Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, July 28–August 2
First of all, save the date: our ORB Launchiversary: Always Be Launching party at Eli’s, at 6pm until late, on Thursday August 20. There will be surprising delights, and more will be revealed soon. Line up your babysitters and dogsitters now!
Other than that, there’s only all of this: Castro Valley Friends of the Library Booksale kicks off Friday, lasts all weekend. Meanwhile, on the wholesome side of the hills, the Roxie is hosting an artsy porn flick festival, and also the documentary about Mary Oliver, who probably wouldn’t mind being part of an artsy porn festival since she hired John Waters to work in her and her lover’s Provincetown bookshop back in the day. Also, you can show up and support people getting released from Santa Rita Jail most days and nights, and you should. It’s also BAMAVERSARY: celebrate ten years of Black Arts and Culture in Oakland (seems like Oakland might have more than ten years of that but who’s counting?), AND BUT ALSO it’s the Fairyland Puppet Fair Weekend! We’re real excited for that, probably more than strictly appropriate for a children’s event but Fairyland does call it “Coachella for people who love puppets, puppet shows, and puppeteers” so there will be our kind of weirdos there, for sure. We hear that The Invite is set in a rent-controlled West Bay apartment and it’s showing for one last week at Grand Lake, so review it for us? Housing is the hassle, neighbors’ sexy sounds coming through the walls is the drama, do they resolve it through becoming a polycule or is the Bay still too radical for Hollywood endings. There’s a cafe at the San Leandro Library now: Books Inc opened then quickly closed down there but the people yearn to eat quiche and read books so in true neoliberal fashion a public-private partnership meets their needs. Go out and listen to more oompapah oompapah at the lake: I’m not saying summer is counting down, but the days are numbered and this weekend takes us into August’s fog, and that sweet time when blackberries and apples begin to overlap, and the pies are perfect, and they’re coming out of the oven, warm and good and begging to be eaten with your neighbors. -MS
Tuesday, July 28
The Fountainhead (1949), 1pm, Orinda Theatre (Hot Side of the Hills). I was grading AP English exams one grueling summer and asked the head of my group the innocent and reasonable question of whether I should disqualify the essay I was reading since it was about The Fountainhead, which clearly wasn't of literary value as the AP Board required. She came in the next day wearing an Atlas Shrugged t-shirt so you can guess her answer. You never know where you'll find a Randian. They may all converge in Orinda today, though otoh watching a movie together is an act of collectivity so nevermind. [Orinda Movies]
Library Helper Club, 3pm, North Branch (Berkeley). The Berkeley librarians and ORB have the same motto: put the children to work, preferably in a book-adjacent task, like stuffing envelopes with merch for hand deliveries to you, faithful ORB subscriber. Full Employment for Children Only. [BPL]
Summer of Rom-Coms: He's Just Not That Into You, 5pm, Dublin Library (Hot Side of the Hills). It's the Summer of Rom Coms, specifically those from 10-20 years ago, when millennials were discovering pining, ghosting, and Ginnifer Goodwin. Too many fuckboys still exist and haven’t aged out of the behavior, meaning everyone should rewatch this, unforch. [AC Library]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Joseph Ogilvy with Obi Kaufmann—Tin Can Coast, 6pm, Book Passage (Corte Madera). Joseph Ogilvy, chef and writer, got bored during covid and went down some rabbit holes on tuna, sardines, and abalone, and now there's a book on the environmental history of the boom and bust of the fishing industry in California! Amazing what people who didn't have two kids under 5 could do under lockdown. The California Current, which moves cold water south from Alaska along our coast, is responsible for the upwelling of nutrients which supported those huge schools of fish and also the invention of the wetsuit (brrr). Obi Kaufmann, author of The Coasts of California, joins. [Book Passage]
Auntie Sewing Squad Resistance Playbook, 6:30pm, The New Parkway (Uptown). Performance artist Kristina Wong made a collective, community art project of mask sewing during lockdown, then birthed a book, a one woman show, and now a documentary about the experience of building grassroots mutual aid in times of disaster. Imagine a better future, then act like it's real already. [Veezi]
Graphic Novel Group: Special Guests Briana Loewinsohn and Thien Pham, 6:30pm, Rockridge Branch (College Ave). For adults who like pictures on their pages, whether you're into reading, writing or drawing them. Come meet each other, talk about your favorite graphic novels, and meet local graphic book artists and writers, starting with locals Briana Loewinsohn and Thien Pham. [OPL]
Chloe Lauter: The Flayed Man, with Eirinie Carson, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). If you had been at the most recent ORB happy hour you could have gotten your hands on the advance copy of Chloe Lautner's new queer-vampire-roadtrip-mother-daughter-spooky-desert-mystery novel, but instead it's at my house, being added to certain piles of books that will someday be on shelves. Luckily, you can make up for it by going to Pegasus and hanging out with the Soft Skull Press author in person (yes, Soft Skull is independent, but it's also owned by a Koch scion, which is just good to stay aware of, speaking of vampires). The most fabulous Eirinie Carson, who also dabbles in the body horror of being a woman, will join the LA writer in conversation. [Pegasus]
Bay Area Memorial Event & Mourning Tent for Awdah Hathaleen, 7pm, Kehilla Community Synagogue (the secret, shameful Piedmont part of Grand Avenue). When we see the name “Piedmont” it’s hard for us not to have the kneejerk reaction that Piedmont schools accepted a bunch of families who left OUSD over the Palestinian solidarity expressed by teachers during the active and ongoing genocide of Palestinian children and families. But we’re going to work past that: Kehilla Community Synagogue has been on the right side of this stuff for a while, and even though they are technically within a city that maintains a Flockian border wall, they also have the good sense to be right on Grand Avenue, which is a pretty Oakland place to be. Join them in solidarity in the synagogue to mourn West Bank activist, journalist, teacher, and leader Awdah Hathaleen on the first anniversary of his murder by an Israeli settler. [everyaction]
Also: Romance Book Club: A Love Song for Ricki Wilde by Tia Williams at North Branch (Berkeley) / Workers Voices Storytelling Night at Medicine for Nightmares (The Mission) / Samin Nosrat in Conversation with Alexis Madrigal at Henry J Kaiser Center for the Arts (The Lake) / Alicia Upano's EVERYTHING TO THE SEA at Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood)
Wednesday, July 29
Ricky Roo and Friends Puppet Show, 10:30am, Dimond Branch OPL (Dimond District). According to people who watched the World Cup, there were muppets at the final halftime show. We are in hot puppet summer and escalating toward a cozy puppet autumn, everyone you know will be wearing puppets instead of gloves this winter, and who knows what next spring holds: get in on the zeitgeist at the library today so you're ready. [OPL]
NGHBRHOOD Library Book Fair, 2pm, NGHBRHOOD Library (Allendale). The NGHBRHOOD Library is a new community center for books and writing and radical liberation in Oakland. I love how everyone makes cool new shit here. After doing a big book drive to start the library part of their endeavor, today they're hosting a free bookish afternoon featuring Oakland youth programs. Chapter 510 will be there, offering poetry prescriptions! [insta]
Summer of Rom-Coms: Valentine's Day, 5pm, Dublin Library (Hot Side of the Hills). "Ensemble comedy" is just theatre nerd for supergroup. Enjoy the squad that includes two Jessicas, a Julia and a Jennifer, Bradley Cooper AGAIN, and because the movie is from 2010, Topher Grace. [AC Library]
Profs & Pints Alameda: How Beer Shaped Civilization, 6pm, Faction Brewing (Alameda). Jonathan Hughes, brewer and professor of brewing talks about malts and hops and the history and microbiology of beer. Craft brewing may have finally saturated the market and gone flat but fermentation is an old, old friend who'll be sticking around. [ticketleap]
Let's Talk About Abortion: Navigating the Post-Dobbs Landscape, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockandahardplaceridge). An abortion fund leader and maternal health and birth experts speak alongside author Kate Schatz on abortion after Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett went Oopsie, I forget, what's "precedent" again? The fact is that the abortion rate has actually increased since 2022 because of telehealth advances and pharmaceutical abortions, so women will find a way to help each other when shit goes down. Call an auntie, she'll know what to do. [luma]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Peter S. Canellos with Elizabeth Ralph - Revenge for the Sixties, 6pm, Book Passage (Corte Madera). Speaking of Alito, or "Scalito" as my lawyer dad used to call him, there's a biography of that asshole out now and why him hating hippies and the grievance politics of the right writ large have gotten us to where we are today (the bad place). Author Peter S. Canellos is an editor at POLITICO, in conversation with Elizabeth Ralph who now is at the SF Standard, but used to be at POLITICO too. Read this and then skip Alito's own book, coming out from the Heritage Foundation-inspired Basic Liberty imprint at Hachette this October. [Book Passage]
Honestly, In Hindsight, 6:30pm, Black Panther Party Museum (Downtown). The Men's Wellness Fellowship gathers to create community, tell stories, and looks back on the year so far. [insta]
WHB July Book Club: Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, 6:30pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). More bookclubbing with Americans in Paris! This time, James Baldwin: Giovanni's Room — a Paris full of seductive bartenders and doomed gay love affairs, but with less racism, at least back then in the '50s, at least for smart and swoony writers. [eventbrite]
Summer Open Mic Night at Lyrics & Dirges, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Berkeley). Featured readers: Carla Schick who writes poetry as a queer transformative activist who is also just a person ("My father sang / the blues Smoked his blues Drank his beer blues / Sweated his factory blues") & Berkeley poet Debby Charlene Segal. Get there early to sign up for the open mic slots that follow! [facebook]
The Coroner's Silence, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). In conversation with Clio's owner Timothy Don; UCLA prof Terence Keel researched how coroners and cops are in cahoots when people die in police custody, obscuring, mishandling, and losing evidence that shows the actual level of violence. These are the pieces of evidence that delegitimatize the state's monopoly on violence, and show that it's all one big gang living off the city's funds. Keel has some ideas about doing more than reform: as Dorsey Nunn says, That's a nice theory of change, now what's your motherfucking praxis? [eventbrite]
Bambi Lake Celebration, 7pm, Tally Ho! Books (Piedmont the Avenue Not the Ethnic Enclave). Pay homage to queer ancestors with August Bernadicou and Brontez Purnell. Bernadicou has just edited a posthumous collection of poetry by Bambi Lake, a Cockettes-adjacent performer, out from Nightboat, and has interviewed and researched LGBTQ elders for decades. Brontez is a punk ballerina poet who just says yes to just about everything and writes fantastic poems about it all. Live life like you're going to die, and write it all down to break our hearts so we'll remember you. [Tally Ho!]
[West Bay Bonus Event] LaborFest Writers Anthology Launch Reading, 7pm, Adobe Books & Arts Cooperative (The Mission). The LaborFest Writers Group was founded by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in 2005 during LaborFest and still gathers working and working class writers weekly more than twenty years later. Grassroots and rabble-rousing, these writer-activists, organizer-authors share poems, polemic, memoir and more in the new anthology that gathers their best work. Featured writers include Barbara Ruth Saunders, Nellie Wong (whose memorial we featured a few weeks ago), Alice Elizabeth Rogoff, and more people who remember what the West Bay used to be like. [laborfest.net]
Panique, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). A satire of noir that's actually a comment on French society a couple years post WWII, but you still get a femme fatale. Based on a novel by classic mystery writer Georges Simenon! [bampfa]
Runtime Movie Club - BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, 7:45pm, Grand Lake Theater (Grand Lake). Beatrice Kilat (regular contributor to the SF Review of Whatever, writer of many other things besides, and expert on how to recognize a sex pest in your community) has curated some movies for you, and Grand Lake is showing the first one! Join Runtime Movie Club for movies once a month and get a nice printed piece of film crit on the far side of the screening. Come curious: the first film is BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions directed by Kahlil Joseph, which showed at Sundance! A video essay, a montage of made and found footage, a musical encyclopedia — trust Beatrice to show you something artsy as hell and hella Black to boot. [runtimemovieclub.com]
Also: Oakland Bloom Presents: Michoacán Cooking with Tsiri at Elmhurst Branch (Deep East) / Sound Advice: A Talk by Photographer Nancy Rubin at North Branch (Berkeley) / Elizabeth Krakow's "HAPPY MOTHER'S DAZE" at Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood)
Thursday, July 30
SOLD OUT Full Moon Grunion Search, 12:01am, Crown Memorial State Beach (Alameda The Former Peninsula). Too many people want to look at fish flinging themselves on shore under a full moon this month for you to go too, but keep your eye on the grunion calendar. Maybe, like the floppy fish laying eggs and spreading semen in the sand, we will all get lucky in love next month on an island beach at midnight in moonlight. [ebparks]
Gujarati Storytime, 11:15am, Fremont Main Library (Deep South East Oakland). This is for kids, and it's a long way from Oakland central, but it's a reminder that the East Bay is bursting with languages and stories and the people who carried them here. If you know a Patel, then you know a Gujarati. The Bay Area is a very big, very old port town, a pearl in the bracelet of the Pacific Rim, and there are over a hundred languages that move the air around here. [AC Library]
Repulsive (And Futile?) Reads, 5pm, North Branch BPL (Berkeley). “Repulsive Reads is a book club celebrating all things grim, grotesque, unsettling, macabre, and weird in fiction” and this Thursday, they’re reading and talking about Nuzo Onoh’s Futility. I have this theory that “African Horror” as a discrete genre—which is very identified with Onoh, to the extent that they call her the “queen” of it—is actually kind of downstream of the rise of Jordan Peele-style political horror? Somebody go to this and ask them if that’s right. [BPL]
Bay Area Film Night: City Hall Edition, 6pm, Oakland City Hall (Downtown). City Councilmember Janani Ramachandran is hosting two short films by Bay Area filmmakers: Jamal Trulove's I Thought You'd Never Ask, and West Bay born but now Oakland based Maya Cameron-Gordon's What'chu Mixed With? . Fun fact! Trulove was exonerated after a 2010 conviction and seven years in prison after being falsely accused of murdering his friend and prosecuted by then SF DA Kamala Harris on bad evidence manufactured by cops, and he won his suit against the city so basically the West Bay paid to make his movie. [eventbrite]
How To Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). East Coaster Julia Angwin comes West and suggests that we historicize instead of inventing dissidence and resistance from scratch. Get prepped with practical anti-authoritarianism and ideas for effective, strategic ways to take the right amount of risk and keep democracy alive. [luma]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Works on Paper Book Club: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, 6pm, SFMOMA (SoMa). Alison Guh, SFMOMA curator, leads discussion of Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and the Stein family purchase of Matisse's Femme au chapeau, which is how it eventually ended up in SFMOMA. Read the book (it's great, full of Parisian gossip and written like a mostly normal person would write about themselves in the voice of their wife), come and chat. Get prepped and bait your breath for MORE STEIN because more is coming on the truly Steinian side of the bay soonish. [sfmoma]
JULIET BLACKWELL: THE SEANCE GARDEN, 6:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda). Pseudonymous local author Juliet Blackwell shares her new mystery novel The Séance Garden, featuring a murder that echoes a murder of the past, in the same spooky house, in Monterey. Which just gives me an excuse to ask you to think about the way that place links us across time, that the ghosts we live among aren't supernatural, but are the results of human hands laid on earth, digging, reshaping, building, and forming the places we name as home. Always Historicize, you know the ORB motto, and if you haven't yet, read geographer Brandi Summers on the haunting of Oakland by its own dead self. [eventbrite]
The Reticular Society: Ian Alan Paul in conversation with Jasper Bernes, 7pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Oh FUN (and I mean it)! A PM Press book that draws on Guy Debord and the Situationists to resist "the online reorganization of capitalist society, the rise of logistics and of circulation as contemporary logics of the economy, policing, and culture," and more. Reticulation here is a term coined to address the fracturing and segmenting of society so that the state and extractive capitalism control the means of networking it back together. Flaneur yourself out of surveillance and into communism is my guess on the gist of it, especially with Jasper in the conversational mix. [insta]
The Last Human Bear: a novel by Greg Sarris, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). Greg Sarris has been writing about the Pomo and Miwok people of Sonoma he grew up with even before he found his own ancestral connection to the tribe. Returning to writing novels after more than twenty years, most of that time as the Chairman of Graton Rancheria of Federated Indians, he reimagines the world of his people through Mary, a tolik—a poisoner and a shapeshifter who can move between animal and human worlds, white and Indian worlds. Sarris comes to Oakland to be in conversation with Obi Kaufmann, his friend, podcast conversation partner, and fellow Heyday author. Not to be missed! [eventbrite]
American Motherhood Tour: Film Screening, 7pm, East Bay Birth Collective (Bushrod). No Country for Mothers directed by Reshma Saujani is maybe trying to do choice feminism again, which is annoying, but also if you are a mom who wants to watch a documentary about momming with other moms thinking about the way that the state and patriarchy turn women against each other, this could be an evening to focus your mom rage on a deserving target and plan the next step of the revolution. [mobilize]
L'avventura, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). More Vitti in Italy! Sometimes when your lover disappears, there's another woman conveniently close by. An excuse to tour around the gorgeous landscapes and admire the way the wind blows Vitti's hair around. [bampfa]
Friday, July 31
Rally to call on ASM Buffy Wicks to restore our 'right to know' by passing SB 954, 12 noon, Frank H. Ogawa Plaza (Downtown). The YIMBYs are determined to weaken CEQA in order to make development cheaper, but the thing is, the Wicks and Weiner-led passage of SB 131 last year lets “advanced manufacturing” be exempted from environmental review—and lets daycares be built in these unexamined facilities, which is good for convenient childcare, but bad for everything else. Join West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, the East Oakland-based Communities for a Better Environment, and defend vulnerable communities from becoming sacrifice zones yet again so that middle class people can buy a nice house somewhere else. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Binding the Booker: Where Art and Literature Meet with Dominic Riley, 6pm, San Francisco Center for the Book (Dogpatch). As anyone who was at the SF Art Book Fair last weekend knows, bindings are what makes a book a BOOK and not a stack of paper destined to be ephemera. If you got a taste for the strange delights that exist once you move past staple and perfect bound options, get ready to hear about cover design and specialized bindings for one-off editions of Booker Prize finalists. This is for the design freaks who also love novels (I know you're out there, dying to get your hands on the ORB zines Alex printed up... come see us on August 20th and snatch them up). [SFCB]
TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing Film Screening, 6pm, revealed after registration (Oakland, Somewhere). Ahead of the Black Feminist TCB-focused book club tomorrow, watch this biographical film on Toni Cade Bambara's life. Learn about her important work in cultural organizing as a filmmaker, writer, editor and more through the stories of her editor and friend Toni Morrison and poet Nikky Finney, among others. The thoughtful review in Variety says the filmmakers show that TCB "was someone who knew how to live with an abundance of freedom." [luma]
Poetry! 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Don’t be late, these poets are prompt (by poet standards). Jackson Holbert (current Stegner fellow, has a youtube channel to review “anything”), Emily Brown (probably the Emily Brown who co-edits the stellar Hot Pink with Zoe Tuck), & a mystery guest. Not a mystery: the guest host Paul Ukrainets, local trans translator who loves a Soviet cartoon soundtrack and hates prisons. [Tamarack Poetry Schedule]
Also: Friday Nights at OMCA with The Whoadees and Special Guests at OMCA campus (The Lake) / Winter in America: The SpeakEasy Version: Continuum at BAM House (Downtown) / Craft Night at Blue Willow Tea Spot at Blue Willow Tea Spot (Berkeley) / Chat # 69 with Eli Kersh: Oxygen for Lake Merritt- Going Forward in 2026 at Rotary Nature Center Friends (A Series of Tubes)
Saturday, August 1
[West Bay Bonus Episode] Exclusive private screening of Marion Meets Makers pilot, 10am, Alliance Française (Lower Nob Hill). Explore trades and craft and American handiwork as filmed by French cineaste Marion. The first episode is about a bootmaker, the next features an Oakland-based stained glass master. The French do so much more than noir now. [eventcreate]
Jack London's Footsteps Free Walking Tour, 11am, Ferry Lawn by the Oakland/SF ferry pier (Jack London Square). A free walking tour of Jack London Square and also Jack London's life. JLS is the hangover from Jerry Brown's vision of Oakland, with condos and tech HQs lining the waterfront, but instead it doesn't even have the density to support a grocery store. Find out what got us here, and why running away to sea is still the best advice anyone could give an aspiring writer. [insta]
Discussion: The Black Woman: An Anthology edited by Toni Cade Bambara, 1pm, given on registration (Somewhere in Oakland). I am telling you The Other Toni is making her comeback. Getup to speed and read her alongside the Black woman writers she curated here, including Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde, as well as solidarity activist Grace Lee Boggs. Buy a copy from Marcus Books on MLK Jr Way or borrow it from the library, and go discuss. [meetup]
Our Stories in Our Voices: Oral History of Oakland Chinatown Organizing Across Generations, 1pm, Oakland Asian Cultural Center (Chinatown). This is a program about how Oakland Chinatown has come together during historical moments, from the 1936 Byron Mark laundry case (when the state supreme court found the City of Oakland's regulation of laundry hours all racist and such), to Asian American youth organizing in the 1960s and '70s. Gregory Yee Mark (descendant of the above Mark family) gives a keynote, but there will be more: intergenerational dialogue on neighborhood organizing in particular. [OACC]
Oakland Noticing Club: Architectural Details, 1pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). You went to the tile and terra cotta tour last weekend right? Show the people what you found. [luma]
Ancestors Taught Me: The Great Camouflage, 1:30 pm, The Sanctuary (So Uptown it’s Almost Temescal). Join poet Amalee for a writing workshop toward liberation. Inhale inspiration from Suzanne Césaire’s surrealism and anti-imperialist activism and work together to imagine something better than this. [Google Doc]
West Edge of Lake Merritt, 1:30pm, 11th St & Lake Merritt Blvd (Grand Lake). The historical walking tours are heating up! Stay local this weekend and walk where Oakland began, and hopefully they'll also point out where refugees from West Bay Chinatown camped out in 1906 after the earthquakes and fires and where they fished in the lake to survive (and caught typhus because the lake was also the city's sewer). For a deeper dive into deep time, you know who's got you covered. [Oakland Heritage]
Luna Vela Pop-up, 5pm, Cafe Bolita (West Berkeley). This is a food pop up, but Luna Vela treats cooking as art and witchcraft and poetry and there will be "ancestral memory, tejana fantasies, and queer futurity" on the menu so we're claiming it for ORB. And say hi to poet-chef Kevin Madrigal Galindo if he's helping to make masa magic in the Cafe Bolita kitchen like he often is. [insta]
Vivien’s Wild Ride, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Local legend film editor Vivien Hillgrove makes a filmic memoir as she begins to lose her sight. Turning the camera on the Bay Area filmmaking scene as she knew it, this personal history is also a scene history. [bampfa]
Also: Machine Sewing Circle at Central Library (Berkeley) / 4th Annual Temescal Open Edible Garden Day at Nextdoor IRL (Temescal) / Free-Play Festival: Melina's Not Good Enough For Monday at Potrero Stage (West Bay) / Movie: Theater Camp at Albany Library (Albany) / My Neighbors the Yamadas at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Laurel StreetFair 25th Anniversary PreParty at Showin' Out Hair Gallery (The Laurel)
Sunday, August 2
Alameda Beach Clean Up with Can I Get a Witness?, 10:30am, Alameda Beach (The Island). Bringing poets together around a mic to hear and be heard is usually the point, but Debbie, the organizer, is taking it outside this weekend. Can you bear witness to the beach too? Make it nice together for the grunions and the people. Then go write a poem about it. [partiful]
A Language of Stitches: The Radical Quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins with Constance Moore, 1:30pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Quilters, outsider art lovers, appreciators of Bay Area legacies of the Great Migration: here's a children's book for you. Oakland artist and teacher Constance Moore wrote the picture-book biography of Richmond's Rosie Lee Tompkins, and now she's sharing it at the institution that raised her profile so much that Trump's administration revoked a quarter million in grants to the museum over a show with her work in it. [bampfa]
Black Film Residency, 2pm, BAM House (Downtown). Spend the afternoon with films that "celebrate Black voices, culture, resilience, and imagination." Two films in the line up are Tent City and Beyond Time; talk with filmmakers, film lovers, and storytellers of all kinds after. [insta]
Hidden Haddon Hill, 2pm, The triangle at Kenwyn Road & McKinley Avenue (Haddon Hill, unsurprisingly). You can tell the nice neighborhoods in Oakland because they put the electricity and phones underground and so the trees haven't been warped around wires. This is one of them — pretty houses with lake views built for rich folks, now with the roar of the freeway added. Excellent trick or treating here too, in witch and werewolf season. [humanitix]
Mending: Sewing Machine Edition, 2pm, Oakland Main Library (The Lake). Bobbin tension, walking foot, serger etc should not be meaningless garble if you're showing up here. Bring your knowledge, your holey clothes, and find machines and mending friends. Go home repaired. [OPL]
Storytime and Craft with Author Elisa Kleven, 2pm, Albany Library (North by Northest Oakland). ORB likes collages, go make some with your kids and local author-illustrator Elisa Kleven. ORB's in house collage artist and occasional librarian Gregory Hom approves. [AC Library]
Ferry Forum: Economics, History, and the Future of a Berkeley Landmark, 2:30pm, Ferry Forum (Berkeley). There might be a new ferry, and the Berkeley pier could be reborn! If those pilings could talk. Learn about old ferries, new ferries, what historians, the city council, and the Coastal Commission all think of it. If you get there early, check out the On the Waterfront exhibit, open at 2 pm. [berkhistory.org]
The Clockmaker of St. Paul, 4:30pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Another Georges Simenon novel on celluloid (Maigret is the detective he's most famous for inventing, but look there's more). A craftsman of clocks whose son is accused of murder gets sucked into the dark underside of Lyon. Marion Meets Makers Meets Noir, and the entire calendar is now officially a circle. [bampfa]
Also: Opening Reception for Loyal Americans: The Story of Eden Area Japanese Americans During World War II at Fremont Main Library (Deep South Oakland) / Jazz on Sunday at Golden Gate Branch (San Pablo Corridor)
