Sinners is at Grand Lake Tuesday then OUT unless they bring it back for a bonus bonus round. But there’s so much to celebrate nevertheless: Happy Centenary to the prettiest, wackiest, localest movie palace in Oakland! Theatre tours will be given in honor of the birthday celebration March 6-8 and special old movies are being screened (see Wednesday). There should be grunions showing up in Alameda this week; start haunting Crown Beach on full moons to see silvery fish and try to catch them. Also, on moons: did you catch the eclipse last night? Richmond’s NIAD is having their annual ARTFUL Gala + Benefit Auction in the West Bay on Saturday. This spring, BAMPFA is showing films (that’s what the F is for) that will make your eyes do spirals in the series Psychedelia & Cinema, as well as kicking off the annual African Film Festival. The New Parkway is screening a movie Maggie Gyllenhall directed and wrote titled Bride! like every day this week, and Jessie Buckley being in it is almost enough to get me sit through horror, almost, though I’d probably opt for the live screening of Othello at the Elmwood on Wednesday instead. But really, book release season is in full swing now and you can’t go to all the readings, so just buy the books instead; they’re more portable than the authors, anyway, and stack up more neatly on shelves. -MS, XL, TC
Tuesday, March 3
Oakland Council Meeting: On Housing development and transit-oriented development., 3:30pm, City Hall (Downtown). This came in via the YIMBYs, but hear me out: Oakland's city council is voting today on whether to delay by several years the implementation of SB 79, the new California state law that overrides local density limits to allow high-density housing development within a half mile of qualifying transit stops. Additionally, Oakland's government is proposing not to increase density aroundAshby, MacArthur, and Rockridge BART stations. Read the proposal and come ready to make a one minute public comment. Even if your elected local representatives flip you the bird, public opinion will still be on the record. [Google Docs]
Education & Schools Listening Session, 5:30pm, Healthy Black Families (Berkeley). The Alameda County Reparations Process will be shared by the county commission, who are showing up for a listening session to connect with the Black community's stories and visions for future policies & actions [Alameda County]
A History of Immigration Law: How We Got Here, 6pm, Albany Library (Albany). Carlotta Wright de la Cal (specializes in immigration, legal, and labor history, and getting her PhD at Cal in history), will talk about the historical roots of today’s immigration debates with Prof Ming H. Chen (expert in citizenship and race, teaches at UC San Francisco Law School). "Fears of leftist agitators and foreign spies of all stripes have historically shaped immigration law, while Presidential executive orders eliminating civil rights are nothing new." Nothing new under the sun. [Path to Belonging]
Black Studies Collective Discussion, 6pm, West Oakland Branch OPL (Across from DeFremery). Continuing discussion series centered on Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies, today's is on "The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought" and "Venus in Two Acts." I am REALLY interested to see that the "post custodial community archive prioritizing the collective memory of Oakland’s historical Black community." @fragments_of_a_bip is bringing prepared questions. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Kate Schatz: Where the Girls Were, 7pm, The Booksmith (The Haight). Longtime local Kate Schatz (Rad American Women A-Z, etc) goes all in for West Bay realness to share her new novel Where the Girls Were, a historical novel about being young and pregnant in the West Bay when it was full of hippies. Maybe pair with The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley? [Booksmith]
[West Bay Bonus Event the Second] Armenian Dreams, 7pm, Saint Joseph's Arts Foundation (SoMa). Hye! All the Armenians are in the Bay and they're performing! Bilingual Poet and translator Hrayr Varaz Khanjian and rom-com writer Taleen Voskuni (Lavash at First Sight) are representing the literary arts, and drag artistes VERA!, Rusty Hammer, Anoush Ellah along with comedian Mary Basmadjian are holding down the performance side of things. Hips will shake, beards will grow, legs will do splits, and everyone will dance. [insta]
Wednesday, March 4
Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy, 12 noon, Geballe Room (Cal). Oh this is exciting – spiritualism in urban space! Blavatsky, occultism, All The Modernists and why they loved fascism (the few the proud the weird versus the masses). Urban planning and utopianism! One review calls Shiben Banerji's book Lineages of the Global City "sprawling and wonderful," which is also how I would like to be described. [Townsend Center for the Humanities]
Berkeley Book Chat: Andreja Novakovic on Chantal Akerman, 12 noon, Geballe Room (Cal). UC Berkeley philosopher Andreja Novakovic discusses her new book about Chantal Akerman with Miryam Sas. They should do this chat three days in a row, with the second event deviating in small but significant ways from the first and the third breaking down altogether and concluding in an act of spectacular violence against an audience member who has more of a comment than a question. [UC Berkeley]
100 Years of Movie Magic, 2pm, Grand Lake Theatre (The Lake). Grand Lake Theatre not only has the best marquee but is also 100 years old! Hurrah for movie palaces, long may they shine. Come see classics for FREE, get a theatre tour, and celebrate the only place around that hosts the 9/11 truthers film festival. [Grand Lake Theatre]
BART MART 1, 3pm, Downtown Berkeley Station (Berkeley). Arts & craft fair for creative expressions of all kinds (mostly anime-style because of new BART mascots? I dunno, whatever it takes to get transit funded), all for sale in the Berkeley BART, which also hosts a poetry-delivery machine. [Insta]
Live Free USA & Thug Therapy Listening Session, 5:30pm, Dezi's (Downtown). Two local orgs dedicated to holistic wellness and community well being among Black Oaklanders host a listening session to support Alameda County's efforts to make reparations for systemic and ongoing racism. [Alameda County Reparations Commission]
End of Days Book Event with Chris Jennings, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). My conviction is that the best way to understand the American right wing and its boot on our necks right now is to look at the West 30 years ago, because all the anti-fed ideology and white supremacy currently running our nation has been seething in the West as long as you've been alive. The East Coast just thought it was the power center while the frontier mentality throwing itself against shifts in BLM policy over cattle leases unleashed a populist fever that hasn't broken yet. The Ruby Ridge standoff is a key moment in this history – come learn the full story. Next, read Tara Westover's Educated (I'd argue the best memoir published in the last ten years) to see how it connects with essential oils and gave us RFK motherfucking junior. Sit with Marthine, who will be listening intently. [Local Economy]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Sandip Roy / Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal: The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator, 7pm, City Lights Bookstore (North Beach). A genre-bending book for a gender-bending legend. Sandip Roy in conversation with local journalist Jeanne Carstensen about Roy's book Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal: The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator. Deeply researched and imagined, and published by the wonderful Seagull Books. BIG deal – Roy is here all the way from Kolkata. [City Lights]
Elizabeth F.S. Roberts' In Praise of Addiction, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's (Elmwood). Roberts talks about addiction and her book about the people of Mexico City with two medical experts: Dr Angela Garcia, author of The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (FSG) and The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along The Rio Grande (UC Press) and Kelly Ray Knight, is Professor of Medical Anthropology at UCSF and author of the book, addicted.pregnant.poor (Duke). Yes, people turn to little cheap treats for pleasure when there are systems making their lives miserable and yes addiction is less a personal failing than an attempt to cope with a cold world, but "making a case for sharing in the pleasures—and suffering—of dependency" -- that’s quite a leap from celebrating interdependence of people to a dependence on substances that trick the brain into wanting more more more. Seems like a real fucking stretch to me. But hey, read the book and prove me wrong (I read the first couple chapters because ORB is curious and responsible, but then ran out of the free sample). [Mrs. Dalloway's]
Floating To Shore Poetry Open Mic, 7pm, Night Heron (Downtown). Creole mermaid Alie Jones hosts! Featured poet is once-Bronx, now-Oakland Nefertiti Asanti (Arisa White called her chapbook "unapologetically uterine," Xandria Phillips says she flips language over to reveal its "gutteral underbelly") and whoever signs up after her for 5 minutes of poetry, story, CNF, lyrics, meditations, recipes, prayers, spells, memories. [insta]
Also: Critical Incident Film Screening and Panel Discussion at Berkeley Law School (Cal)
Thursday, March 5
Lunch Poems: Cindy Juyoung Ok, 12 noon, Morrison Library (Cal). Cindy Juyoung Ok (you might remember her from last week’s Kim Hyesoon translators feature) will read her poems, which say things like “You / leave those you assured // you would not leave and, / too, people have left / you in silence and without // reason but presumably /because of your intensity...” Girl, same. And “You call me ho; it’s short for home”: TWINS, I swear. [Lunch Poems]
Oakland Bloom Presents: Michoacán Cooking with Tsiri, 3:30pm, Melrose Branch (Deep East). One thing I love about migration patterns is the clusters of culture that get plopped into new locales when families and friends say, hey come here to where I landed. It's how the Bay Area got a wholesale transfer of Louisiana pronunciations, it's why there's a gaeltacht in Boston, and it's why we get really good food from Michoacán here in the Bay Area (also, if you haven't heard about avocado-fueled violence in Michoacán pushing farmworker migration to California, listen here). Chef Marlene of Tsiri will share her ancestral cuisine, rooted in Michoacán and made from quality, local ingredients and in respect for all those who work the land. [OPL]
Black Critical Theory Initiative: Axelle Karera, 3:30pm, Social Science Matrix (Cal). Karera seems to be arguing that Frantz Fanon has long been misunderstood as a naive romantic about emancipation, and people lost sight of his philosophy's most far-sighted and prophetic dimensions, basically, the rocky road through decolonization that followed the years since he died much too young. [African American Studies (UC Berkeley)]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Gen Blend March, 5:30pm, Ruth's Table (The Mission). Every month elders and the middle aged and young folks share food and their words. Bring a contribution to the table as well as to the mic (keep the performance under 3 min). [Litquake]
Kate Schatz in conversation with Tracy Clark-Flory, 6:30pm, Books Inc. (The Island that used to be a Peninsula). More Where the Girls Are! This time in the part of Oakland that we cut off with a shipping channel. Perfect combo, as Tracy's forthcoming memoir digs into her own mother's strong-armed relinquishment of her biracial daughter to adoption, so this conversation will be RICH with deeply-felt perspectives on women's autonomy over their bodies and their families, and threats there unto. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Westest] Lauren Groff and RO Kwon , 6:15pm, United Irish Cultural Center (Outer Sunset). Groff’s The Vaster Wilds and Matrix are two immersive novels about women and isolation, one with nuns, both with plants. The semi-survivalist is in town from Florida because why wouldn’t you be, honestly, to talk about her short stories with local novelist RO Kwon, and they’re clearly expecting quite a crowd if they’re taking over a cèilidh hall. [eventbrite]
Prof. Shereen Marisol Meraji and Jeff Chang on Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, 6:30pm, North Gate Hall (Cal). Jeff Chang talks with journalist professor and audio expert Shereen Marisol Meraji – I bet music comes up quite a bit, alongside the history of Bruce Lee, Oakland in the '60s, and what it means to be a cultural star as a person of color. [UC B]
[West Bay Bonus Event the Localest] Launch Party for Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area, 7pm, City Lights Bookstore (SF Chinatown/North Beach). KQED Arts and Culture reporter Rae Alexandra and illustrator Adrienne Simms celebrate their new book from City Lights. Deeply researched profiles of the women who preceded us here reshape our understanding of this place we love. [City Lights]
The Rhapsody: Politics and the Road to Utopia, 7pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Featuring wonderful local Sri Lankan novelist Nayomi Munaweera (Island of a Thousand Mirrors), who, leads us in a search for Utopia! Hopefully not to be found in the cosmopolitan metropole of occultist fascism that the Modernists made. Rhapsody promises, "Sex, society, love, technology, politics, art, wealth, and God are just a few of the delicious Utopias we have on our radar." [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event the Internetest] Chronically Online: A PowerPoint Party with Close All Tabs, 7pm, The Commons at KQED (The Mission). Deeply online rabbit holing comes to life via the powerpoint (still on screen, but with people there too, talking to you too), thanks to the local podcast about internet culture Close All Tabs (never close all the tabs, are you kidding me, you save all the thousands of them in a bookmarking tool for the apocalypse, when you'll finally have time to read everything). Quiz at the end! [KQED]
David Dunaway's A Four-Eyed World, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood). David Dunaway presents his cultural history A Four-Eyed World: How Glasses Changed the Way We See, because as Ogden Nash wrote, "Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it, / But there comes a day when your eyes are all right but your arm isn't long enough to hold the telephone book where you can read it." [Mrs. Dalloway's]
Girl Renegades: Shoshana von Blanckensee and Chloe Sherman, 7pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). Novelist Shoshana von Blanckensee (Girls Girls Girls) and photographer Chloe Sherman (Renegades) talk about writing and photographing the West Bay in the '90s. Sherman was taking photos in the Mission as part of the art scene and queer cultural renaissance there, which is also the period when von Blanckensee's debut novel of lesbian runaways finding a home and community and a way to pay the rent in the West Bay takes place. Scenes from the underground, squared. [eventbrite]
The Trip, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Schlock auteur Roger Corman directs a Jack Nicholson script in this 1967 psychedelic cult fave, with Peter Fonda starring and doing a funny bit with a washing machine. In his memoir, Corman reports that the cast and crew went to Big Sur and dropped acid together while his story editor and assistant, Frances Doel, took notes. At one point—so the story goes—Corman decided to like face down on the ground, whereupon he received a vision of an entirely new art form, one that would be transmitted through the earth, with the audience absorbing the work by likewise lying face down on the ground. It could work, the B-movie mogul insists in his book: "I think of all the costs you could cut in production and distribution alone." Preceded by The Psychedelic Experience, a short from 1965, featuring music by Ravi Shankar and a voiceover by the inevitable Timothy Leary. [BAMPFA]
[West Bay Bonus Event the Novelistest] Álvaro Enrigue: Now I Surrender, 7:30pm, The Booksmith (The Haight). Oh, we're getting into the HOT part of the spring season of book releases! Álvaro Enrigue and Ingrid Rojas Contreras are lighting up the West Bay by discussing Enrigue's Now I Surrender (translated by Natasha Wimmer, who is so very good). SO, his last novel is a hallucinatory, hilarious, historical chronicle of the final 24 hours of Tenochtitlan even as Cortes begins to destroy it, and one of the best things I've read in years. And look! He's followed up on his ex-wife's widely-acclaimed book about going to Apache territory now with his novel about Apache territory then. Read it for the style and to imagine the behind the scenes drama. [The Booksmith]
Also: Sumud Behind Bars: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Everyday Resistance at Center for Middle Eastern Studies (Cal) / Lecture: The Interpreter of Desires: Iranian Cinema with Psychoanalysis at Stephens Hall (Cal) / Connecting Past, Present and Future through CHamoru Body Ornamentation at MLK Jr. Student Union (Cal)
Friday, March 6
Pinecones and Portals Presents: March Campfire Stories, 4:30pm, Mariposa Gardens (Bushrod). Juliana Frick brings to life The Snow Queen. In the old folk tale, Gerda’s devotion to her Kai inspires creativity and courage, and the girl rescues the boy, and there's musical accompaniment! [humanitix]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Alley Poems, 4:45ish pm, Kerouac Alley (North Beach). Sit around a table (or stand if they’re all taken) and read poems, yours or others’, to start off a first Friday traipsing around North Beach to find all the poets. Come say hi to Marthine, who is hosting. [insta]
C-Y Chia & Shane Stanbridge present the Lion Dance Cookbook, 5:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda). No snacks this time, but hear about the kickstarter-funded cookbook by a great crew of Oakland culinary creators who genuinely made me happy to eat vegan food. They're moving out of the US, but you can keep cooking their spicy, delicious meals, if you follow the recipes. [eventbrite]
Launch of Liquid Tachyon Temples by Khalifa Mitchell, 6 pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Cherry Pie Press is a LGBTQ poetry press, Mitchell is the following according to their instagram profile: “Writer. Poet. Screenwriter. Novelist. Essayist. Articleist. Polyreligious. McLovin. Angel. Demon. Flower.” [Nomadic]
[West Bay Bonus Event Continuation] ZYZZYVA 131 Issue Release Party, 6pm, Golden Sardine (North Beach). After the alley, cross the street to hear readings from poets featured in Zyzzyva issue 131: Brian Ang who is interested in everything, and for whom each line is a poem unto itself), Nica Giromini ("All day the day / sprawled in / this spot."), and the North Bay burst of pure poetic fervor known as Kelly Gray ("Hello grief. Hello Sally / Does anyone name their child Sally anymore?") [insta]
Poetry! 6:30pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Last Friday the Poetry! vibes were HOT. This week, the weather is cooler and the poets are much younger: Anjali Emsellem, Kayla Ephros, Simone Zapata – it’s a showcase of emerging voices tonight, followed by a dance party until 2 AM, because the youth can stay out late. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event Again] Kitchen Table Show, 7pm, Nosh Box (SOMA). Three readers: Tongo Eisen-Martin (former West Bay poet laureate), Kiley McLaughlin (poet and fiction writer, "charade-ing in the pop up store grasping till it’s handsy, tell it momma"), Daniel Lavery (novelist, coyote, back in the East Bay!). With snacks. [insta]
An Evening With Rebecca Solnit, 7pm, St. John's Presbyterian Church (Elmwood). The event planners at Mrs. Dalloway's wisely decided that a larger venue was necessary to host the country's leading essayist. Solnit's new book is a sequel to Hope in the Dark, a now-canonical pep talk to radicals bewildered by the seemingly insurmountable headwinds of Bush-era jingoism. In The Beginning Comes After The End, Solnit doesn't mince her words: she wants us to steel ourselves for the end of our present civilization and the dawn of something new and unfamiliar. [Mrs. Dalloway's]
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Sirkmaxxing in '70s Germany. This is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's riff on All That Heaven Allows, with a relationship between a sexagenarian ex-Nazi cleaning woman and a Moroccan migrant worker replacing the cross-class romance of the Douglas Sirk tearjerker. An enormously affecting film, from one of the most misanthropic directors the movies have ever known. That's the real love-against-all-odds story here: the one about Fassbinder, hater par excellence, finding a way to love his unlikely lovers. [BAMPFA]
Gravitational Lensing returns with Program 13: Memory, Archives & Reclaiming History, 7pm, Shapeshifters Cinema (Oakland). This is part of a series focused on women and nonbinary filmmakers -- the experimental and art films gathered under the banner here look back, look in, look askew at history and memory. Click through for all the movies. [Shapeshifters Cinema]
The Fever, by Wallace Shawn, 11pm, Clio's Books (The Lake). “My feelings! My thoughts! The incredible history of my feelings and my thoughts could fill up a dozen leather-bound books. But the story of my life—my behavior, my actions—now that’s a slim little paperback, and I’ve never read it.” Over thirty five years after its initial debut, the moral anguish of Wallace Shawn's The Fever feels more relevant than ever. Don't take my word for it: Shawn himself, now an octogenarian, starred in a furious New York revival of the play just last month. This production at Clio's stars Benoît Monin, a regular sight on East Bay stages (and a Stanford psychology professor, a sin that the ORB editorial board has magnanimously chosen to forgive). [eventbrite]
Saturday, March 7
Miyawaki Forest Planting in South Berkeley, 9 AM, Corner of Adeline St. and MLK Jr. Way (Berkeley). “Note: this event will take place at the same time as another City-hosted tree planting event at San Pablo Park.” Careful out there, don’t get confused about where you’re putting roots down. [City of Berkeley]
Bonsai Mammoth Auction & Sale Fundraiser, 9am, Lakeside Park Garden Center (The Lake). Donate all your tiny tree related materials in the morning and the auction starts in the afternoon. Runs both days of the weekend to support the littlest tiny tree museum in Oakland. Are there coastal live oak bonsai?? [GSBF Bonsai Garden at Lake Merritt]
Ivy Harvest Day, 10am, Dimond Canyon El Centro trailhead (Sausal Creek Watershed). The plants are big here. Come out and pull out ivy that drapes the oaks and bays and blocks native plants from growing along Sausal Creek with neighbors and artists and other volunteers. Vines and leaves will be used to make baskets and paper at a later date! You're only invited to the weaving if you've done the pulling. [Sausal Creek Artist Collaborative]
Know Your Rights Community Meeting, 11am, East Oakland Nursery (Deep East). East Oakland residents: come to the Planting Justice nursery for a Know Your Rights Community Meeting. Rights. We still have them. [Planting Justice]
Alameda Readers Group, 11am, Main Library (The Island That Used to Be a Peninsula). If you've only read the cartoons in recent New Yorkers, here's some motivation to read and discuss the big articles and stories from December's issues. Someday you will catch up to the present (no, that’s a lie, unread New Yorkers will haunt me forever like my cache of tabs). [Alameda Free Library]
The Memory Collector Pop-Up, 11am, Couchdate (Temescal). Support Palestinian artists by purchasing framed prints and embroidery curated by a local Oakland artist. 100% of proceeds go to Gaza. [@the_memorycollector]
Red Lightning Woman Power, 12 noon, North Branch (Berkeley). Gather to listen to local Indigenous women sing songs of healing, renewal, and connection. Their voices together and your open heart and ears will create ceremony in the library for all. [Friends of the Berkeley Public Library]
Holi Festival of Colors, 1pm, 7th West (West Oakland). Non Stop Bhangra hosts the North Indian color festival all afternoon -- wear white, and bring a good throwing arm, your dancing feet, and an appetite for chaat. [eventbrite]
AAMLO Family & Kids Club: Celebrating Women's History Month, 1pm, African American Museum and Library (Old Oakland). stories, arts, and short films for all the kids and their grownups. Firebird by ballerina Misty Copeland is the featured book and children's author Zarren Jeri Malik will be present to share his book, I Am a Star to Momma's Moon. [OPL]
A Breath of Life to Our Seeds of Resistance Opening Reception, 1pm, EastSide Arts Alliance (San Antonio). Celebrate 50 years of Bay Area muralista, mask-maker, and culture-holder Xochitl Nevel Guerrero’s art, teaching, and community spirit, and her newest work, a commission taking place in the center of the exhibition, including a painted labyrinth to walk and think in. [EastSide Arts Alliance]
Diarios de motocicleta, 2:00 pm, New Parkway (Uptown). Spanish-speaking Saturday mixer! Speak Spanish with whoever shows up and then watch a great movie about a man so Argentine everybody called him Che, played by the only Mexican quite dreamy enough to capture his whole thing. A good movie about the road trip across South America that made him a communist, and, like all of the Che books that Seven Stories publishes, it’s a lot more worth reading than a dorm room poster might lead you to imagine. [parkway]
Sinners, 2pm, Tarea Hall Pittman South Branch BPL (Berkeley). If you didn't make it over to Grand Lake Theatre for the final bonus screening on Tuesday, you've got one last chance to revel in the most Oscar nominated movie ever made on a biggish screen. [BPL]
Xu Fangfang's Presentation about her father, artist Xu Beihong, 2:30pm, Asian Branch OPL (Chinatown). Xu Beihong's ink paintings of horses in dynamic, wheeling motion crowned him as the father of modern Chinese painting. Xu Fangfang, the artist's daughter, will discuss her personal family history Galloping Horses: Artist Xu Beihong and His Family in Mao’s China, and how they came through the political upheaval of midcentury China. Welcome the Fire Horse with art, history, and books about both! [OPL]
Penny Cooper and Rena Rosenwasser in Conversation with Catherine Wagner and Margot Norton, 3pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Makes it into the ORBit because Rosenwasser is cofounder of the local feminist publishing house Kelsey Street Press and BAMPFA’s description name-dropped Cecilia Vicuña, whose visual poetics never stop sparking delight and fascination. [BAMPFA]
In Praise of Addiction, 4pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). Come back for more of Roberts on harm reduction and becoming shameless (positive). [eventbrite]
Monetized Happiness: A Poetry Reading by Keith Gaboury, 5 pm Nomadic Books (Uptown). Gaboury’s book is “a poetry collection that shows economic disparity, homelessness, parenthood, and urban living” in the Bay. Local poets performing supportively are: J.R. Rice, Tino V. H. Jr., Reggie Edmonds-Vasquez (forthcoming book from Foglifter), Esperanza Cabrale, and K.R. Morrison. [Nomadic Bookshop]
Black Reelness presents: Dirty Laundry 5pm, 2727 California (Berkeley). Drag, bottomless mimosas, trivia, and showing up for the culture, presented by The Barony of Northern California association with The Court of Many Colors, Equity & Inclusion. [The Barony of Northern California]
MYSTERY TRAIN: 50th Anniversary Celebration: Greil Marcus with Daveed Diggs, 6:30pm, Oakstop - California Ballroom (Downtown). The Bay Area Book Festival presents music critic Greil Marcus and Oakland's own personal Daveed Diggs talk together to celebrate the 50th-anniversary of Bruce Springsteen's favorite music book, Marcus's Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music [Bay Area Book Festival]
Embrace of the Serpent, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). If you loved reading Sarah Miller on ayahuasca, go watch this adventure drama about an Amazonian shaman and Ishi-esque lone survivor who assists two scientists searching for the (fictional) rare yakruna plant. Explore the Amazon and questions about plant knowledge and colonialism in black and white. [BAMPFA]
Also: Black Leaders Listening Session at Pilgrim Christian Church (Castro Valley) / Growing Mushrooms with Pollinate Farm at Main Library (The Lake-ish)
Sunday, March 8
International Working Women’s Day March and Rally, 11am, The Pergola at Lake Merritt (The Lake). Join Sogorea Te' Land Trust, starting at the Pergola at Lake Merritt in Huchiun (aka Oakland), and wear whatever hat you've knitted this time. [Insta]
Opening Reception for The Waiting Room, 12 noon, Dream Farm Commons (Downtown). Cassie Thornton leads a ritual and gives a weather report about the two dimensions currently operating at once: the one where we do normal things like order coffee and clock in at work and the bloody insane one where children are smithereened and February Fridays are sweaty like September. This ritual will open the waiting room, where sitting around, sans phones, might allow us to actually process rather than avoid the somatic discomforts of crisis. I listened in on Thornton in conversation at Dream Farm last week and damn if she isn't doing some art as world reimagining work. [The Waiting Room]
The Amazing Bubble Man, 2pm, Rhythmix Cultural Works (Alameda East End). Berkeley has produced a surprising number of bubble-oriented counterculture celebrities. There's the hippie clown Wavy Gravy and poet laureate of People's Park Julia Vinograd, but the real Pope of Soap (and probably the only one who has performed for the Sultan of Brunei) is Louis Pearl, a.k.a. The Amazing Bubble Man. Make sure to catch his act in Alameda before he finally pops. [Rhythmix Cultural Works]
She Dared to Dream: Ayanna Pressley, 2pm, Grand Lake Theatre (The Lake). Walk the red carpet as part of the Indie Night Film Festival to connect with the local filmmaking community, watch the movie, and enjoy a post-screening Q&A with filmmakers. [Ticket Tailor]
Hop Fight Book Party, 3pm, 5303 Claremont Ave (Shafter). Over-funded on Kickstarter backers, reviewed by ORB, the long wait for the second edition of Frank T. Marquardt's Hop Fight: The Authoritative Guide to the Drunken Sport Even a Child Can Play is over! The party will have, we're promised, "sanctioned hop fight demonstrations, a reading from the book, and door prizes for attendees in good standing [on one foot, we assume, with excellent balance." [eventbrite]
The Merchant of Four Seasons, 4pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Fassbinder and the average Hans, Germany and Germans in the fifties being bad. This is one of the movies that really made his reputation, about a fruitseller who kills himself and the movie is like “yep.” Don’t be a cop; don’t join the foreign legion, don’t be an average Hans. [BAMPFA]
Moving Party, 5pm, Real Time & Space (Chinatown). Just in time for their 15th anniversary, Real Time & Space is saying farewell to their Chinatown studio spaces. Join their final party before they move to new pastures with experimental artist talks, pizza, and dancing. [Real Time & Space]
Baada Ya Masika / After the Long Rains, 6:30pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Kicking off BAMPFA’s annual African Film Festival with this coming-of-age piece from Kenya, brush up on your Kiswahili or just take it in and read the subtitles. [BAMPFA]
Anti-ICE Supper Club: Afro-Latin Celebration, 7pm, Sobre Mesa (Downtown). The first of a series of fundraising dinners in defense of immigrant communities, tonight celebrating Afro-Latin and Caribbean culture. Net proceeds benefit Bay Resistance, because we know immigrants bring the spice, and Fuck ICE. [insta]
