Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, July 7–July 12
We have entered Laborfest month, which will include watching the musical Newsies but also butterflies and walking tours of Berkeley’s WPA architecture, and an Oakland General Strike walk. I bet the Current’s weekly calendar will share the highlights. And while you’re considering going to the West Bay, check out the Same Page SF Summer Reading Challenge! If you liked learning about Olympia oysters the other week, measure the bay’s salinity near a reef of them on an ongoing basis. There are plays involving comedy and ones about colonization opening this week, then all day long on Saturday the Alameda Book Con is bringing local authors to sign and read and try to avoid meeting your gaze. And after a year of solid effort, finally the rest of the Bay agrees: Mondays do not exist. Take a day off to finish the novels you started over the holiday weekend, then get back out of the house tomorrow and all week long because the literary schedule ratchets up after our collective sunburn and holiday hangover have subsided. Meet me in the last of the sunshine in Kerouac Alley on Saturday and tell me how it all went (or, if you're in the ORB discord, help us pick a place to watch world cup this week). -MS
Tuesday, July 7
Library Helper Club, 3pm, North Branch BPL (North Berkeley). Put your children to work at the local library! I hear they need internships to get into college and elementary school seems like the time to start. [BPL]
Hannah Hirsekorn Botanical Drawing Gathering, 6pm, 2727 California St (South Berkeley). Come draw plants! Caress flowers and leaves with your eye, caress paper with your brush, pen, pencil, charcoal-dusted finger. Caress color, caress texture, caress thickness and delicate edges. Make new plant and artist friends along the way. [2727]
The Black Studies Collective Community Reading and Discussion Series: The Black Antifascist Tradition, 6pm, West Oakland Branch Library (De Fremery). Black Studies is a living tradition and the book club at the library brings it back out of the academy and into the community. Read The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition by Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen together. This is the second of four meetings: try to make as many as you can to create collective understanding. [OPL]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Laura Marie Meyers with Jessica Joyce - The MASH Up, 6pm, Book Passage (Corte Madera). It's a rom com featuring a “what if MASH came true?” premise – my '80s girlies, this is for you. Ms. Myers, I'll give you a freebie: make your sophomore book a cozy mystery following the plot of Fuck-Marry-Kill, and we'll all buy that one too. [Book Passage]
SCABMUGGERS, The Play, Premiere, 7pm, The Freight (Berkeley). Power, gender, sex, race, and how they divide the left, as explored by writer Yvonne Martinez and a troupe of actors in a fractious year among organizers in the 1990s, split by internal sexual harassment accusations even as the woman who got stalked tries to call in and hold community together rather than ostracize the man in question. If you are studying up on how to deal when men's appendages wreck a shared community, ask Bea for the syllabus she devised for her Sex Pest Reading Group at Bather's Library. Watch the play, do the reading, learn how to handle inevitable conflict without going full schism. [The Freight]
Melissa Murray's “THE U.S. CONSTITUTION,” 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood). Author and legal expert Murray annotates and explains the Constitution, because these days even the Supreme Court doesn't seem to understand it. [Mrs D's]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Fundraiser for SFPD victims, 8pm, The Stud (Folsom St). As you learned from ORB's Sunday Reading round up (subscribe to get the weekly evidence that we’re all too online), West Bay police got ornery during Pride, what with people daring to walk and dance and stop cars from running them over. Join the kickline, join the party, give some money to the folks who got beat up and arrested. [insta]
Wednesday, July 8
Gather In Art and Craft Community Night: Rewalking Memory Paths, 5pm, ARTogether (Downtown). Make art from what you remember, write down what others recall, share it all with each other and that's how history and community are formed, with gentleness and resilience. Led by artist-in-residence Aylin Ayee. [ARTogether]
Poetry as Companion: Parenting in Uncertain Times, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Evan Bissell and Ben Gucciardi (Arguments, forthcoming) lead a poetry reading and writing workshop, part of Evan's project Parents Against the Future, in which he draws together art-making and community-building to help us imagine better worlds for our children together in the face of climate grief, extractive systems, and the world collapsing around us. Write to make sense of it all, to cast spells, to feel your way into each other's minds. [luma]
The Afterlife is Letting Go, 6pm, Tarea Hall Pittman South Branch BPL (Berkeley). Brandon Shimoda, the California poet temporarily misplaced to Colorado, comes back to discuss his nonfiction book meditating on the aftermath of racist, unconstitutional Japanese incarceration, The Afterlife is Letting Go (City Lights). When do we remember, what do we forget, how do we shred and wipe away inherited silence. “Stirring, trenchant, and necessary” says Christina Sharpe. Don't miss this. [BPL]
Merritt Dialogues: No More Normal, 7pm, The New Parkway (Uptown). Instead of trying to “get back to normal,” take the moment of horror to destroy the status quo instead. The Bay Area Book Festival convenes Jeff Chang, trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté and “wellness practitioner” Nicole Steward to share stories, practical guidance, and pathways to “community-centered healing that address the roots of personal and social suffering.” Sounds radical, idealistic, and utterly Oakland. [veezi]
Joe Uehlein - “Three Roads: Labor, Music, Ecology,” 7pm, Pegasus Books Downtown (Berkeley). We're trying to figure out how to get from here to there. How should it, could it be. A book and a discussion can be a stepping stone on that path. Joe Uehlein, longtime labor activist and son of a steelworking labor organizer, took his experience in unions to climate justice, and also took the Woody Guthrie “this machine kills fascists” line seriously. Music, people power, fighting the man: if Berkeley doesn't turn out for this, I will eat my Mime Troupe t-shirt. [Pegasus]
Paths of Glory, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). BAMPFA is on a Kubrick kick and is taking Kirk Douglas along for the ride. The ride is a war movie, which like all good war movies, is actually an anti-war movie on celluloid brittle with cynicism. [BAMPFA]
Also: Decolonized Kitchen with educator Maribel Garcia at Elmhurst Branch (East Oakland) / The Bike Fix at Martin Luther King Jr. Branch (Deep East) / Mystery Movie at the Library at Elmhurst Branch (Deep East)
Thursday, July 9
[West Bay Bonus Event] The Places We Gathered: A Lesbian Storytellin’, Show & Tellin’, Open Mic Night, 6pm, GLBT Historical Society (Mid-Market). Find all the local lesbians at this "part mixer, part open-mic," part memory palace, part party, all apostrophed event. Oakland is where all the lesbians live now but show the West Bay historic sapphics some love too. [GLBT History]
How We Disappear: Information in Life and in Death, 6pm, Local Economy (Formerly Known as Shafter). I had five voicemails from my father when he died. He told me loved me in one of them. Another was a pocket dial, and Google's transcription of the sounds he made was “home dead dead dead dead. Dead dead dead. Yes.” I needed both. The first couple chapters of Stanford historian Thomas Mullaney's new book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information, are pulling me in deep – immersive storytelling braiding the details of filial relationship and parental loss with a fascinating explanation of the material infrastructures of information transfer and storage (so far– can he keep it up?). Organization versus dissolution, retention versus loss – it's a tension impossible to resolve: is the flyer ephemera or is it for the archives? In conversation with Tamara Kneese, who also looked at death and the internet and made a book about it. [luma]
Culture Makers: Old Spaces, New Life, 6:30pm, The New Parkway Theater (Uptown). Hear about Oakland's historic homes, landmarks, and spaces with East Bay Yesterday's Liam O'Donoghue, Peralta Hacienda Historical Park's Miguel Lopez, Oakland Parks and Recreation Foundation's Kadera-Redmond and Oaklandside's Azucena Rasilla. How can we preserve and repurpose Oakland's monumental past and why has the city struggled to do its duty to the places and spaces that give the city its history? Can we tax property owners more? [eventbrite]
Eve-a-palooza: A Celebration of Eve Babitz at Womb House Books, 6:30pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). Have an EVE-A-PALOOZA in celebration of TOO LA: Letters Never Sent by Eve Babitz. There will be a reading, there will be hats, there will be women who have opinions about Didion vs Babitz versus other contenders for the crown of Californianest writer. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Second] Kitchen Table: Pizza and Poems, 7pm, 826 Valencia (The Mission). Poet Matthew Zapruder who “brought us / to this old city / the port connects / to the world” and thinks Diet Coke tastes like “an acquaintance of chocolate / speaking fondly of certain times / it and chocolate had spoken of nothing,” shepherd and writer and convener of city kids in a barn M.A. Kawinzi who may yet advise you on how to cook a goat, solarpunk cozy scifi author T.K. Rex, and pizza who remains silent and sizzling! [third place]
Wanda, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). I have not seen this movie by Barbara Loden, but I have read the book that's kind of about the movie, Suite for Barbara Loden, because The Dorothy Project publishes the coolest shit and I buy everything they're selling (I am threatening/promising ORB's core editors that I will review Renee Gladman's Ravicka series at some point; novels that swear they are about place while not hewing to any place-based writing conventions? WHY. HOW. GIMME.) So see the movie, see what got Nathalie Leger all het up, and see if you want to read a book about it too. [bampfa]
Also: Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right with Katie Gaddini and Moira Donegan at Green Apple Books on the Park (West Bay) / An Evening with Poets Beth Piatote and Aimee Suzara at Medicine for Nightmares (The Mission)
Friday, July 10
The Beehive Collective: The True Cost of Coal, 6pm, The Junior Center of Art and Science (The Lake). The Beehive Collective has drawn a MAD Magazine inspired folding artwork that reveals the destructive nature of mountain top removal, a visual created with Appalachian communities. Since digging and drilling are still all the rage, come together in this workshop to reflect, connect, and get curious about how art and activism can work together for environmental justice. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Summer in San Francisco with Rae Alexandra, 6pm, Mechanics' Institute (FiDi). Learn from Rae Alexandra about the women who made the Oakland Bay Area everything it is, has been, will keep becoming. Enjoy the spiral staircase, tell it hi from me. [insta]
Poetry! 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). It’s probably happening? Outlook unclear, but based on a solid year and a half of poets showing up, including last week when I thought they weren’t, I bet they will again. Keep an eye on the schedule. [Poetry in the Bay]
You Can’t Take it With You, 7:30pm, Martinez Campbell Theater (CoCoCo). Look, sometimes your friend is performing in a community theatre ensemble and you do her a solid. But also! Light comedy: who couldn't use a night of that performed live and enthusiastically right now? [Campbell Theatre]
Also: Bay Nature Summer Dock Fouling Series at San Francisco Marina Yacht Harbor (West Bay) / Sweet Summer Evening Fundraiser for Camp U-Kai at Good Hot (Outer Far North Oakland) / Nature Series at UNTITLED vol.2 (Temescal Alley) / Small-Scale Home Composting at Preserved (College Ave) / Get-Hype Open-Mic at Discover Community Cafe (West Oakland) / Lakeside Chat #68 with Corrina Gould - Land Back in the East Bay at Online (The internet) / The Times of Harvey Milk at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Movies In The Park: The Smurfs at San Pablo Park Sports Field #1 (Berkeley)
Saturday, July 11
F. M. “Borax” Smith Estate, 10am, Redwood tree, near 1105 McKinley Ave. at Home Place East (Ivy Hill). The Oakland Historical Society is BACK AT IT. Oakland built by BORAX, and if you're read Carter Beats the Devil, you know about this house (sort of). Before everything was subdivided there were big old estates spreading over the rolling hills of the fan. Check out Arbor Villa, Francis Marion “Borax” Smith’s palatial estate, founded on mining borax for laundry I think. Also, establisher of the fabled Key Route System. "The tour visits the site of Oak Hall, the 9th Ave. palm trees, the Mary R. Smith Cottages and other historic houses, including ones designed by Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan." [humanitix]
THE BOOKOUT: Family Fable Writing Workshop with Duane Horton, 10am, Prescott Market (West Oakland). Families! Write together! Imagine a fable with Duane Horton, East Bay Black queer fantasy writer, as your guide, and bring a book of your story home to read at bedtime. [eventbrite]
Wham! Bam! Zine Fair, 11am, JCAS (The Lake). Zine Fair for all and sundry! Part of the “Wham! Bam! Queer!” art exhibition of zines, art, and more for The Long Pride Month we all know and love as just “The Bay Area.” [insta]
Mutiny at Port Chicago: Black Resistance and Redemption, 1pm, OMCA Lecture Hall (The Lake). Oakland now has an officially designated Port Chicago Remembrance Day, even though Port Chicago is on Suisun Bay in CoCoCo. But, according to Betty Reed Soskin as quoted inExplosivity, friend-of-ORB Javier Arbona-Homar’s Bay Area geography of TNT, bombs, and more, the naval base “indexes an intimate geography that records trauma, violence and activism” (all the Black sailors doing heavy lifting refused to get exploded by munitions and went on strike). Watch the historical drama Mutiny, and hear from a panel of local luminaries and historians: Congresswoman Lateefah Simon, Antwanisha Williamson, and Cynthia Adams, moderated by Dayvee Sutton. [OMCA]
A. Avery, Isabel Bezerra Balée, Stevie Redwood Reading, 2pm, Woolsey Depths (South Berkeley). Local poet A. Avery releases their new book BRUTAL, Isabel Bezerra Balée suggests, “I could turn to you / and ask what you think / about circular economies / whether you believe in / octopian intelligence,” and Stevie Redwood is “unimpressed by scene queers, artifice, & pacifism.” POMES ALL DAY. [insta]
Rockridge Book Club, 3:30pm, Rockridge Branch OPL (Rockridge). Is there anything more Rockridge than a book club discussing Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, no there is not anything more Rockridge than that, god bless it. [OPL]
Reasons to Be — Exhibition & Photobook Launch, 5pm, Dictée Art & Exhibition (Ivy Hill). Large-scale prints from Aidan Jung's project are on display, books of the photos created by the fantastic California bindery For the Birds Trapped in Airports are for sale, poetry is read by Rose Crespo, Raina Jung, and Demi Vera, sound is playing by Andrew Kodama, refreshments are light, and an artist is signing. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Alley Poems, 5pm, Kerouac Alley (North Beach). Meet Marthine and other poetry lovers around a table in the last of the sunshine outside Vesuvio, and bring some poems. Yours, others’, something you found in a notes app or on the bathroom wall. All words are welcome.
[West Bay Bonus Event The Real Deal] Camille T. Dungy Reading: America, A Love Story, 6pm, Golden Sardine (North Beach). HURRAH! Another California poet temporarily misplaced in Colorado is coming home to read their words to us. Camille Dungy, author of the deeply insightful and upending Soil, editor of Black Nature, has a new book of poetry out, of which Publisher's Weekly says “For all its grief and pain, this tender volume’s irrefutable watchword is love.” Mothering, gardening, California's landscapes, and fraught relationships with the political and lived, embodied experience of American history as a Black woman sift through poems of formal play and structures, including ghazals and constructed constraints. Count me in, and see you there. [insta]
Kate Washington's MIDSTREAM, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Literary & Garden Arts (Berkeley). If you're stuck in a Sargasso Sea of a shitty marriage, you can just jump ship and swim for your life. Sacramento-based Washington’s new memoir Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims, offers secular, self-administered baptisms in rivers, lakes etc as a midlife rebirth. With Elissa Strauss, who writes about caregiving – should be an interesting conversation about where duty ends and choice begins. [Mrs D's]
The Exiles, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Remember how we talked about Relocation and the creation of “Urban Indian” communities? Kent Mackenzie hung out in the early '50s, right in the heat of it, in Bunker Hill, the densest neighborhood in LA, and got to know the Arizona Indians who had all moved there. The neighborhood of course got targeted for “slum clearance” just a few years later. He filmed this short semi-documentary there, and it's very slice of life before the tenuous grip on community was dislodged, yet again. [BAMPFA]
Also: Film Maker Chat & Coffee at Victory Point Board Game Cafe (North Berkeley) / Inner Outer, Issue One: Parks — Release Party at Golden Gate Park, The Love Blocks (West Bay) / Enjoy Zine Festival at Medicine for Nightmares (West Bay) / Celebrate the Semiquincentennial: Test Your U.S. History Knowledge! at Main Oakland Library (The Lake-ish) / July Death Cafe at Central Library (Downtown Berkeley) / Alice in Wonderland - Free Theater in the Park at Hinkel Park Amphitheater (Berkeley) / Crossroads and The Exploding Digital Inevitable at BAMPFA (Berkeley)
Sunday, July 12
Mountain View Cemetery, 10am, Exact meeting point sent after registration (Piedmont Ave). Dennis Evanosky takes you on a hilly walk to meet the historic figures of Oakland and asks that you arrive 15 minutes early because the dead aren't just waiting around you know. They have places to be. [humanitix]
Community Dye Day: Working with Fresh Indigo, 11am, Makeshift Studio (Longfellow). Fresh indigo community dye bath! Turn all your whites teal and light blue and even green with leaves. Bathe your cottons in soymilk like a vegan Cleopatra before bringing them to get a bluer blue. [insta]
Strangers’ Prompts: Found Ephemera Generative Writing Workshop, 12 noon, Shapeshifters Cinema (Jack London Square sorta). What I love about prompts is that they invite the world into your consciousness – like WB Yeats making apocalyptic metaphors from George's automatic writing, when chance and influence and inspiration come in, who knows what will come out. All to say, join “a generative writing workshop in conversation with materials from the Shapeshifters image collection. Part art assignment, part Fluxus score, part structured writing time.” Prose people, poets, and filmmakers all welcome, as long as you have five hours and 70 bucks to spare. [insta]
The Future of Present Tense, 1pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Join in the most epic collaborative collage and zine project in town: repurpose the materials from Stephanie Syjuco’s wall installation Present Tense (Roll Call) to make your own publication! [bampfa]
Book Launch with David Thomson + Pierrot le fou, 3pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). David Thomson has written another book about the movies: A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies. Jean-Luc Goddard made another movie with lovers on the run in French sunshine. Put it all together and this is what you get. [bampfa]
Megan Bell: If I Could Only Talk to My Younger Self, 3pm, Donkey & Goat (West Berkeley). Natural winemaker in Santa Cruz known for her label Margins, and for shutting it down this year due to financial shortfalls facing the industry at large, Megan Bell will offer insights to folks who are trying to start their own winemaking operations up: what works, what doesn't, and what to drink when you're shutting down a dream. [insta]
Josie and the Pussycats, 3pm, The New Parkway Theater (Uptown). Including this because the New Parkways says “Josie and the Pussycats is a razor-sharp satire of the music industry disguised as a bubblegum pop movie — and it was way ahead of its time”: its time was 2001? Which seems kind of late for satirizing the music industry? But enjoy it for the gum or for the razors, whatever your take is. [insta]
One-Eyed Jacks, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). A Kubrick Western that was actually directed by Brando, which BAMPFA says is a “Freudian VistaVision epic” – hold onto your ten gallon hats. [bampfa]
Also: Salt Ponds: Salty Bites for Salty Sites at Coyote Hills Visitors Center (Fremont) / Love and Lit Book Club Meeting: Losin' Control by Ladii Nesha at Zoom (The Internet) / Mac Barnett - Make Believe at Book Passage (Corte Madera) / All About Desire Art Party at natasha_tsozik fine arts studio (West Bay) / Cookbook Club: In Bibi's Kitchen at Local Economy (Rockridge)
