If you didn’t know, all new books always release on Tuesdays. No one knows why, it’s a vast conspiracy. So, Tuesday this week is a big West Bay Day, full of book releases and other special reasons to go the extra twenty minutes and feel your ears pop in the tunnel under the bay. But hop back over! Ticket sales are closed for this weekend’s east bay landscape connection walk with José, but plan ahead a little and get lucky next weekend. Up in the Far North Oakland neighborhood known as Richmond, there’s a play set in a future that has just about come to pass in 2026, having the first of a two weekend show (see more below). Sign up for the Storyboard Residency at St Mary’s by April 1 to push your big writing project forward this summer. New Parkway is having a final showing of Sinners Tuesday and doing a red carpet moment to celebrate the Academy Awards Sunday, and that’s all the movie content you’re gonna get here because ORB’s talented, thoughtful film dudes are all at capacity somewhere else, so it’s all poems down the line. Movie needs can only be met by Stephen at Screen Slate this week. Except the A’s documentary on Saturday, that ball is one I tried my best to catch. Oaks are flowering, a big heat wave is coming, Nowruz is around the corner, so go outside and throw a ball around while reciting Tom Clark poems about how the best A’s were always last season’s. -MS
Tuesday, March 10
What do the rich owe the rest of us?: A conversation on taxation and democracy, 4pm, Social Sciences Building (Cal). Professors of law, economics and governance Brian Galle, Ray Madoff, Emmanuel Saez, and Vanessa Williamson talk about California’s proposed wealth tax and how to tax the ultrarich in order to restore democracy. [UCB]
Author Talk: Sandip Roy's Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal: The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator, 5pm, Stephens Hall (Cal). Sexuality, gender, performance, and the crumbling of traditional forms of crossdressing are all evoked in a kind of anti-autofiction (too bad autobiography is already taken as a term). Creative nonfiction with evocative fictional vignettes of life in midcentury Bengal as a gay performer from a long line of players. [UCB]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Savala Nolan's Good Woman: A Reckoning, 5:30pm, Book Passage - Ferry Building (Embarcadero). The East Bay's Savala Nolan, professor of law at Berkeley and author of Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body, is heading west to launch her new book, Good Woman: A Reckoning. Exploring motherhood, divorce, masculinity, femininity, all from a Black intersectional perspective on the constraints of womanhood. In conversation with Tracy Clark-Flory.[Book Passage]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Second] San Francisco Review of Whatever Issue Three Release Party, 6pm, The Latin American Club (The Mission). It's the second year of the SF Review of Whatever, go celebrate our print friend, who, like ORB of late, has finally capitulated and begun to publish book reviews. The classifieds are still my favorite section. [SF Review of Whatever]
[West Bay Bonus Event AGAIN] The Science and Psychology of Muppet Design, 6:30pm, Location upon RSVP (North Beach). Michael Schupbach makes muppets, and will explain the science behind cuteness (Sianne Ngai on cuteness as an aesthetic category is revelatory if you want to dig in further) and a purple nubbly texture can help puppets cross the uncanny valley. [eventbrite]
[SOLD OUT] The WTF Did I Just Read Book Club: Death Valley, 6:30pm, Book Society (Elmwood). Surreal reads and a glass of wine – add your name to the waitlist if you went to the desert on a horse with no name and ended up in a cactus and lived to tell the tale. [Book Society]
[West Bay Bonus Event OK FINE] Cindy Cohn's Privacy's Defender with Cory Doctorow, 7pm, City Lights Bookstore (North Beach). The modern problem with privacy started with the telegraph, and it's only gotten more complicated from there. Here two stalwart defenders of online privacy talk about what it means to fight for privacy when we leave lasting digital footprints and lingering cookie crumbs everywhere we go online, our voices in our kitchens are recorded and held in data centers in Texas, and now our physical movements in public are being tracked too (hello Flock, we meet again). [City Lights]
Michael Pollan's A World Appears, 7pm, First Congregational Church of Berkeley (Elmwood). The Berkeleyest Michael according to ORB voters talks us through the labyrinth of our minds in his new book A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. Spoiler alert: meditation and psychedelics, his old pals, are still The Way. [Mrs. Dalloway's]
Also: Center for African Studies Colloquium: The Red New African at Philosophy Hall (Cal) / Communism without Communalism: Disurbanist Pastoral at Stephens Hall (Cal) / Nadine Takvorian on ARMAVENI: A Graphic Novel of the Armenian Genocide at Green Apple Books (West Bay)
Wednesday, March 11
Author Talk: Andreja Novakovic's "Chantal Akerman: Filmmaker and Philosopher", noon, Stephens Hall (UC Berkeley). A philosopher searches in films by Chantal Akerman to find answers to big questions about "home and homelessness, work and social reproduction, self and identity, and desire in its many forms." [Townsend Center for the Humanities]
Far from Home, 4:30pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). The last time the US was meddling in Iranian politics directly, one side effect was director Sohrab Shahid Saless fleeing the Shah’s regime for West Germany in 1975. He shaped German cinema, BAMPFA says, and the canon of films on exile. [BAMPFA]
Motherhood Around the World: Parenting, Policy and Possibility, 6pm, Book Society (Berkeley). Abigail Leonard shares the stories of four women navigating motherhood around the world in her book and will talk with Katrina Roundfield, PhD about matrescence and cultural expectations that swirl around the absolute miracle of keeping children alive when they refuse to eat and sleep. [Book Society]
Neighbor-to-Neighbor Teach-In on Supporting Immigrants, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). ICE is already here in the Bay, deporting our neighbors. Teachers are protecting students and supporting families, and neighbors are putting systems in place for mutual aid and support so when it escalates, which it will, networks of trust and resource-sharing is already established. Come meet some local folks doing the work. [Luma]
[West Bay Bonus Event] The West Facade Novel Launch, 7pm, Green Apple Books on the Park (The Sunset). Hurrah, Lauren C. Johnson's novel, The West Facade, is out from Santa Fe Writer's Project! Only West Bay event of the night we're sticking in Wednesday. Lauren talks tonight about her medieval Paris gothic fairytale with a statue come to life with fellow local writers Tara Campbell and Beth Winegarten. Go full Society of Creative Anachronism here and pull out the hennins and cloaks you've kept for just such an occasion. [Green Apple]
Arab Resource and Organizing Center hosts Iftar, Panel, and Discussion: The War on Iran, 7pm, 155 Grand Ave (The Lake). From the organizers: "AROC stands with the people of Iran, and calls for an end to war being perpetrated by the United States and Israel. As we join the peoples of the world mobilizing against militarism and fascism, we invite our community to come together to build understanding of this crisis, and to build the solidarity needed to overcome it." [Google Doc Sign Up]
The No Man Slam!, 8pm, The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley). No Dudes at the open mic tonight -- Women, femmes, GNC folks ONLY! [eventbrite]
Also: Is This Your Only Life? at Alumni House (Cal) / The Sunday Dinner Series with Live Free at The Way Christian Center (Berkeley) / Kill the Documentary at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley)
Thursday, March 12
[West Bay Bonus Event] Opening: Directory of Dreams: Bay Area Lesbian Economies and Radical Care, 1970–1995, 11am, GLBT Historical Society Museum (Financial District). The Oakland-based Bay Area Lesbian Archives (BALA), curates an exhibition about the community networks of Bay Area lesbians running through cafés and bookstores to credit unions and print shops that served as places to work, to connect to other queer folks, and to affirming, supportive services. Runs all day. [GLBT Historical Society]
SOLD OUT Celebration Rally with Alysa Liu, noon, Oakland City Hall (Downtown). Oakland's Olympic gold medalist has her own mural and now is being officially feted! Tickets went fast, and the FAQ says there's no parade because Alysa instead "asked for a celebration that shines a light on Oakland’s vibrant community and talented local artists." The website says it’s “in partnership with Invisalign and PG&E.” [Visit Oakland]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Opening Reception: Ephemera Unearthed!, 5pm, SFAI Legacy Foundation (SoMa). Opening of an exhibition on Craig Baldwin's Other Cinema series, featuring all the ephemera he saved about it. Baldwin has led Other Cinema at Artists’ Television Access for longer than my little sister's been alive and she's 40. Find weird movies here and the people who love them. [San Francisco Cinemateque]
Our Oracle Ruin: Reading from Gaza’s Book of Genocide, 5pm, Wheeler Hall (Cal). A conversation about Palestinian poetry from Gaza (with readings in Arabic and English translation) with writers/translators/scholars of Arabic literature here from out of town, Huda Fakhreddine and Sinan Antoon, moderated by Samera Esmeir. How to bring a world shredded by genocide into language, and then intro translation? Conversation followed by a reading of poems in the original and in English. [Berkeley Events]
Holloway Poetry Series: Wendy Trevino, 5:30pm, Wheeler Hall (Cal). Bay Area poet Wendy Trevino lives in the West Bay, but has crossed over to the warmer, but cooler, side of the Bay today to read poems into the golden hour. Her first book-length collection of poems, Cruel Fiction, was published by Commune Editions. From Poem: "Always in relation / Is what any one is / & change happens / Only in relations." From her bio: "Wendy is not an experimental writer." [Pegasus Books]
Bearing Witness: Stories from the Palestinian Olive Harvest, 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Agroecology, food sovereignty, mutual aid and trying to keep Palestinian olive growing and harvesting cultures alive during an ongoing genocide. But first: dinner catered by a local Palestinian chef (a bit of a thing these days, for good reason, as long as it's done well, and we'll trust the anarcho-communists at Tamarack all know how to behave and what not to extract from people making their food). Then a short documentary “Burin Under Fire”, stories from the olive groves, mingling and more. [humantix]
Kitty Stryker – Love Rebels: How I Learned to Burn It Down Without Burning Out, 6pm, Main Library (The Lake-ish). Kitty Stryker has been doing the work, and is here for an honest yet hopeful community conversation about how to see and tend to need in the world without losing sight of the fact that the helpers need help too. And sometime to rest a while. It's MUTUAL aid, after all. [OPL]
On Morrison – Namwali Serpell in conversation with Cathy Park Hong, 6:30pm, Hive (Northgate-Waverly). The Bay Area Book Festival is getting a head start on itself, bringing Transit author and former Cal Prof Namwali Serpell into conversation with Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings but also it turns out lots of poetry!) about Serpell's new book On Morrison, and how Toni Morrison's art, work, politics, and steel backbone deeply transformed American culture. If you haven't read Toni at Random on Morrison's editorial career championing Black authors, I'll loan you my heavily marked-up copy. [eventbrite]
To Live & Write in Alameda, 6:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda). Join an Alameda-based community of writers hosted by writing coach Bronwyn Emery, wherever you are in your path as a writer, to stretch on the page and meet each other. In March: short stories. And once a month, the group puts on a reading in a bookstore in Alameda. Find your people and remind them Alameda is really a peninsula of Oakland. [eventbrite]
Future Residues, 7pm, Bathers Library (Koreatown-Northgate). Featuring poet Brandon Brown, writer and chicken-appreciator Sofia Cordova (On Puerto Rico: "Food sovereignty is the overworked term used for plátano y papaya en el patio, the work I long to do, the work that called me back"), and Darieck Scott (scholar of Black queerness, fantasy, and superheroes) on what we've inherited and how to look at the streaks it leaves on us. Part of the series Poetics and Plant Medicine, a cross-disciplinary discussions of aesthetics and psychedelics, co-curated by Stephanie Young and Ramsey McGlazer. Come early! Bathers gets full up. [insta]
The Return of Ancient Epic: The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). Translator and editor Robert P. Goldman leads a discussion of the Sanskrit epic The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki. The copy then says that the monumental, ancient Sanskrit epic poem The Rāmāyaṇa -- that is, the foundational text to one of the world's biggest religions and most populous cultures, the origin story of Divali, and currently sitting on my children's shelves in Oakland in various adapted forms published by American publishers -- "is little known to readers in the West." Maybe they mean West Bay? [eventbrite]
Compensation, 7pm BAMPFA (Cal). Inspired by a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the same actors play two different couples in two different times, one deaf, one hearing, TB, AIDS, Love. [BAMPFA]
Department Show: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 8pm, Durham Studio Theater (Cal). A quick dose of Shakespeare: 90 minutes of fairies, asses, and thinking you're in love when it was all just a puckish trick of flower juice. Let's hope they didn't cut the wall scene; I do love a rude mechanical to break up the high comedy with some low brow clowning. One more time tomorrow night too. [UC B]
Also: The Loft Hour: Tadiwa Madenga and Juliana Ramírez Herrera at Arts Research Center (UC Berkeley) / Author Talk: Shatema Threadcraft's The Labors of Resurrection at Berkeley Law (Cal) / A Discussion on Abolition and Carceral Alternatives with Savala Nolan at Berkeley Law (Cal)
Friday, March 13
Shotgun Spotlight: Lily Janiak, 10:30am, Shotgun Studios (Berkeley). Lily Janiak, theater critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, will talk about her career in writing about the theatre, and her role on the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Drama jury. There's so much drama behind the scenes, and even after the play is performed! [Shotgun Players]
Cohorts Season One Group Show Reception, 5pm, Bathers Library (The Cool Part of Telegraph). Back to Bathers we go! Celebrate the first Bather's cohort of artists/writers/performers who have been reading, watching, making good art together, and talking about it. And maybe you want to apply soon to join in the next cohort. Community Arts Education is the way we're doing this now. [insta]
Poetry! 6:30pm, Tamarack (Downtown). A late add for web visitors only because we vibe reported Tamarack poetry so hard last week I couldn't catch up to the present. The writers are back from their annual AWP gathering and tonight you can hear Sarah Rosenthal (many books, core observer and participant in the vanguard/experimental/conceptual poetics world of the East bay, also "we know how / the poem is about / death yet these / people seem so alive"), Jess Eng (the food writer I think?), and a surprise guest! [insta]
Filmprov, 7pm, Gallery 2727 (Berkeley ). The debut of Filmprov: live music performed over classic films. A little bit Philip Glass inspired maybe? (Keep reading to see what I mean.) All funds go to Freedom for Immigrants. [insta]
Doctor Voynich and Her Children, 8pm, Masquers Playhouse (Point Richmond). In this play by Leanna Keyes (a student of Cherríe Moraga), Ivanka Trump is the first female president, abortion is illegal, and the trans traveling Doctor Rue Voynich and her apprentice dispenses herbs in red states because that's what's left of medicine. Poetry, plants, queerness, way too realness. First of two weekends of shows [Masquers Playhouse]
Opera Parallèle: La Belle et la Bête, 8pm, Zellerbach Hall (UC Berkeley). A movie, an opera, a Philip Glass score, a fairytale featuring transformation -- Glass was trying to scratch off the gem-like finish of a movie, the same every time, with the sandpaper of interpretation and life, and said, “Above all, art is a social phenomenon. … Music is what happens when you play. And not just when you play, but when there’s at least one other person in the room.” Be live and in person and with people while the movie plays. First of two nights. [Berkeley Events]
Empowering Women of Color Open Mic, 8pm, La Peña Cultural Center (Oakland Part of Berkeley). Annual and beloved, this open mic is launches the Empowering Women of Color Conference (EWOCC) -- the W including all experiences of womanhood, across genders. Come for live music, spoken word, radical storytelling, and performances by writers who love to talk truth into the mic. Come see and be seen, listen and be heard. [La Peña Cultural Center]
Also: Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth at Stephens Hall (Cal) / Francophonie Celebration: West African Dance Evening with Naby Bangoura at Alliance Française de Berkeley (Berkeley)
Saturday, March 14
Palestinian Palestine Before the Mandate, 10am, Albany Library (Albany). Lecture 5 covers Palestinian Palestine during the British Mandate period. "no readings, no exams, just honest history." You can check out previous lectures on the site too, to catch up. [Palestine Before October 7]
Heyday's Colors of California: Volume 2, 1pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Hey look, Marthine Satris, wearer of all the hats, juggler of books and calendars, is back as moderator of Volume 2 of this many-hued series with three Heyday author/artists. Elissa Callen is a natural pigment maker, ecological artist, and nature adventure friend whose artwork is featured in *Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles*. Krystle Hickman's The ABCs of California's Native Bees is based on five years of field observations. Robin Lee Carlson, author of The Cold Canyon Fire Journals knows change over time and human meddling in landscapes. Come learn about pollinator perception, pigments of invasive plants, changes to California's palette due to settler colonialism and climate change. Followed by some hands-on small-group activities, so come ready to get prismatic. [luma]
SOLD OUT Wild Wild Feast: A Cooking Class and Dinner with Chef Chad Hyatt, 2pm, Fork in the Path (Berkeley). Sorry folks, no more seats at the table tonight, but you can still buy Chad Hyatt's The Mushroom Hunter's Kitchen, the best out there for culinary uses of wild mushrooms beyond the always classic "sauté it and add salt." [Fork in the Path]
¡Roundtable Reading Bilingüe! The One and Only Ivan / El único y incomparable Iván, 2:30pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Ivan is a gorilla who lives in a mall, watches TV, makes friends with an elephant, and enjoys art! Your kids can come read aloud the bilingual text and take home a copy. [BAMPFA]
Film Screening: The Last Game, 6pm, Pony Studios (Temescal). The final public community screening of The Last Game, a documentary gathering stories about the fans of the A's over the team's 57 years in Oakland. With the director and invited guests from Oakland’s baseball community! Remember Dollar Tuesdays, Rickey Henderson stealing bases, José Canseco hitting homers, and what it was like to go generation after generation to root, root, root for the home team (unless you were my dad, who was still Bronx loyal and went to the Coliseum to watch his Yanks play). More than Moneyball, this was tailgate parties and buying a hat while you crossed the BART bridge, this team was my kindergartener son eating two hot dogs and saying "I love baseball! I love the A's!" It's Poet Tom Clark's book Fan Poems with the lines in "A Fan's Pain": "I go deep inside myself/ to look for the A's / I know." I know you remember. [Square]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Letterform Live!, 6pm, The Pearl (Dogpatch). Designers and design lovers, go forth and honor the first 10 years of creative type-making, archive building, and bookishness of all kinds. You'll get to do hands-on design activities, and enjoy storytelling and Debbie Millman’s exhibition: Tristram Shandy, The First Modern Book, and maybe even win a raffle of typographic delights. [Letterform Archive]
Author Talk: Nadine Takvorian's Armveni, 6:30pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood). HYE! Did you enjoy some Armenian festivities alst week with Vera et al? Now you can take more history home., share it with your kids. Author/illustrator Nadine Takvorian debuts her YA graphic novel Armaveni: A Graphic Novel of the Armenian Genocide in conversation with artist Eugene Yelchin. Family trauma and the history of a genocide are told in a mix of historical, contemporary, and fantastical sequences, sharing an oft denied and hidden period in modern Mediterranean history. [Mrs. Dalloway's]
No Hope Without Ecstasy 8pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Like a wizard, the new issue release party of Pinko is never late, nor early, and arrives precisely when it means to, even if we already announced it a couple weeks ago when it was February 27th. Celebrate gay communism with short readings and music by DJ C.L.R. Jamz. [insta]
Also: Alameda County Reparations Commission: Youth Power Listening Session at Chabot College (Hayward) / Member Tours: Women’s History Month Artwalk with Avril Angevine at OMCA (The Lake) / Sana Javeri Kadri & Asha Loupy's The Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook at Ferry Plaza Farmers Market (West Bay) / Clothing Swap & Print at Junior Center of Art and Science (The Lake) / Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Luminous Procuress at BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley) / Rockridge Book Club reads Crying in H Mart at Rockridge Branch Library (Formerly Known as Shafter) / Spring Fling Mixer at Local Economy (Rockridge) / RESIST: A sultry celebration of liberation, movement, and mutual aid at Flux Theatre (Berkeley) / Plant Bingo at Blk Girls Green House (Lower Bottoms) / The Word Barre at Lakeview Branch Library (The Lake)
Sunday, March 15
Trans Ancestors in History and Creative Practice, 1pm, OMCA (The Lake-ish). Community historian Andrea Horne speaks about Black trans history in the Bay Area and beyond, as a long time West Bay community member. Next, creative workshops with queer teaching artists on writing and comix will help channel inspiration from the participants' own trans ancestors into joyful, free visions of trans futures. [OMCA]
Tales of the Tofu Goddess: A Tribute to the Artful Life of Flo Oy Wong, 1pm, Oakland Asian Cultural Center (Chinatown). Two short documentaries about a very long-lived artist: Flo Oy Wong—Tales of the Tofu Goddess: The Artful Life of Flo Oy Wong, and Drawn from Life: The Creative Legacy of Flo Oy Wong. Flo Oy Wong, historian Roy Chan of the Oakland Chinatown Oral History Project, and film director Andi Wong will all be there for Q&A. Then take a walk together to see a mural that incorporates Wong's drawings of Oakland, her homeplace. [Oakland Asian Cultural Center]
Festival of Gentleness, 2pm, Fig Leaf Gardens (Redwood Heights). Gather for tacos by Dos Raîcez and art of all kinds under the fig tree, say hello to plants, chickens, and bees, and then lay back and listen to readings by poets Hanne Williams-Baron, Trin Lê, Ankoor Patel, and Adrian Mattias Bell, followed by a golden hour of music! [Fig Leaf Gardens]
“The Seduction of AI for Writing” with Larry Ebert, 3pm, Gilman Brewing Company (West Berkeley). Larry Ebert is a systems engineer turned writer who teaches about innovation but also about the human impacts of AI and is "currently researching the impact of AI on human critical thinking and creative thinking skills" (signs point to bad, the impact is bad). Maybe he can outline a path forward between full refusenik and the total offloading of brainpower to the machine, but ORB remains in the skeptical camp. [California Writers Club Berkeley Branch]
Six Women Poets Celebrating Women's History Month, 3pm, Local Economy (The Neighborhood Formerly Known as Shafter). So many books between the six of them, they could fill a whole Library of Alexandria. This reading centers women of the SWANA diaspora and allies: Poet Deema Shehabi (co-author of Water to Water: Gaza Renga with Marilyn Hacker) reads alongside Sara Borjas (Fresno & Oakland Xicanx poet and author of poems where "golden oldiez meet the punk attitude of No Doubt"), Shadab Zeest Hashmi (Pakistani-American poet, essayist, memoirist), Persis Karim (poet, scholar, and editor of A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans), Nathalie Khankan (author of quiet orient riot [from Omnidawn!]), and Priscilla Wathington (Palestinian American poet/editor and the author of the chapbook, "Paper and Stick"). [luma]
Beware of a Holy Whore, 3:30pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Rainer Werner Fassbinder's movie about the making of a movie, inspired by his own experience during the making of Whity. Do you like Godard films but find yourself wishing they were more German and a lot gayer and shot through with an unrelenting sadomasochism? Fassbinder might be the director for you. [BAMPFA]
[South Bay Bonus Event] San José Poetry Slam, 6pm, Wheelhouse of Willow Glen (Deep South Oakland). Oakland slam poetry institution Nazelah Jamison graces Teal Town to help relaunch the 37-year-old San José Poetry Slam in the new home of Poetry Center San José. Hosted by Scorpiana Xlent, who self-identifies as a "Diva Goddess of Humility and o.k. poet." [Poetry Center San José]
Also: Bon Marché and Van Tran Second-hand and Repair Pop-Up at Best Friends Wine Bar (Albany)
