Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, June 9–June 15
For whatever reason the East Bay is feeling existential this week, what with Sartre at the Oakland Theater Project and Antonioni at BAMPFA. There’s sunnier stuff on the slate, though. Don’t miss ORB’s own Marthine Satris in conversation with the interdisciplinary artist Alicia Escott on Wednesday in the West Bay—doors open for drinks and food at 5pm at the Teknion showroom on the Embarcadero. (A bunch of us will be there—come say hi!) And go pick a fight with James Ellroy in Corte Madera. This weekend, on the wrong side of the bay, there’s the Bi-Annual Trinity Alley $5 Book Fair. We’ve also got La Mision's homegrown literary festival and the Queer Women of Color Film Festival at the Presidio Theatre, both of which things James Ellroy would hate.—MS, XL, TC, AB
Tuesday, June 9
Books and Hooks, 10:30am, Bay Farm Island Library (Bay Farm Island). The Venn diagram of bookish people who like to crochet is nonzero, and they’ll be here turning the colors of book covers into fabric squares for some reason (having fun, that’s the reason), if you want to count yourself in that number. [AlamedaFree]
Oakland Bloom Presents: Fermentation Workshop with Turnip That Beet, 4pm, Piedmont Avenue Branch OPL (Glen Echo Creek Watershed). Fermentation is an act of faith in the future, it speculates that there will be a day when you’ll thank your past self for all the yummy pickles. Give a gift to yourself: make some pickles for the good days that are coming with some friendly microbes under the guidance of Chef Alia of Turnip That Beet. [OPL]
Decolonized Kitchen Workshop, 4:30pm, Ira Jenkins Community Center (Deep East). For kids of all ages and all the playful at heart to work with native plant ingredients for cooking with Maribel. Activities include cooking, drawing, and learning how to be good guests on native lands. [insta]
A Summer of Spike Lee Joints: The Original Kings of Comedy, 5pm, Elmhurst Branch OPL (Deep East). Spike Lee’s concert film from 2000, documenting a Charlotte stop on the Kings of Comedy tour. It features Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, Bernie Mac, lots of big pleated suits, some ferocious crowd work, a great Cedric bit about the difference between wishing and hoping, and Bernie Mac stealing the show and bumming you out that he died so young. Part of the library’s summer Spike Lee series. [OPL]
Meet the Author: Yotam Marom in conversation with Malkia Devich Cyril, 6pm, Main Oakland Library (The Lake-ish). Organizers talking about organizing: organizer, strategist, and author Yotam Marom will chat about his new book, For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness with organizer, strategist, and author Malkia Devich Cyril, preceded by poetry from Lu Aya of the Peace Poets. [OPL]
Yet Another Sold Out Book Society Event, 6:30pm, Book Society (College Ave). It really feels like Book Society has cracked some kind of code, because they charge people so much money for book events and then absolutely pack them in. (The secret is wine, I guess? And Elmwood?) Anyway, this month, they’ll be reading Carnality by Lina Wolff, but you won’t, because they’re sold out; Instead, walk down College from Elmwood, get a bottle of however-many-bucks-it-is-now Chuck (before they turn the Rockridge Trader Joes into Senior Housing) and pick up a copy of Lina’s Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs at EBB, all for less than a twenty. [Book Society]
East Bay Poets: James Cagney, Cassandra Dallett, and Tim Xonnelly, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). Poetry with beloved East Bay poets James Cagney, Cassandra Dallett, and Tim Xonnelly, celebrating the release of Xonnelly’s latest collection, The Invasion of Pantomime. Be the 81st person to view the YouTube clip of his LA launch. [Pegasus]
Chris Ballard’s The Plunge Book Launch, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore (College Ave). Local guy Chris Ballard comes to Mrs. Dalloway’s to talk cold water. His new book is The Plunge: Maverick Swimmers, an Unlikely Quest, and the Transformative Power of Cold Water, which I haven’t read but which I’ll recommend purely on the grounds that Ballard was a great reporter at Sports Illustrated in the days before the magazine was converted into a spam farm. [Mrs. Dalloway’s]
Also: Reflections for Freedom and Free Our Kids Screening at The New Parkway Theater (Uptown) / Trivia Night for a Cause at Missouri Lounge (San Pablo Corridor) / Bedtime Club: For Non-Gestational Parents at Local Economy (Rockridge)
Wednesday, June 10
[West Bay Bonus Event] Alicia Escott: Artist talk and conversation with ORB’s Marthine Satris, 5pm, Teknion showroom (Embarcadero). Alicia Escott, the SF Arts Commission’s artist in residence, does cool interdisciplinary work with video and plant “sculptures” and wildflower seeds and recently undead Marxist theories of ecological crisis. Go listen to her talk about it with ORB’s own Marthine Satris! In a furniture company’s swank new showroom on the Embarcadero, no less! The space opens at 5pm for drinks and small bites. The artist will give a brief talk at 6, followed by a conversation with Marthine. It’ll be ORB as hell. Part of SF Design Week. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Exhibition Opening: Caguiat Delacruz: The Tramp, 6pm, The Wattis Institute (Dogpatch). Celebrate the opening of Caguiat Delacruz: The Tramp at the Wattis, bringing together newly commissioned film, installation, painting, and prints. In Caguiat Delacruz’s film, Wesley (and his dog Chips) and Hiroko wander the streets of Oakland and fields of Half Moon Bay dressed in baggy pants, snug jacket, and bowler hat. It’s a Chaplin thing, obviously, whose 1915 The Tramp was shot and produced by Essanay Studios in Fremont. Not the point, but I love how the Wattis website is having a stroke and also makes it basically impossible to find out anything normal about the film (although I’m already sold, I’m just saying). [The Wattis]
Writing a Novel in Real Life, 6pm, Local Economy (College Ave). Local writers Lenore Weiss (Pulp into Paper), Jesus Sierra (drafting historical fiction, getting somewhere), June Martin (work still in progress! surprises yet to come), Dominic Lim (Karaoke Queen: gay romance novel!), Mia V. Moss (Mai Tais for the Lost: a novella! So petite) come together to talk process. The journey is the destination and the writer friends you make along the way, etc. [luma]
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 6pm, Drake’s Dealership (Downtown). Bay Area Bar Shakes is doing A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM at Drakes for their first outdoor show and it’s FREE!!!! (Coyote told us about this one; a tip of our hat to them.) BABS is super fun: “we do shakespeare plays the way we feel theatre ought to be - fresh, immediate, social, and connected to community. we do not hold auditions. we do not have a director. we have one run-through together + then bring the story to life in front of a bar audience, for free.” Apparently they don’t capitalize letters, either. [insta]
BIMBO Book Club, 6:30pm, Tamarack (Downtown). The regular meeting of the Books Inform My Based Opinions reading group. Not sure which book they’re talking about this week, but swing by anyway. [Tamarack]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Beyond the Guidebooks: Subversive History of the City, 6:30pm, Museum of San Francisco (FiDi). Chris Carlsson and Dr. Rachel Brahinskiy (co-authors of Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes) talk about the sites of the past and how to see the West Bay’s resistance to power under the gleaming towers. Moderated by Bay Area Current columnist Wendy Liu. [insta]
Homesick for A World Unknown, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). Miriam Horn will be talking to anthropologist Cari Borja about George B. Schaller, who she just wrote Homesick for a World Unknown about. They’ll chat about the deeper narrative arc of Horn’s work, from political rebellion and female activism to climate futurism. [eventbrite]
The Rules of the Game, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). French audiences booed Rules of the Game when it first came out in 1939. Supposedly a theatergoer tried to set fire to the screen, and the movie was soon banned by the government for having an “undesirable influence over the young.” It’s important to note that it was under the French Third Republic, not Vichy, that the ban was handed down. And while legend has it that the Nazis torched the negative of the film, it was in fact an errant Allied bomb that did the job. Maybe it’s prettier to think that only fascists would be so mindless as to destroy Jean Renoir’s magnificent sendup of bourgeois hypocrisies, but good liberals hated the thing, too. The director famously said he was portraying a society “dancing on a volcano”—country house, hunting party, stolen kisses at a masked ball—and it took a whole-ass war to get everyone to realize he was on to something. Film critic and historian David Thomson will introduce the movie and lead a post-screening discussion. [BAMPFA]
Berkeley Slam Ft. Tomas Palpallatoc, 8pm, The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley). The Longest Running Poetry Slam on the West Coast continues to run, on the West Coast, and this time it will be featuring Tomas Palpallatoc, a queer Filipinx poet who grew up in the outer Sunset district of San Francisco whose writing centers on twinks, death, god, and how tired Tomas is of all 3 of them. [eventbrite]
Y Tu Mamá También (Queer Love in Color), 9pm, The New Parkway (Uptown). In Mexico, two teenage boys and an attractive older woman embark on a road trip and learn a thing or two. I watched this con mi Mamá tambien and oh boy was that awkward and uncomfortable (this was in the era of VHS rentals and we did not know it was a very, very sexy movie but we sure found out right quick.) [The New Parkway]
Also: Monthly Meet-Up with The Black Film Connect Screenwriter’s Group at Kinfolx (Downtown) / Poetry Workshop with Caroline Goodwin at Atherton Library (The Peninsula) / Start A Neighborhood Disaster Preparedness Group at Berkeley Fire Department Training Room (West Berkeley) / Oakland Privacy: Fighting Against the Surveillance State at Somewhere Private (Oakland)
Thursday, June 11
World Cup, noon, The New Parkway (Uptown). A strange game the rest of the world plays, and for some fucking reason, FIFA’s awful government agreed to do it here in the barbarian hinterlands, so our government could ruin it too. I don’t know. Luckily, Golden Goal will be a good magazine about it, and at the end of the day, it’s football, which is to say: always bad, always so good. Oh, you can watch it at the New Parkway, that’s why we listed this here, almost forgot. [The New Parkway]
Inequality: A Conversation, 1pm, OLLI HQ, 1995 University Ave (Cal). If there’s one thing that inequality hates? A conversation about it. Alan Karras, Lenny Goldberg, and Steven Vogel are going to “explore the causes of rising inequality, evaluate remedies such as wealth taxation, healthcare reform, and antitrust regulation, and consider what civic education might help reverse these trends.” I bet they’ll come up with some good ideas, such as stealing high-end clothing and reselling it to the working class for fun and profit. [UCB]
Crime Time Happy Hour, 5pm, Book Society (College Ave). Reese’s Book Club, but Reese will not be there: an informal (free!) chat with authors Philippa Malicka (In Her Defense) and N. Jooyoun Kim (The Last Story of Mina Lee). No formal program, but I bet there will be a bunch of wine, Reese will be furious if she hears there wasn’t wine. [Book Society]
Article Search Office Hours, 5:30pm, Oakland History Center (The Lake-ish). Want help finding an article for your diorama? GET ON IT—last year’s entries set the bar so much higher than I could have ever expected. And this year there’s extra prizes: pick a story from 1951, or one about the Black Panthers, or gin up your kid’s competitive drive to excel in historical sculpy scene making, a skill for the 21st century. [OPL]
[Sold Out] Member Preview Opening Celebration for Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, 6pm, Oakland Museum of California (The Lake). OMCA’s will be the first major museum survey of Mildred “I’m a maker, some people call it ‘artist’” Howard’s five-decade practice, with Poetics of Memory bringing together her collages, found-object sculptures, and immersive installations that explore memory, identity, and the African American experience. The evening is sold the heck out, but members can get to the Daytime Preview Hours from 11–4 pm, before it opens to the public, or, you know, literally at any time after that for as long as it’s open. [OMCA]
Queer Cinema for Palestine Screening, 6pm, Bathers Library (Televisual Telegraphic Ave). This year’s Queer Cinema for Palestine at Bathers will be a sixty minute program on the work of queer, Palestinian, and allied artists, in historic Palestine, across the diaspora, and beyond. Food for donations, proceeds go to @bay2gazamutualaid. [insta]
[North Bay Bonus Event] James Ellroy—Red Sheet: A Novel, 6pm, Book Passage (Corte Madera). “Red Sheet is an anti-communist novel,” declares jamesellroy.net. “It stands foursquare in the tainted tradition of Ayn Rand and Mickey Spillane.” Look, this sounds like utter shit. Ellroy knows it, too. He’s rubbing your face in it. He wants you to wonder if he lost a bet and as payout had to write a book even more fucked up than that one where he jerks it to his dead mom. He delights in making you feel rotten and corrupt for having liked The Black Dahlia when you read it in your twenties. But here’s the thing about it: I don’t think he’s enjoying himself, either. Witness: “Red Sheet lionizes name-naming kingpin Whittaker Chambers.” Whittaker Chambers? A lion? The man was a self-mythologizing snob brought up in the sniffy codes of shabby gentility who, communist turncoat or not, represented everything Ellroy has always brutishly styled himself against. Do you realize how painful it must have been for James Ellroy, America’s premier author of two-fisted fascist pulp, to make a hero out of Whittaker Chambers? And all in the hopes of annoying some liberals in 2026? Whatever, gramps. Go shake his hand at Book Passage, if you must, but wash thoroughly afterward. [Book Passage]
[West Bay Bonus Event] SHACK15 Conversations: Jonathan Weber with Cory Johnson - City on the Edge, 6pm, SHACK15 (Embarcadero). A big old San Francisco book: Jonathan Weber’s City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco. Cities are always fighting for their souls in books like this one, “a sweeping account of San Francisco’s transformation at the intersection of technology, politics, and culture,” which is a thing accounts do (sweep) when they document transformations at intersections. Weber will chat with journalist Cory Johnson and they invite you to stick around for “audience Q&A and pre- and post-talk networking,” at this “community for Founders, Innovators, and Changemakers” in the iconic San Francisco Ferry Building. I dunno. I’m curious about the book, but, uh, I think I’m busy that day. [Book Passage]
Dance Party with Barry Walters, 6:30pm, Books Inc. Alameda (Once a Peninsula). Dance party at a bookstore: music critic Barry Walters presents his new book, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000 (“The definitive history of LGBTQ music, from Stonewall to RuPaul, and its impact on culture and American life”), in conversation with Marke Bieschke, after which DJ Danniboi will be mixing many of the aforementioned dance classics for an in-store dance party. [eventbrite]
Nice Places, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). Vincent Chu will chat about his novel set in the West Bay and on instagram, Nice Places, in which the protagonist pretends to live a life of adventure for the hearts and the likes. Kate Folk says it’s about the identities we forge online, Kirkus says Chu turns the everyday into the revelatory, Tomas Moniz might say something else in conversation—turn up and find out if any of us even exist in three-dimensional space anymore. [eventbrite]
Carolyn McConnell’s Motherhood Discounted, 7pm, Tally Ho! Books (Piedmont Ave). The United States, Oman, and Papua New Guinea are the only three nations on Earth not offering paid parental leave, notes Carolyn McConnell, author of Motherhood Discounted: Care Work in America Before and After Roe, who knows why: the American myth and ideal of personal autonomy (“Each of us arrives in a state of debt...Far from being pathological, dependency is universal and inevitable. Once you acknowledge this basic human fact, the goal of ending dependency is revealed as truly bizarre.”) She’ll be chatting with Eileen Barrett and I hope she also explains what’s up with Oman and Papua New Guinea. [Tally Ho]
L’avventura, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). A woman disappears from a volcanic Sicilian island during a pleasure cruise she’s taking with her lover and her best friend. Moody atmospherics ensue. The 1960 movie made a name for Michelangelo Antonioni, and film critics soon were remaking the name into a joke about the languorous alienation of his films: Antoniennui, they called it. Not wrong, really, but this stuff has a way of sticking with you, even if it drives you up a wall at first. [BAMPFA]
Also: Leamos autoras: Quiénes somos ahora - Katya Adaui (Peru) at Central Library (Downtown Berkeley) / Lincoln Summer Nights at Lincoln Square Recreation Center (Chinatown) / Connection Circle: Choosing a Life Without (Your Own) Kids at Local Economy (Rockridge) / [West Bay Bonus Event] Laverne Cox with Cheryl Dunye at Sydney Goldstein Theater (Hayes Valley)
Friday, June 12
Opening Doorways for Belonging and Liberation: PARAMITA Film Screening and Healing Workshop with Kirthi Nath, 6pm, Oakland Asian Cultural Center (Chinatown). An “experiential workshop” involving meditation, healing rituals, sacred reflection, community care circles, and a screening of PARAMITA, a 24-minute documentary by Kirthi Nath about a South Asian American queer woman’s coming out to her family. Nath will be at the workshop to facilitate. Free to attend, but register at the link. [OACC]
The Imprisoned Voice of George Mesro Coles-El, 6:30pm, Clio’s Books (Grand Lake). The first in Clio’s to-be-recurring series of Friday-night conversations with writers, scholars, and philosophers who produce their work exclusively from within American prisons, “The Imprisoned Voice” (in which all conversations occur live and in real time via phone), things will get started with the poet George Mesro Coles-El, currently incarcerated at San Quentin (on which). All proceeds go toward supporting the sustainability and expansion of community engagement programs that support currently incarcerated writers and scholars. [eventbrite]
Cynthia Gómez Muñeca, with Tamika Thompson, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). “It is 1968 Oakland, and Natalia Fuentes has been hearing rumors about the beautiful Violeta Miramontes. The young heiress to Spanish colonial wealth has been left paralyzed by a mysterious illness. But Nati knows a thing or two about witchcraft, and she is certain that this is the work of dark magic.” OK, damn, I’m sold. Cynthia Gómez will chat with Tamika Thompson about her new queer Bay Area gothic, Muñeca. [Pegasus Books]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Andrew Sean Greer with R. O. Kwon and DJ Duarte, 7pm, The Peacock Lounge (The Haight). The only author of a comic novel to win a Pulitzer in living memory (because we’re all committed to forgetting Junot Diaz right?) has a new book out: Villa Coco! Two novelists and a DJ: sounds like a good party is in the works. [Go Passage]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Liam O’Brien: Butterflies of the Bay Area (and Slightly Beyond), 7pm, Copperfield’s Books (Santa Rosa). Liam O’Brien is getting all the way to Santa Rosa and the man doesn’t drive—join a carpool and hear stories from the great local writer, illustrator, celebrator and protector of butterflies in the Bay Area and (slightly) beyond. In conversation with Holland Gistelli., the Education Program Manager of the beautiful Sonoma natural reserve of oak savanna, Pepperwood. [Pepperwood Preserve]
Bay Area Current Birthday Bash!, 8pm, Mosswood Chapel (Mosswood). A rager to celebrate The Current’s first birthday! Happy Birthday, The Current! [Bay Area Current]
Also: Game of Shrooms Meet and Show at Faultline Gallery (The Laurel) / Film Fridays: Sopera de Yemaya with Director Q&A at EastSide Arts Alliance (San Antonio/Fruitvale)
Saturday, June 13
Film Screening: The Palestine Laboratory, 10:30am, Albany Library (Solano Ave). A free screening of Antony Loewenstein’s 2025 documentary series, The Palestine Laboratory, made with director Dan Davies and broadcast on Al Jazeera English. It’s about how Israel uses the West Bank and Gaza as testing grounds for new weapons and surveillance tech, which are in turn exported abroad and used to suppress internal dissent. Doors at 10:10am. [eventbrite]
Tour of the ghost of Temescal Creek, 11am, 51st and Telegraph (Temescal). Walk over the ghost of Temescal Creek, one of the key waterways of Oakland before it was buried, culverted, and built over. Learn about the history of this place and how the water shaped it, both physically and in drawing all kinds of life toward it, human and more than human. [Wholly H2O]
AfroPortals Community Archiving Day, noon, Location upon RSVP (Eastmont Hills). An archive day entering Black Queer Folks and Families in Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area. Bring photos, posters, letters, or other printed materials related to your Black queer folks, to be digitized and become a part of EastSide Arts Alliance’s CARP, BALA, and the new AfroPortals Digital Archive. [insta]
“We Losin’ Recipes” Juneteenth Celebration, noon, West Oakland Branch OPL (West Oakland). The West Oakland Branch Library, West Oakland Library Friends, and solfood host an afternoon rooted in Black joy, cultural memory, and intergenerational community: “We Losin’ Recipes,” a multi-generational cookout and gathering that honors Juneteenth by celebrating the traditions, stories, and people that make West Oakland home. Food and drinks curated by Sol Food and A Taste of West, live DJ sets, community line dancing, and dedicated tables for Spades, Bid Whist, Dominoes, and UNO. Double-dutch, hopscotch, crafts, and coloring for the little ones, too. [OPL]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Andrew Sean Greer with his TWIN BROTHER!, 1pm, Book Passage (Corte Madera). In Villa Coco Andrew Sean Greer sweeps us away to a bonkers gay summer in Tuscany, and I had to include the Book Passage event on the calendar because the author’s conversation partner is his identical twin brother, Michael Greer, and that just sounds fun—hoping there will be family stories and identity-swapping pranks. [andrewgreer.com]
Jose Barlow Benavidez Panel Discussion, 2pm, EastSide Arts Alliance (Fruitvale). On the fiftieth anniversary of the shooting of Barlow Benavidez by the Oakland Police in 1976, have Black and Brown police shootings and police accountability changed since then? Panelists will discuss the circumstances of the shooting and how the community came together in protest, connecting it to the current status of OPD accountability. [The Fruitvale History Project]
Queer Trans Hysterectomy Writing Workshop, 4pm, Local Economy (College Ave). Did your wandering womb amble so far it left your body? Do you identify as queer or trans and want to write 500 words about uterine yanking? Cool, there’s a zine for that, edited by Hanne Williams-Baron and Adrian Matias Bell. Get started together today. [luma]
On the Record: Everybody Is A Star , 4pm, Central Library (Downtown Berkeley). Celebrate Juneteenth with Black music celebrating freedom and joy, learn the history of this long-celebrated holiday, make some buttons and eat some cupcakes. [BPL]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Ashton Politanoff with Emily Bell: Dad Had a Bad Day, 4pm, Book Passage (Corte Madera). So many ways to process midlife masculine malaise: it doesn’t seem like tennis would be the worst one, but Ashton’s out there to prove our first impressions wrong in this novel about fathers, sons, friendship, and a futile search for meaning. In conversation with his editor at Astra House, Emily Bell: come to this talk for a behind the scenes look at the world of literary fiction and the costs of turning everything into a competition. [Book Passage]
DOCR-ROMAJ 0002: Post-Industrial Shoreline and Ruins, 4:30pm, TEPCO Beach (Richmond). Gonna be honest, I don’t understand what this is but it seems dope as hell. Here’s what they say if you click their link: “The interpretation and examination of post-industrial land uses: ruin, remediation & nostalgia. Upon conclusion of the Notice, visual assistants can either return home via Richmond BART or follow a group along the greenway to a late night business along the San Pablo Avenue strip. SITES TO ASSESS: Costco, porcelain ruins, wetlands, war memorials, shoreline space programming, railroad ruins, factory ruins, ferry ruins, warehouse adaptive reuse, company town ruins, makeshift harbors and yurts. What is the ‘East Bay’? How do we know it when we see it? Upon receiving the J.B. Jackson Necessity for Vernacular Form grant, the Department of Civic Romanticism (DOCR) will be creating a visual data inventory on landforms, textures, shapes, colors, land uses and configurations which catalogue the retrospect, process and imaginary of place. Each month, the Department’s Bureau of Images (BOI) will be coordinating with select local provinces in the East Bay Ministry of Lands (EBMOL) to undertake a journey through everyday spaces on bicycle. Recording landscapes of interest using any creative medium of choice. At the conclusion of our Notices to Romanticize, the Bureau will deliver the image inventory to the DOCR Principal for preparation of a report of what once was, what is and what could become in the landscape.” We think it’s a bike ride along the bayshore? Somebody go to it and tell us if we’re right. [ride with gps]
Le doulos, 4:30pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Another of Jean-Pierre Melville’s tributes to American noir, done up in French existentialist trappings. This one is from 1962 and has Jean-Paul Belmondo in its, costarring a series of dingy hotel rooms and lampposts in the middle of nowhere. Who doesn’t love that hardboiled hon hon hon? [BAMPFA]
MATERIAL SPELLS Book Release + Reading, 6pm, Eternal Now (West Oakland). Celebrating MATERIAL SPELLS, the gorgeous new book from Tracy 茜茜 Ren compiling two years of artwork, research, essays and poetry centering on her exploration of place and belonging through a variety of art practices including sculpture and ritual. There will be tea, readings by Tracy, and there’s an invitation to come offer your work—performance, reading, sounds—if it is in relationship to Tracy’s themes. Marthine is on deck to read her poem “Incantation,” published in Antiphony’s issue #10—who’s next? [insta]
La notte, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Antonioni’s followup to L’avventura takes place over the course of a night in Milan. I saw this a very long time ago and have retained little but the overall climate of stylish alienation and a scene in a hospital with Monica Vitti playing a nymphomaniac. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau are here, too, being alienated all over the place. Kubrick loved this one. [BAMPFA]
Wikipedia Show and Tell, 7:30pm, Bather’s Library (Downtown). Bring your favorite wiki-rabbithole and mingle with all the other magical elves who have “a favorite wikipedia article.” You have five minutes, use “slideshow, corkboard, video, analog" whatever you need. (Did you know there’s an “unusual articles” wikipage to consult?) Past articles: Francisco Goya, Glasgow effectm Boston Corbettm Tarrarem World Trade Center 2, Onfim, Largest organisms, Michel Lotito, Cuttlefish Temple garment, HCA Red List of Endangered Craftsm Frankenstein (of Frankenstein vs. Baragon), Public Universal Friend, Largest meteorites on Earth, and List of standing stones. [Bathers]
Also: Game of Shrooms at Nooks and Crannies Everywhere (The East Bay) / THE STORY TIME BAND at The Freight (Downtown Berkeley) / Club de Lectura en Español: Polvo por Denise Phé-Funchal at César E. Chávez Branch OPL (Fruitvale) / Unity Fest at Chochenyo Park (Alameda) / Chinatown Birthright Citizenship Historical Walking Tour at Chinese Cultural Center (West Bay Chinatown) / 40x40 Neighborhood Empowerment Day at Parker Community Resource Center (Eastmont Hills) / Stumped no More: Tree Identification for Mushroom Hunters at Randall Museum (West Bay) / Saturday Love at Sunset Cove (The Lake) / Declare Open House and Print Shop at Arion Press (West Bay) / Free Monthly Book Swap at KINFOLX (Downtown) / No Straight Lines film at Tarea Hall Pittman South Branch (South Berkeley) / Marianna Marlowe with Natasha Singh - Portrait of a Mestiza at Book Passage (Corte Madera) / Belly Dance Performance with Nicole Maria! at Piedmont Avenue Branch OPL (Piedmont Avenue) / Rockridge Book Club at Rockridge Branch OPL (College Ave)
Sunday, June 14
Archiving the Block, 1pm, Black Panther Party Museum (Downtown). A listening party and workshop for songwriters with Unocoolbro and friends! Hear the artist’s upcoming album Black Gentrification, and think about the power of music as individual expression and a gathering point for community. Come if you like thinking and talking about music, language, land, space, memory and Black collective futures, and write together with others who do too. [insta]
Dusty Baker’s Crossroads, 1pm, Marcus Books (Longfellow). Dusty Baker will be at Marcus Books to talk and sign copies of his new memoir Crossroads, and chat with sports journalist Monte Poole. I read somewhere that, between his playing days and his time as a skipper, Baker has participated in something like three percent of all MLB games, which is one of those facts that make me dizzy just to think about. He’ll talk about his life in baseball (with people like Hank Aaron, Orlando Cepeda, and Willie Mays) and also “the worlds of music, wine, and the simpler joys of life.” [eventbrite]
“Disappeared in Detention” Information Session, 3:30pm, La Peña Cultural Center (Oakland Part of Berkeley). To go one step beyond “did you see that video?” and “Fuck ICE,” crucial as those steps are, this will be “expert panelists who will share up to date information from a legal and activist perspective” on the whole fucking fascist detention project our country is doing, and how to fuck it up. Event is free, registration is required, and space is limited. Visit action tables during the break to take some immediate steps. Among the speakers: Natalia V Santanna, Stacy Suh, Rev. Canon Anna Carmichael, & Jose R. [La Peña]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Greg Sarris’s The Last Human Bear, 4pm, Book Passage (Corte Madera). Greg Sarris will be at Book Passage to talk about his first novel in twenty-eight years, The Last Human Bear, set against the backdrop of 20th-century California Indian country, migrant field worker camps, Depression-era rancherias, and cinematic Sonoma landscapes: Mary Hatcher, a Native Pomo woman passes between Native and white societies, “Offering an engrossing rejoinder to the paucity of fiction centering California’s first peoples.” [Insert rave quotes by Rebecca Solnit, Dave Eggers, John Freeman, and Obi Kaufman]. Sarris is author, professor, and serving his seventeenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. [Book Passage]
Hao C. Tran, The Old Village Road, 5pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Hao C. Tran will read from his second memoir collection, The Old Village Road, about life before the fall of Saigon and after it. “Songs of a Vietnamese American.” This interview from 2023 mentions wanting to write another book, and now he has. [Nomadic Bookshop]
Barry Lyndon, 5pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). BAMPFA’s really going heavy on the melancholy this week, huh? This is the Kubrick movie every critic is required by law to call painterly. It’s gorgeous and very long, and there’s a duel toward the end that’s as tense as anything you’ve seen in a Western. [BAMPFA]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Text Change: Trans Reading Series, 6:30pm, The Stud (Folsom). June “World’s Greatest Writer” Martin is hosting this, the first in San Francisco’s new trans reading series “Text Change,” featuring Annalee Newitz, Grayson Thompson, Isaac Fellman, Xóchitl Manuel Márquez, and Violet Spurlock. “Five trans writers on anything but transition” is the tagline. [insta]
Also: Online with Womb House: Gail Crowther discusses her new book on the reading life of Marilyn Monroe at Zoom (The Internet) / FULL! Bay Nature Special Event: Sea Otters as Summer Begins at Elkhorn Slough at Elkhorn Slough (Moss Landing) / Oakland Drinks Water Community Health Fair at DeFremery Park (West Oakland) / Octavia’s Legacy: Imagining the Futures She Made Possible at SFPL Main Library (West Bay)
