Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, June 16–June 21
First, the good news: there are jobs for poets! Here’s one you can apply for at Chapter 510. There are also sports for people who want to move like a small flock of goats on a field, which is its own kind of poetry, and The New Parkway is showing those lines etched by bodies in space on the big screen (aka the World Cup I guess). AND everything is also gay, of course, because the Frameline Festival is starting this week and there’s screenings at The New Parkway as well as in the West Bay.
Enough about screens, let’s get out to fields and sunshine, where I can lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass because SOLSTICE is upon us and let’s soak it in before the tilt toward fire season, an intense El Nino winter, and more of Musk’s exploding rockets makes the sky a threat instead of a pleasure. Here’s a party in Oakland you can go to and here’s another one, or you can circumambulate the whole bay, a local mountain peak, or just each other. A new play starts this week in a ball pit in Oakland, which sounds filthy and intriguing, and the exhibit at the Black Panther Party Museum about the women of the party is up and ready for viewing. (Also, ORB happy hour, at 4pm Thursday, at Temescal Breweing!)
Then on Friday, there are Juneteenth celebrations in Antioch (where so many folks from the Fillmore landed after urban renewal put the UR in SPUR that the Fillmore Juneteenth party was advertised in Antioch on billboards I heard, but now they have made their own), at Prescott Market which is hosting Hella Juneteenth after a little beef with the one at OMCA it seems, at Willow Park in West Oakland which will have free books from Haymarket if you want more of the Black anarchist vibe Oakland knows and loves, and look, unlike when Dorothy Lazard remembers cops being posted at the San Leandro border at sunset to make sure no Black folks were there after dark, now San Leandro is hosting their own celebration of emancipation. How generous and liberal to get on board once it’s a national holiday. For those planning their summers out more than a week ahead, if you want to make puppets that are large and in charge and will march around Lake Merritt later this summer, 7/11 is your last chance. And don’t forget books: the first Temescal Alley book fair is on Saturday July 18. I am sure we’ll see you there.-MS, TC, AB
Tuesday, June 16
Storytime for Caregivers with Sarah Wheeler, 10am, Local Economy (Rockridge). This time they're unfortunately actually talking about parenting, a warning for any caregivers hoping to escape that topic for a hot minute: but at least it's through a critical lens on all the people selling advice books. Special guest is Sarah Wheeler, ORB vibe reporter and mom about town. Bring your babies and try telling them what to do instead of lecturing their moms. [luma]
Baseball Storytime Featuring The Oakland Ballers, 11am, West Oakland Branch OPL (De Fremery). Finally, the long national nightmare of basketball is over and we can get back to hitting balls with sticks, even if what the Ballers play is only really baseball if you are wearing very rose colored glasses. Baseball stories, songs, and players in the library: when was the last time the Warriors read a picture book out loud to you? [OPL]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Bloomsday and Beyond, 11:30am, Union Square / Market Street Station Concourse (The City). When Brian O'Nolan (also known as Flann O'Brien and Myles na Gopaleen), scholar Anthony Cronin, poet Paddy Kavanagh, James Joyce's cousin Tom, and more friends tried to follow Bloom and Stephen's route through Dublin to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Bloomsday, they made it only halfway through all the stops described in Ulysses before keeling over from the pints consumed, but at least they filmed their misadventures. Now you can Guinness your way into literary flâneurship too, in an all day bus-riding celebration of the West Bay's Irish history, transportation system, and the wanderings of an Irish Jew trying to avoid his house and occupy his mind with the entire history of narrative while Blazes Boylan shtups his wife. [SFMTA]
Thomas Lynch Performs Ulysses For Bloomsday, 1pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood). If the Flann and Paddy-like full day commitment is too much for your bourgeois lifestyle, listen to Lynch read a chapter from Ulysses on your lunch break instead. I hope it's the Sirens chapter, my favorite for its rhythms and lyric play with sound: "Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a hair. Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a curving ear," etc. [Mrs D's]
Ulysses Reading for Bloomsday, 5pm, United Irish Cultural Center (Outer Outer Outer Sunset). More Blooming, more daying. It's almost sunset, so ideally, they'll read from the Penelope chapter, which is the most blissed out ending a novel has ever had: Yes I said Yes I will YES. I love to say yes, must be the Molly in me.... [UIOS]
Author talk with Andrew Lam, 6pm, Central Library (Downtown Berkeley). Andrew Lam, author of Perfume Dreams (Heyday) has a new collection of short stories out from Red Hen: Stories from the Edge of the Sea. Set in the Bay Area Vietnamese diaspora, it also has a third BISAC category that makes this perfect for Pride: "Erotica - LGBTQ+ - Gay." (I like the way it reads as plus/minus gay in particular). Enjoy the way he brings it all together! [BPL]
Drag Story Hour, 6pm, Pine Knoll Park (The Lake). Per Sia, Deuce Lee, and more princesses of performance will read stories and raise money for the Oakland Liberation Center in Fruitvale! Come for the gorgeous costumes, as well as crafts, a photobooth, and conversation, and start teaching the children that all gender is drag and how to belt a snatched waist. [insta]
KISS & TELL LITERARY SALON: FREDERICK SMITH & EMILY K. HARDY, 6:30pm, Books Inc. Alameda (Used to be a Peninsula). The gayest romance gathering yet, with Frederick Smith sharing his Love is A Contact Sport, and Emily K. Hardy on her new romance book, I Really Do. Putting the G and the L into the month of Pride, we're all feeling hella homosexual and intersectional at the bookstore today. [eventbrite]
Black Is Beautiful: Oakland Premiere, 8:15pm, The New Parkway Theater (Downtown). Hella Creative is starting a film club on Black cinema, starting with Yemi Bamiro's documentary Black is Beautiful, about Kwame Brathwaite, whose photography and art gave form to the titular phrase (which he also coined). [insta]
Also: Dishcourse Social at (Oakland) / Creative Writing Space at West Branch BPL (Berkeley)
Wednesday, June 17
Publisher’s Lunch: Tiffany Tsao and Lili Loofbourow, 12 noon, Heyday (San Pablo Corridor). These Heyday Publisher’s Lunches are usually invitation only, but getting Tiffany (novelist/translator/editor/scholar) in town and Lili (Slate, WaPo, innermost ORB orbit) out to speak with her is a very special confluence and you ORB subscribers are very special people so consider yourself invited. Swing by to eat lunch and hear two brilliant writers in conversation about how we hold onto ourselves and find ways to mother that don’t involve shrouding ourselves in societally-inherited forms. Also, energy-deprived speculative futures, Indonesian-Chinese diaspora community and trauma, and how to art monster -- the good shit, is what I am saying. [Third Place]
Community Reading of The New York War Crimes, 5:30pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Instead of reading the cooking and games app with a newsy appendage, give it up for the New York War Crimes. Words are coming in from Gaza, from Southern Lebanon, from Palestinians in exile, with a focus in this 21st issue on the voices speaking from experiences of Israeli incarceration (abolition now, everywhere). Buy a Riso printed poster to support the contributors. [insta]
The Art of Black Storytelling—Juneteenth Edition, 6:30pm, Mad Oak Bar ‘N’ Yard (Lake-ish). J.R. Rice delivers a talk that's part lecture, part story, and very Black in this discussion of signifyin' in spirituals, poems, oral literature, and collective experience. [eventbrite]
The ACOTAR Countdown Book Club: Book 2, 6:30pm, Book Society (College Ave). We apologize: last week Book Society actually had a free event and we stuck it in the alsos instead of giving it the proper attention such a rare sighting deserved. Don't worry though: they're back to charging you to come through the door, this time for the tingles of fairy smut, beloved by Amy Brown's instagram full of midwestern moms. This is about the Maas series if like me you thought "ACOTAR" might be some kind of NASCAR for wine moms (also! Listen to Tracy and Amanda get all nuanced on the cultural figure of the wine mom, I loved it). [Book Society]
John Kenney's I See You’ve Called in Dead, 6:30pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (College Ave). Rita Bullwinkel and I agree on many things, but she's sick of stories about middle-class middle-aged people with failing marriages (future submitters to McSweeney's take note: no divorce, unless it comes with space octopuses), and I am not. However, this one here tonight is published by Zibby Publishing and that I cannot countenance, so come to the ORB happy hour tomorrow instead and let's talk about the real life imploding marriages we have heard about and how we can make novels out of them that even Rita will like. [Mrs D's]
Amie Zimmerman’s False Spring, with Wendy Trevino, Rosie Stockton, and Amy De'Ath, 7pm, Pegasus Books Downtown (Berkeley). How many poets does it take to launch a poetry collection? Tonight the answer is four real home runs of readers. See how big the swings they take are for Amie Zimmerman's new collection of poetry, False Spring, from Roof Books. Zimmerman, in whose book restraint/constraint/experiment and Walter Benjamin are the bonds against which she strains to offer meaning in form, will be joined by poets Wendy Trevino (has published a book with Commune Editions but claims she is not an experimental writer -- ORB will be the judge of THAT), Rosie Stockton (Nightboat says their latest book Fuel, formed by the Central Valley's oil fields, "picks at the weave of oil-soaked world orders to interrogate the ways capitalist death-drive seeps into our unconscious lives"), and Amy De'Ath, visiting from Boston (Not a Force of Nature from Futurepoem-- see this brilliant exegesis of that book's relationship to sublimity, Sianne Ngai, and climate crisis for why you want to show up and stay til the end). See you there! [Pegasus]
Le samouraï, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Still cooler than any of its many imitators, though all of Melville's tight-jawed stoicism now comes off at best like a teenage boy’s fantasy of adult despair and sophistication (John Woo loves it), at worst like so much proto-incel hooey (Tarantino loves it, too). Whatever, the pursuit through the Paris Metro is fun as hell. [BAMPFA]
Also: Teen Zine Club: Happy Pride Month at Main Library TeenZone (Downtown) / CHARLES O'MALLEY & SCOTT W. STERN at Books Inc. Alameda at Books Inc. Alameda (Alameda)
Thursday, June 18
Teens Metalsmithing: Make Your Own Jewelry at Chavez, 1:30pm, César E. Chávez Branch (Fruitvale). Teens! Making chainmail! But tiny pieces of it to wear as earrings. We all need to strap on a little armor sometimes to protect those boundaries. [Oakland Public Library]
mak-'amham/Cafe Ohlone, 3:30pm, Lawrence Hall of Science (Berkeley Hills). Have herbal tea and snacks made from local native plants and chat with mak-'amham/Cafe Ohlone founders Vincent Medina (Chochenyo Ohlone) and Louis Trevino (Rumsen), in this monthly gathering, and learn from Vincent and Louis about the work and joy of cultural revitalization. [BPL]
ORB Monthly Happy Hour, 4pm, Temescal Brewing (Shockingly, in Temescal). Bring your children and other accoutrements. Paying members, you can pick up your swag and preserve your privacy from our prying eyes. Otherwise, as small business owners concerned about the bottom line, we will be developing an alternative postal system in homage to Pynchon and the Strait of Hormuz's impact on shipping costs that involves Xander walking up to your door and knocking on it. Buy us a beer instead and we'll leave you alone. [ORB]
SOLD OUT Opening Exhibition: Oakland City of Stars, 5pm, African American Museum and Library at Oakland (Downtown). Eric Murphy creates mixed-media collage portraits of Oakland legends, and this is his most recent round of original artwork rooted in Oakland history. [OPL]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Small Plates Publication Party 2026, 6pm, San Francisco Center for the Book (Design District). Books range from mass market to small press to fine art, and we're over in the limited edition art object part of the book spectrum today. Artists Quinn Keck, Grendl Löfkvist, and Rachel Phillips made pretty art objects with bindings holding paper -- come hear them talk about their process and why sometimes books cost $55 (check the inflation calculator, these are radically underpriced at that). [San Francisco Center for the Book]
Kitchen Stories: Sharing Home Recipes and Why They Matter to Us, 6pm, Local Economy (College Ave). Member Danny Scuderi hosts a potluck to celebrate family recipes and home cooking. Wear your normcore best, and bring your dishes, an appetite, and that creased and stained photocopy of the recipe for your great grandmother's chocolate chip cookies that she served to your mom every afternoon in the West Bay 70 years ago. Don't worry, there's oatmeal in them to balance out the copious sugar and shortening. [luma]
Eirinie Carson and Savala Nolan at Womb House Books, 6:30pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). We are doing horror and motherhood this week folks and how they’re the same thing. No sleep, hallucinations, unclear where anxiety ends and haunting begins: yup, sounds like postpartum and when exactly does that stop. Eirinie Carson is the author of BLOODFIRE, BABY and Savala Nolan of GOOD WOMAN: they'll be circling around the gothic entrapment of societal expectations and the madness that results. [eventbrite]
BFUU, The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, 6:30pm, Oakstop (Downtown). “The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible," said Toni Cade Bambara. Be seduced by our imaginations, come into the future we're making for you: the writer's pied piper chant. Watch this documentary biopic of Toni Cade Bambara (she's ready for her revival I tell you), through archival footage and the stories and remembrances of her loved ones, including our adored Alexis Pauline Gumbs and TCB's editor/literary bestie The Other Toni (Morrison). [eventbrite]
A BUZZED BEE!, 7pm, Kinfolk (Downtown). Look, we are betting there's a number of elementary school spelling bee champs lurking in the ORB audience. We know our people. This one's for you. Get a little drunk, but not so tipsy you can't remember the "P" in "pneumatic," and start spelling. [insta]
Celebrate Smash the State & Have a Nice Day: A Larry Fagin Reader, 7pm, Bathers Library (Teletelepathigraphic). Alan Bernheimer, Jean Day, Kathleen Frumkin, Lorraine Lupo, Paul Maziar, Kit Robinson & Aaron Simon are reading to celebrate the release of "A Larry Fagin Reader," edited for Cuneiform Press by Miles Champion. Expect experiment, some Spicer-y, Berrigan-y legacy, and Fagin's own restlessness in form. [insta]
L’eclisse, 7pm, BAMPFA (Cal). As part of BAMPFA's Monica Vitti series, they're doing an ad hoc The-1960s-Antonioni-films-he-did-just-before-he-did-Blowup. This one is from 1962 and is described by words like: nearly wordless sequence, drifts, love affair, frenzied scenes, Stock Exchange, modern society, treacherous secrets, freedom, and montage. That kind of thing. Monica Vitti is, we are promised, moody as hell. [BAMPFA]
Love Letters, 8:30pm, New Parkway (Uptown). In 2014, same-sex marriage just became legal in France and newlyweds Céline and Nadia are expecting their first child. Administrative bullshit ensues, which the movie turns into the problem of how--by constructing a bureaucratic record--people make themselves into parents. Nice interview with the director. [frameline]
Also: Summer Solstice Swap and Mixer at Dimond Park (Sausal Creek Watershed) / The Bee and Me at Tarea Hall Pittman South Branch (South Berkeley) / Hella Comix #7 Reading at Tarea Hall Pittman South Branch (Berkeley) / Black Authors Book Club: Death of the Author- Nnedi Okorafor at West Oakland Branch OPL (De Fremery) / Know Your Rights: Employment Background Checks and the Fair Chance Act at Online (Oakland) / Poetry Circle at Claremont Branch (Berkeley) / The Wakasa Monument History @North at North Branch (Berkeley) / EDWINA PHILLIPS: WHAT WE TAKE at Books Inc. (The Island)
Friday, June 19
Meena Harris at The Bookout, 10am, Kinfolx (Downtown). Meena Harris, whose aunt's name doesn't rhyme exactly with Pamela, is an Oakland girl gone big time, as so many of them do. She'll be reading her kids books to all the children who can pack into the coolest gathering spot in town this morning. [insta]
Juneteenth! at OMCA, 11am, OMCA (Lake). A full-day celebration of Black culture, creativity, and community, live performances and DJ sets, Bay Area Black chefs and food vendors, and hands-on activities for visitors of all ages. Take the opportunity to check out Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, while you're there! [museumca]
Bay Nature Summer Dock Fouling Series #1, 3pm, Docks outside Scott’s Seafood Grill & Bar (Jack London Square). Join writer and naturalist Eric Simons to lay down on docks or poke around on the pilings and see what intertidal life you can find hiding in the nooks and crannies of the marina and docklands. Then form your own tidepool ecology at a nearby bar and share nudibranch photos (consensually). [Bay nature]
Poetry! 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). The poems continue! Guest hosted by Stephanie Baker and Alice Lin, who bring Tiff Dressen (a poet who writes persimmons, figs, night herons and bat rays into their poems, a Nightboat author; sip on their Oaklandy Berrigan-y draught in Conjunctions), Marina Lazzara (in the Robert Duncan line at New College), Julien Poirier (Berkeley poet, City Lights poet, founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse Collective) to the mic and I am sure the room will reverberateateate again.
Fruitvale Station, 7pm, Paramount Theatre (Downtown). The story of Oscar Grant, who was killed by BART police on New Years Day at you-know-where. This movie started it for Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan, and it's fantastic to see the Paramount showing movies again; don't miss the chance to see it on a big 35mm screen, in a room with people, where you can't and won't want to look away or at your phone. This showing is presented in old-school style, with newsreels and shorts and organ music ahead of the feature. [Paramount Theatre]
Gugu’s World, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). A queer coming of age in Brazil’s northeast: "caught between a magical upbringing with his grandmother Dilma and an uncertain future, eleven-year-old Gugu...tries to hide signs of Dilma’s illness from the disapproving outside world" so he doesn't have to leave her. Damn. Part of Frameline50. [BAMPFA]
The Poetry Lounge: After Dark, 8pm, 811 Oakland (Downtown). Open Mic with Reno the Poet "bringing the underground artist scene BACK! Erotic Poetry, Cyphers, Open Mic, Live Performances! Grown & Sexy Queer, BOLD, & Say it Louder!" Am very curious about cyphers -- as in codes? code breaking? Open Mics are getting very experimental here and I like it. [insta]
Saturday, June 20
Adult 3-on-3 Basketball Tournament, 9am, Greg Brown Park (South Berkeley). We hear you all are still enjoying the game of giants despite my declaring it baseball season already, so sure, all you ordinary people, go snap an ankle ligament trying to be Wemby. [City of Berkeley]
Pride Nursery Gardening Day & Native Plant Botanical Illustration Workshop, 9:30am, Garretson Point Staging (EBRPD) (San Leandro Bay). Garden together and tend native plants and your own queer community. Then, enjoy the sweet and thoughtful guidance of Ellena Ruiz who will teach a native plant botanical illustration workshop. In the one I took, she said, Caress the plant with your eye, and let your hand follow your gaze and it WORKED. Even plants want to be seen. Draw them like one of your French girls, Jack. [insta]
The Town of Encinal, 10am, 1852’s Leviathan and Condor streets, today’s Grand Street and Clement Avenue (The Island That Used to Be a Peninsula). Alameda history walking tour. This one is about how "James Hibberd helped himself to all the land from Oak to Paru streets and from the San Francisco Bay shoreline. He created a wharf and the small town we’ll explore. He left in 1855 allegedly without paying for his land." You can also do this again tomorrow. [Square]
A Summer of Spike Lee Joints: Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing, 11am, West Oakland Branch (De Fremery). Hey, have you ever read David Denby's original review of Do the Right Thing? The one where he says Spike Lee is responsible if the ending makes "some audiences go wild"? Even if Do the Right Thing weren't one of the greatest works of American cinema, we'd have to put in the canon anyway for having compelled a mystifyingly well-regarded critic to show his white ass so completely. [OPL]
Honoring Yoshiko Uchida, 11am, North Branch (Berkeley). Learn about Yoshiko Uchida, author of Journey to Topaz and other iconic works of literature for children, as well as the aunt of legendary literary critic Michiko Kakutani. Also, make a bracelet. But only if you're a kid. [BPL]
PUBLIC MEMORIAL: NELLIE WONG ¡PRESENTE!, noon, Oakland High School (Cleveland Heights). Oakland-born Nellie Wong, Asian American socialist feminist poet, essayist, playwright and activist, has died, and will be honored in a public memorial for her work and life. Her poetry was included in This Bridge Called My Back (Aunt Lute!!) and her first poetry collection was the most successful book in the history of famed small feminist poetry publisher Kelsey Street Press. Also the older sister of journalist William Gee Wong, their family's story is told both in her poems and his memoir. [eventbrite]
Festival of Knowledge Celebrates Summer Solstice, 1pm, African American Museum and Library at Oakland (West Oakland). AAMLO's Festival of Knowledge is aligning with solstice and so gardeners will be there to share their horticultural knowledge and tune you into the seasons and the sun's energy. [Oakland Public Library]
Substackers Meetup, 2pm, Local Economy (Rockrich). To confirm that despite the occasional weird arts hang and sexy cool ORB party, Local Economy is holding it down as the most normie-coded space in Oakland, they are hosting a gathering about how to do more on Substack. Anyone who goes should talk to the discussion leaders about the Nazi problem the site has and how to use ghost or ecosend instead. Clout is worthless under fascism and substack's probably already trying to pivot to video so get out ahead of the collapse. [luma]
When the Road Curves, 4pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). You can be a debut author at any age, and Marianna Lonsdale's first novel from Sibylline Press (women authors over 50 is their rule!) proves it. Set in Oakland in the 1990s so the plague of cell phones is yet to come but the plague of HIV/AIDS is a very present, doom-laden force as it was for so many of us who grew up and had sex and lost family and friends to the disease in the '90s. A romance with a musician, a question of settling down into the tried and true of monogamy and family versus searching for more -- a rich text that the author will discuss with fellow local writer Janine Kovac. [eventbrite]
Fear and Desire, 4:30pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Kubrick's first and worst movie, you haven't seen it, but now's your chance. "War is Bad" is the basic message, a message he'll return to in MUCH better movies. A local pharmacist was his major investor; Kubrick apparently went around and asked everyone he knew for money, and got enough of it ($10k) to make his first (and worst) movie. He would go on to make better ones, though, some of which you might have heard of. [BAMPFA]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Rite Of The Demon: Summer with Suzanne Ciani, 6:30pm, Gray Area (The Mission). We will never be done with the modular synths, and we’ll even go to the West Bay for them if the occasion is Suzanne Ciani, who once tried to take a tutorial with Donald Buchla, was told, “don’t take this personally, but we’ve decided there won’t be any women in the class,” and has been taking it personally in the best way ever since. Ciani will “perform an immersive experience in her signature quadraphonic speaker array” along with LA’s Fierra Ex Machina, and it all has something to do with the Oracle of Delphi. [Gray Area]
Charo In Concert, 7pm, Orinda Theatre (Orinda). My mother in-law berated me for not knowing who Charo is. I'm not sure I know, still (though I have read that "her bubbly personality, thick accent, her signature "Cuchi-Cuchi!" and sharp comedic timing that made her a popular guest on shows like The Tonight Show, David Letterman, Carol Burnett Show, and Merv Griffin, as well as memorable acting roles on The Love Boat, Fantasy Island") but I might be taken to find out. Apparently she is a true guitar virtuoso, too? What a world. [orindamovies]
Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues, 7pm, Shapeshifter Cinema (Jack London Sq). Come for a bouquet of international queerdom, made on actual film, mostly. Sisters! (1973, by Barbara Hammer), Swing, Swish, Sway (2026 by TT Takemoto), and several more short movies that the real film nerds will know more about than me, and you will too as soon as you go and watch them. [insta]
Le cercle rouge, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Melville’s second-to-last film is a jewel-heist picture with all his usual touches: the austere blue palettes, the presence of Alain Delon’s cheekbones, the fabricated orientalist proverb that tries to gull you into thinking there’s something profound going on here just beneath the surface. Don’t be taken in. This is all silly stuff. Just have some fun watching the pretty French men smoke their cigarettes. [BAMPFA]
Also: SSP Cafecitos ☕️ at Jerusalem Coffee House (Shafter) / Hilando Resistencia / Threading Resistance - Closing Event at Rockridge Branch (College Ave) / Hind Rajab: In Her Voice at Arab American Cultural Center (San Jose)
Sunday, June 21
Land as Body with Puri Arts, 1pm, OMCA (Lake). Dohee Lee and Puri Arts bring their project Land as Body: Belonging from Jeju island, mudang (which I'm told is translated as "shamanism") to "provide a ceremonial bridge for healing between ancestors and the people of all lands that have endured ruptures due to deportation, incarceration, and all forms of colonial violence." [museumca.org]
WORD/MUSIC READING "JUST THIS LIFE", 4pm, The Monkey House (Berkeley). WORDS: by legend of my life-long love of San Francisco poets Kim Addonizio, whom I have adored for thirty years, cradled for this journey to the East Bay by Oakland writers Melinda Clemmons, Keith Gaboury, Kar Johnson (WOOT!), and Christine No. And there's MUSIC! by Danny Caron & Snelby Grelling. Hosted by Peter Thomas Bullen. To RSVP: email Belindabotche@gmail.com [The Monkey House]
SOLD OUT Garden of Memory, 5pm, Chapel of the Chimes (Piedmont-the-Avenue). If you need to ask what this, it's already too late, they're sold out, and you'll have to wait until next Solstice (or at least that's my Garden of Memory solstice tradition). [New Music Bay Area]
Movie Nights at Moments Co-op: Queer Cinema for Palestine, 6pm, Moments Cooperative & Community Space (Downtown). Six short films curated by Queer Cinema for Palestine. Donations go to a family in Gaza. At the last movies for Palestine gathering, a bunch of folks ended up at Eternal Now just a few days later for Tracy Ren's reading, so what I am saying is, go and find your people, make a difference together by supporting art thinking about politics, and doing it all again soon thereafter. [eventbrite]
Red Desert, 6:30pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). More Monica Vitti, more Antonioni (this time in color!). In industrialized northern Italy, Vitti is another moody wife of somebody, an electronics engineer, suffers what would be called a nervous breakdown at any other time and place, though this time it's less about being a modern woman, and more about modernity being industrial poison: factory pipes, yellow smoke trailing to the sky, figures lost in a poisoned fog, staring into a poisoned bog. [BAMPFA]
Also: Plant Daddy Day at Curious Flora Nursery (Richmond) / The Town of Encinal One More Time at Grand Street and Clement Avenue (Alameda)
