsible for both, it turns out), and summer camp shrinkflation is driving everyone nuts. July, you can have it. -MS
Tuesday, July 14
SOLD OUT Wood Street Oakland Premiere, 6:30pm, The New Parkway Theater (Uptown). We've been hearing how moving this moving picture is about people being moved against their will from their self-created community on Wood Street where Prescott Market and the Baller's parking lot is now, and now all the tickets have moved so move along to Grand Lake Theatre tomorrow where you can watch the pictures of your real neighbors move on a very large screen. [insta]
Bay Area Film Night: SPLASH CITY, 7pm, Grand Lake Theatre (Grand Lake). A crime thriller about two West Bay brothers whose roads diverge in a wood: bipping versus basketball. Written and directed by Sunset District native Gilbert Anthony Milam who also became a very big cannabis guy; gotta put those weed profits somewhere and making movies is a better place for them than some crypto investment shit. [eventbrite]
Antifascist Histories, Current Scenes of Struggle, 7pm, Clio’s Books (Grand Lake). James Stout historicizes anarchism and antifacism in Against the State: Anarchists and Comrades at War in Spain, Myanmar, and Rojava. He'll be joined in conversation by Edith Mirante who has spent significant time in Myanmar as well as in the revolutionary streets of Portland. [eventbrite]
Also: Bastille Day Celebration at Golden Sardine (North Beach) / Poetry and Arepas: Earthquake Relief Event for Venezuela at Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore (The Mission)
Wednesday, July 15
Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin Reading Group, 6pm, Berkeley Institute (Berkeley). Collectively read and discuss Le Guin's most experimental novel, a big bag of stories and world-building of a future post-apocalyptic Bay Area, as the Berkeley-born author applies everything she learned from her father Alfred Kroeber's studies of Indigenous Californians to imagining a post-capitalist culture that would reemerge here with the values and practices of World Renewal (still held and practiced by California's first people like the Karuk, the Wiyot, the Yurok etc). Come having read the first 200 pages, then keep going for a month at the same pace. [Berkeley Institute]
The Elusive Body: Medicine, Mystery & the Diagnostic Crisis, 6pm, Book Society (College Ave). Health-focused journalist Alexandra Sifferlin and UCSF diagnostician Dr. Gurpreet Dhaliwal talk about how the medical system is just a big guessing game and how Sifferlin wrote a book about it. [Book Society]
Grand Lake Neighbors Meeting - Grand Avenue Redesign Project Discussion, 7pm, Barnett Hall next to Lakeshore Baptist Church (Grand Lake). Grand Ave connects the Bay Bridge to West Oakland, downtown, and the lake, and the city has a plan about it! Charlie Ream from OakDOT shares plans to make it better, smoother, and less deadly for bicyclists and pedestrians. [Grand Lake Neighbors]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Jake Skeets with Beth Piatote, 7pm, Books on the Park on 9th Avenue (Outer Sunset). There was almost no poetry all week and I was becoming disconsolate but then I remembered that Jake Skeets (Diné) is coming to town with Horses! He's reading with Beth Piatote (Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation), whose new collection is distant water. Joy Harjo (Muscogee) is praising Skeets's work as "a reverberation of horse songs echoing" and as the author of the phenomenal incantatory poem "She had some horses," Harjo should know. And Berkeley Prof Piatote draws from the rhythms and grammars of the Nez Perce language to explore sonic and spiritual ecologies. We almost got stuck forever in prose and politics but the poets are here to lift us up and out. [Green Apple Books]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Reddest] Anarchy in the Haight Ashbury!!! 50 Years of Bound Together Anarchist Collective Bookstore, 7:30pm, Counterculture Museum (The Haight). All the volunteers at the all volunteer bookshop will gather round to tell you how they do it and have been doing it for fifty years (are lentils for dinner involved, I bet they are). [insta]
Wood Street Documentary Screening, 7:30pm, Grand Lake Theater (Grand Lake). The residents of the Wood Street encampment and the filmmakers came together to make this documentary about the self-created community that emerged from various governmental forces deciding this is where they'd shuffle homeless folks off to so the rest of Oakland didn't have to see their neighbors with nowhere else to go. There's enough seats in GLT that everyone who wants to hear the stories and see life on the raw edges of Oakland from the inside should be able to fit in, after the sold out premiere screening at the Parkway last night. [tickets]
Disorienting Dick, 8:30pm, The New Parkway Theater (Uptown). The calendar bot refused to accept this event at first, which is very silly because clearly this is a movie about a man named Richard Whiteman who is very straight and maybe even asexual. The sock puppets in the movie must have been the problem, not the "campy queer fever dream" that "doesn't get bogged down by things like 'logic' or 'plot.'" [eventbrite]
Also: Poetry, Live Music, Dance, and Fashion Night at Saint Josephs Arts Foundation (SoMa) / Peter Sun Presentation and Performance of Living Botanical Sculpture at Arion Press (Fort Mason) / Port of Shadows at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley)
Thursday, July 16
Katie Gaddini and Seyward Darby at Womb House Books: Esther's Army, 6:30pm, Womb House Books (Temescal). Ex-vangelical and current sociologist Katie Gaddini will discuss her book Esther's Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right with Seyward Darby, author of Sisters in Hate: American Women and White Extremism. There's trad wives and radical white nationalists, Black churchgoers and MAGA-face influencers, the crunchy women who leapt over the horseshoe's gap to MAHA, and everyone in the Tri-Delta house. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Chuck Tingle / Fabulous Bodies, 7pm, The Internet Archive (The Richmond). Camp, horror, zombies, and parasocial relationships that fall out of the screen and into our laps! How LA, how today, how Tingling in all the best ways. [The Booksmith]
My Deepest Desire, 7pm, Tally Ho! Books (Upper Rockridge). Local artists Sandy Walker and Mugi Takei talk about My Deepest Desire by Japanese poet Tamiki Hara, released this year in a new translation accompanied by the ink drawings of Sandy Walker. Hear the artists speak about the human scale of war and its violence, the importance of art to our communal psyches, and more. [Talley Ho Bookstore]
Help Me, My Love, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). A wife falls in love with an man who is not her husband; most reviewers are really into the music. All Italian, through and through. [BAMPFA]
Also: Music & Mocktails with KALW DJ Emmanuel Nado at Main Oakland Library (Downtown) / Francis Baker on Beauty and the Anthropocene at Local Economy (Rockridge) / Listening to Wine: A Tasting and Storytelling Experience at Jered's Pottery (Emeryville) / HOLLY LARSEN: LUCKY, LUCKY PEOPLE at Books Inc. (Alameda the Once And Future Peninsular Extension of Oakland) / Phil Cousineau's THE WISDOM OF THE ODYSSEY at Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood)
Friday, July 17
Friday Nights at OMCA with Óskar Ly & Rumbalú and Asociación Cultural Kanchis, 5pm, OMCA (The Lake). Peruvian and Colombian music and dance, hanging out with your neighbors, a live (costumed) figure drawing session, food trucks, and probably an ORB editor with his twins somewhere in the mix of it all if they're over the latest round of preschool virus. Who could ask for anything more? [OMCA]
Poetry!, 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). There was no reading last week! But the Friday night poeting is happening again after a small break. J. Yuru Zhou (“Girls, Californian or not, speak in / simile so naturally”), Addie Mahmassani (whose book on Odetta and Joan Baez and the women of the folk revival comes out this fall), poet laureate of Los Gatos, California, Mr. William Ward Butler, and Li Patron who doesn’t much think of themselves as a poet these days. (guest hosted by Simone Zapata and Christine Imperial)
The Poetry Lounge, 6:30pm, 811 Oakland (Downtown). Singer Zariyah, rapper Mad Jack, and hiphop artist Tiki10Hunnit will get the ball rolling, then it's your turn for the open mic. Hosted by Reno the Poet! [insta]
The Mark Of Zorro, 7pm, The Paramount (Oakland). The foppish son of a ranchero puts on a mask and starts buckling his swash on behalf of the oppressed. This is the silent version from 1920 with Douglas Fairbanks in the lead role. (Canonically it's the movie Bruce Wayne watches with his parents before they're murdered.) Live music accompaniment by Mark Herman, which is always cool.[ticketmaster]
Also: Listen To Your Elders: An Elder Project Anthology Release Party! at Ruth’s Table (West Bay) / Campfire Stories: The Emperor's New Clothes at 828 59th St (North Oakland)
Saturday, July 18
Radio Day By the Bay - Live! 2026, 8am, Radio Central (Used to Be A....). A face for radio, a radio for faces, racing for faded, ratio facials, it's all a lot of static, will someone turn the tuning dial and set the waves just right? [California Historical Radio Society]
Water, Steel, Concrete, and Glass: The Elements That Shaped Jingletown, 10am, The waterfront at 29th Ave & the Park Street Bridge (Jingletown). There's a canal, there are bridges, there's 880 and now there's an arts neighborhood in what was once an industrial area. Come learn how one thing led to another with Stuart Swiedler. Come early, come often to all the OHA walking tours on the schedule. [humanitix]
Temescal Alley Book Festival, 12 noon, Temescal Alley (Used to Be Stables). Jessica Ferri of Womb House Books has organized the first ever Temescal Alley Book Festival! Come say hi to local favorites Heyday, ORB, Zyzzyva, and more, followed by readings from local authors and a celebration! [insta]
The Existential Circus!, 2pm, Point San Pablo Harbor (Greater Northwest Oakland). Music and arts and whimsy and costumes and waterfront camping on the tip of the peninsula behind the giant refinery. 2 pm for camping, 5 pm for the rest of it. [Point San Pablo Harbor]
[West Bay Bonus Event the First] Show Me Your Bottom Line: Art and Eco-Punishment, 2pm, Telematic Media Arts (SoMa). Artist Jill Miller trained in BDSM in order to administer humiliation to an executive volunteering to take punishment for environmental crimes with lithium-dipped whips and more. But if he's enjoying it, thrilling at being slapped, is it punishment at all or just encouragement for him to keep misbehaving? Can power dynamics ever really be inverted under capitalism? With art historians Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, and Media Scholar Nicole Starosielski [insta]
Screening and Film Discussion: Kintsukuroi, 2pm, Main Oakland Library (The Lake-ish). Watch a locally made, independent feature film about Japanese internment made by the son of a Japanese American citizen imprisoned at the camp at Topaz as a child. The film’s director/writer/producer Kerwin Berk and cast members will be there to answer questions! [OPL]
Lake Merritt Puppet Society Creatures Parade, 4pm, Snow Park (The Lake). Large-scale puppet parade to celebrate Oakland's urban ecology, especially Lake Merritt's lively waters (read Cole on the Lake Merritt monster for inspiration). "This is a BYOPuppet event." You have one week to papier mache a crowmaggeddon with your local murder of friends, or make yourself a salmon to embody one of the Chinook who swam to the Lake and died there last year. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event the Second] Reception, Open House and Panel Discussion: Banned Books, 5 pm, American Bookbinders Museum (SoMa). The museum's current exhibit highlights 250 years of book banning, since America has always talked out of both sides of our mouth when it comes to actually honoring freedom of speech (whose speech, when, where). The panel of experts include Becka Robbins of Fabulosa Books and founder of Books not Bans, David Gales from the Prisoners Literature Project and librarian, Dorsey Nunn, Heyday author of a banned book and a Formerly Incarcerated Person, novelist and professor Keenan Norris (coincidentally also a Heyday author nbd), and Sarah Stone, from SFPL. [Bookbinders Museum]
SOLD OUT Shoot the Piano Player, 6:30pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Laura Truffaut is back, to introduce another of her father's movie, and it's sold out again! Man, you really have got to get faster on those tickets or you're never gonna catch her. [bampfa]
Roberta Kwok's LOST IN CURIOSITY, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Berkeley End of College Ave). Scientists out in the field or in the lab, following their curiosity toward wonder may eventually find revelation, but there's a lot of wandering in the muck and running that experiment again before it happens.Which is why good research is expensive -- you pay for dead ends too. Roberta Kwok, former genetics lab rat at Stanford now journalist, talks with fellow science writer Elizabeth Svoboda about the passions and determination of scientists walking the edge of the known world. [Mr's D's]
Also: Encinal Park History Tour at Encinal Park (Alameda) / 50 Years of The Booksmith: A Neighborhood Celebration at The Booksmith (The Haight) / Intro to Ecology & Biodiversity of Urban Oakland II at Leona Canyon Trail Head (The Hills) / Stories with an Accent (in Russian this time only) at 2727 California (Berkeley) / Maceo Carrillo Martinet, "Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are" at Medicine for Nightmares (The Mission)
Sunday, July 19
Ridgetop Redwoods, 10am, Madrone Picnic Area, Blossom Rock Historic Landmark marker (The Hills). John Nicoles leads you into the past, under the second and third growth redwoods that are trying to restore the whole forest that used to capture and drip fog into the home of the grizzly and the wolf, the azalea and the fawn lily. He'll probably talk more about how settlers chopped the trees down and shot them down the creeks to the bay. [humanitix]
[West/North Bay Bonus Event] Biking/Art/Rock-Skipping Event, 10am, Rodeo Lagoon (Outer Sunset). You will ride a bike, you will draw, you will visit the Headlands, you will skip rocks, which reminds me of this astonishing long read from four years ago back when Outside Magazine hadn't been stripped for parts, on the greatest living rock skipper. They say this'll be an hour to an hour and a half, but I think these organizers are worse at time management than me, and they definitely aren't counting the time it takes to ride back across the bridge. This will be your whole day, but maybe you will be ready to challenge Kurt by the end of it. [insta]
Revolutionary Poetry Reading Circle, noon, Lake Merritt (Near Lake Chalet But Not Inside). The youth love poetry and hanging out in person. Join Madeline Rose Hernandez from precarious mag & host Sohini to explore the theme of memory / place in language and on the page. There will be breathing rituals, poetry to read, discussion, and masks to breathe through (which are pretty unnecessary when you're meeting outside but there's a whole identity and aesthetic around N95 masks that the lefty babies are into, so do your thing.) [insta]
Spotlight Sundays: Mildred Howard in Conversation with Nashormeh Lindo and Essence Harden, 1pm, OMCA (The Lake). Hear Mildred Howard, the East Bay artist featured at OMCA right now, share "stories and reflections on a lifetime of art, practice, and living in the Bay Area" with her longtime local artist friend Nashormeh Lindo. Howard's sculptural work is informed by growing up with a mom who bought and sold antiques, and there's supposed to be a documentary about her screening too but I can't find that on the OMCA website at all now. Talk moderated by YBCA's curator Essence Harden. [OMCA]
[North Bay Bonus Event] "Apocalypse? No." Solarpunk Live Readings & Happy Hour, 1pm, Solar Punk Farms (Guerneville). Bay Area solarpunk authors (Ursula K Le Guin's Always Coming Home is the ur-text) show up on a farm dedicated to making the genre's vision a reality. Zoe Young, Khan Wong, Spencer R. Scott, T. K. Rex, and Joe Wadlington -- readings, book signings, snacks in Sonoma. [eventbrite]
Gary Phillips // The Haul, 1pm, Marcus Books (Longfellow). Gary Phillips, author of The Haul: A Heist Novel, comes to town from SoCal to talk about his work as a writer, organizer, and his native LA as a location for noir and crime fiction. [eventbrite]
Wrenching News Workshops, 1pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). The news is wrenching, so wrench the news and contribute to the community sculpture in a collective ritual created by Maren Hassinger, the LA-born artist featured by the museum right now. If you can't go this month, there will be monthly twistings of paper through November. [bampfa]
[West Bay Bonus Event] The Mutual Aid of Language – Book Talk and Discussion, 2pm, Medicine for Nightmares (The Mission). Mark Sicoli, a linguist who hangs out in Oaxaca for field work, has a new book about language's evolution that says mutual aid and anarchism are core to communication and conversation. Using language to help each other, not manipulate, what a concept. [Medicine for Nightmares]
"This Is Terrible, This Is Wonderful": Postpartum Zine Workshop, 2pm, Local Economy (College Ave). Make a collective poetry zine about the highs and lows of the early days of parenting with an artist from the East Coast. Not sure what she does should be called poetry (her book is filed under "self-help: affirmations"), but hey -- Brooklyn-Hudson Valley-artist-mom guides a bunch of Rockridge-artsy-moms writing little validations together: sounds cute. [luma]
Creating Climate Resilience on Berkeley's Waterfront, 3pm, Veterans Memorial Building Auditorium (Downtown Berkeley). So far, the plan for Berkeley's waterfront has been: use pieces of concrete, brick, and asphalt as riprap to hold the land and the sea apart. Repeat. Ellen Plane from the very cool SFEI will talk about the historical ecology of the Berkeley Bayshore and then a discussion of sea level rise and some other response options besides dumping of industrial waste (restoring marshes is a big one, but then we run into the hard edge of transportation infrastructure and everything gets very expensive.) [Berkeley Historical Society & Museum]
Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker Movie Night, 6pm, Moments Co-op (Downtown). Learn how Ella Baker, godmother of SNCC, shaped the American civil rights movement, in this 1981 documentary about the woman who said "power to the people," and meant it. [insta]
5th Annual Ride for Palestine, 7pm, Middle East Children’s Alliance (West Berkeley). Raise money and ride along the edge of the Bay for the Right of Return. From the River to the Sea means from Berkeley to Richmond today. [Ride for Palestine]
Also: Encinal Park at Encinal Park (Used to Be a Peninsula) / SF in SF presents Ian Shoales/Merle Kessler and Molly Tanzer at The San Francisco Public Library Main Branch (Civic Center) / Jazz on Sunday: Charles Hamilton on Trombone at Golden Gate Branch OPL (San Pablo Corridor) / Takahata’s Gauche the Cellist at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley)
