Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, May 19–May 24

It’s a Boots Riley kind of week in Oakland! The New Parkway is providing Sorry to Bother You for the Baby Brigade on Thursday afternoon and then I Love Boosters takes over at 9 that night and doesn't let up. There are NO MOVIES at BAMPFA: they finally ended their Fassbender. Instead, The Lunchbox has opened at Berkeley Rep (sounds musical and delicious), the 5th Annual Lake Merritt Dog Contest is open for voting (get on it), and a play featuring mushrooms, redwoods, and an occasional human is happening in the West Bay for only one last weekend. The wind yesterday blew any last thoughts of winter away, dried up our flower gardens, straightened my hair, and accelerated at least one fire. Rehydrate with ORB at our Happy Hour on Wednesday. —MS, XL, AB

PS! Our subscription campaign is getting tantalizingly close to being over, thank goodness, which means A. We almost have enough Founding Members (250) for what we've decided is Minimally Sustainable ORBing (MSO), but also B. We don't, quite, yet (only 225). Want to help us get there, so we can stop badgering you about it? HERE IS HOW. And if it sweetens the pot any, we're giving Official ORB Tote Bags (OOTB) to everyone who subscribes at the “Mutual Defense and Support” tier ($15/150) during this campign (if you're in the East Bay, we'll probably even hand-deliver it.)

Tuesday, May 19

[West Bay Bonus Event] Water as Currency: Hughen/Starkweather in conversation with Joshua-Michéle Ross, 5pm, Mining Exchange Museum (FiDi). Spend time with art that flows from our Bay, literally made art with the waters and minerals of the San Francisco Bay Delta Estuary, as well as its sounds and histories of extraction. Beautiful, haunting, place-based, and resonant -- I visited the installation last week, but seeing it with the artists will be better because they will share the research and context from which the beauty they have created emerges. [insta]

A Taste of the Land: Stories & Realities of Farming, 6pm, Book Society (Elmwood). Cheese, wine, and love on a goat farm. Jennifer Acker, editor of the Amherst-based lit journal The Common, talks about Surrender, her new novel of rural reality, with local ag experts Andy Naja-Riese and Tamara Hicks. Ask Andy about farmworker housing in Marin: that should get the room a little warm. [Book Society]

Ikebana with Keiko Kubo, 6pm, Albany Library (Far North Oakland). An episode of the Albany Reads program bringing community together around The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest by Satsuki Ina, this time with flowers! Learn ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, with Keiko Kubo. Learn how to notice seasonal, natural forms, and address intergenerational trauma. [Albany Library]

Andreja Novakovic on Chantal Akerman, 6:30pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). Andreja Novakovic wrote a book about Chantal Akerman, and I bet she’s gonna talk about Chatal Akerman. Be warned, you cannot be sure that you won’t hear the word “Hegel.” [eventbright]

Eva Des Lauriers' I'M GONNA GET YOU BACK Launch Event, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's (Elmwood). Oakland author Eva Des Lauriers presents her newest YA novel about two exes and a lot of gossip shared anonymously online. Which reminds me: Send us your most scandalous blind items right now and this week's sixth sense theme can include all the bad vibes you've picked up around town. [Mrs. Dalloway's ]

More Newsreel!, 7:30pm, Bathers (Coolest Block on Telegraph). The newsreel series continues, with a pair of documentary films from Cuba and director Santiago Alvarez: Isle of Youth (1969) “that shows young Cubans helping to build new communist realities” and 79 Primaveras (1969), about Ho Chi Minh and how he beat the Yankees. [insta]

Also: Individual Poetry Writing Workshops at Central Library (Downtown Berkeley) / Creative Writing Space at West Branch BPL (San Pablo Corridor) / Oakland Youth Filmmakers Take Over Grand Lake Theater for YouthBeat’s 15th Annual Showcase at Grand Lake Theater (The Lake) / VotingMatters: Discussing the Primaries at JFK Library (Vallejo) / KISS AND TELL LITERARY SALON BOOK CLUB with Angela Montoya and Kristen Alicia at Books Inc. Alameda (Used to Be a Peninsula) / Queer Women in Nazi Germany at Clio’s Books (The Lake)

Wednesday, May 20

***ORB Monthly Happy Hour,*** 4pm, Heart & Dagger (The Lake). We alternate between craft beer and dive bars because like Oakland, we contain multitudes. (Hearts AND Daggers? In THIS economy?) [ORB \O/ ORB]

RUSH MOVIE PREMIERE, 4pm, Grand Lake Theatre (The Lake). The West Bay's Cryssy Cola made a movie with fellow local rappers Wink, Gbo Lean, Southside Su & Wak Bandz about "hitting licks, bippin', chasing fast money and the street beef that comes with it." There's a quiet showing at 4 pm for those staying under the radar, and a red carpet strut and main showing at 7pm, so you can always walk over after the ORB Happy Hour to check it out. [eventbrite]

How Flowers Made Our World: David Haskell in conversation with Alexis Madrigal, 5pm, Redwood Grove Amphitheater (Strawberry Canyon). Haskell wants you to discover the awe inside flowers and their millions of years of evolution, and each attendee will get a flower to deeply contemplate while listening to the conversation. Hear about marigolds and magnolias and mariposa lilies, beetles and birds and bees, and evolution and metamorphosis and molting of all kinds. [UCB]

Building Disaster-Resilient Communities with Kate Rose Weiner and Kailea Rose Loften, 5:30pm, Nomadic Books (Uptown). In the polycrisis, Kate Rose Weiner and Kailea Rose Loften began collaborating on what would become Compassion in Crisis: Building Disaster-Resilient Communities, a multi-vocal guide to navigating catastrophes guided by values of mutual aid and communal care. In this program, they're joined by contributor Nicole Huguenin and Counterstream's Shilpi Chhotray for a heart-centered exploration of how we can show up for ourselves and each other in the face of crisis. For activists, organizers, and good neighbors everywhere, this is a conversation about reclaiming the "prepper" label from the bunker builders, and understanding that holistic care and community resilience are the real ways to prepare for what we face during fire, flood, and other coming disasters. [Nomadic Bookshop]

AMANDA RIZKALLA, Hungered, 6pm, Books Inc. (Alameda). Amanda Rizkalla reads and signs her debut novel, Hungered, in which a young girl yearns for stability while her mother frantically tries to keep them safe without a home to call their own. In conversation with Susanns Kwan, whose Awake in the Floating City also turns on the loss of home, though to climactic instability, not economic. [eventbrite]

Writing the Liminal Body, 6pm, Local Economy (Almost in College Ave). More molting, more metamorphosis. We’re bags of chemicals that make thoughts gyrate and emotions course, sometimes out of all proportion to the world. Now: write about it with Ali Lawrence! For middle-aged moms, in particular. [luma]

The Student Lens: Reporting Inside Oakland Schools, 6pm, The New Parkway Theater (Uptown). Ace schools reporter Ashley McBride moderates a conversation with high school journalists who’ve been covering their campuses for the Oaklandside from the inside. Some credentialed grownups will do some talking, as well, no doubt in the Peanuts wah-wah voice, but the kids are the main event here. [eventbrite]

Erica Pool’s The Judgment Trap: Why We Judge, How It Hurts Us, and How to Break Free, 6:30pm, Rockridge Branch OPL (Formerly Known As Shafter). Join one of the authors of The Judgement Trap and learn to practice radical nonjudgment, “awareness and acceptance of what is.” Share, but compassionately, with the judgiest person you know in the neighborhood, who definitely doesn’t want anyone looking too closely at their life. [Oakland Public Library]

Celebrate Clare Cooper Marcus, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Literary & Garden Arts (Elmwood). Honoring Clare Cooper Marcus with her close friends and collaborators by commemorating her posthumous memoir from New Village Press about a life making gardens in Berkeley: Groundbreaking. [Mrs. Dalloway's]

Also: Black Authors Book Club at West Oakland Branch (De Fremery) / Voting Matters: California Primary Voter Guide Live with CalMatters at KALW (FiDi) / Rooted as Resistance presented by the Writer's Grotto at Medicine for Nightmares (The Mission) / Lebanese Dance, Rhythm, and Community at Middle East Market & Café (San Pablo Corridor)

Thursday, May 21

Poetry Ancestors, 6pm, THE WORKSHOP (Grand Lake). A generative writing workshop led by Lyn and Dorean that invites you into poetry as ritual, remembrance, and inheritance. There will be plants and altars! [eventbrite]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Emily LaBarge & Nicholas Gamso launch DOG DAYS, 6pm, Fraenkel Gallery (Union Square). Transit Books’ new one, Emily LaBarge’s Dog Days, “an electrifying synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory” but also the story about how trauma doesn’t interrupt the impulse to narrate but pours gasoline on it. I’ve been saying that it’s the book to read if you know that The Body Keeps the Score low-key sucks, and mostly benefits from a very good title and a dearth of better books about trauma. This is a better book about trauma. [luma]

The Curse of Hester Gardens, 6pm, Books Inc, Alameda (The Island). Tamika Thompson will chat with Audrey T Williams about her new novel, which is “We Need to Talk about Kevin as if written by Jason Reynolds and Tananarive Due meets Model Home by Rivers Solomon in an innovative twist on the haunted house novel,” and someone needs to get agents under control, the comp-speech is getting ridiculous. Kinda sounds like a good novel, though. [eventbrite]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Larry Sultan, Water Over Thunder, 6pm, SFMOMA (SoMa). Filmmakers, writers, Larry Sultan’s former colleagues and students for an evening marking the publication of a new collection of materials drawn from his archives. [SFMOMA]

I Cannot Submit to Injustices: Collected Works of Martin Sostre, 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Couldn’t find any details about this, keeping it mysterious. Good bet it’s an “event” about “books,” probably even this one. [no details, go down to Tamarack and be like “what’s up”]

Black Rio! Black Power!, 6:30pm, Oakstop (Downtown). Documentary on the Black Rio movement’s impact had on music, culture, and struggles for racial justice in Brazil in the 70s, the result of over 10 years of in-depth research. Watch the trailer to know you want to hear this. Subtitles for the words, none necessary for the rhythms. [Sarah Webster Fabio Center for Social Justice]

Ayelet Waldman's A Perfect Hand, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (The Berkeleyest). First new novel from local author and former public defense attorney Ayelet Waldman since she took drugs, let's see if it's a good one. ORB are fans of her 2003 novel Daughter's Keeper, which we started reading expecting it to suck and then actually it kind of nailed some stuff about Berkeley and its relationship to Fruitvale and also how ACAB, which, kudos to you Ayelet in 2003. Anyway, this is a "novel of love and subterfuge set in nineteenth-century England," and, sure, why not. Ayelet Waldman's husband will be in conversation with her. [Mrs. Dalloway's]

Also: The Arochukwu Renaissance: Towards Holistic Renewal, Enlightenment, and Global Service at Wu Performance Hall (Cal) / Poetry Circle at Claremont Branch (Berkeley) / Radicals, Realists, and Repression: The State of Activism in the U.S. at The Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists (Berkeley) / Thabyay: Creative Resistance in Myanmar (with Filmmaker Q&A) at 4 Star (The Richmond District) / QTBIPOC Book Club Reads Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi at Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown)

Friday, May 22

Black Life: Bloom as Miracle, 3pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). What happens when two performance artists—identities unknown to each other as well as to the audience until the day of the show—suddenly collide? This improvisational performance is the third installment of the yearlong series AS LONG AS THERE ARE CATASTROPHES, THERE WILL BE MIRACLES, organized by Black Life Guest Curator Gabriele Christian. [BAMPFA]

Poetry! 6:00, Tamarack (Downtown). At the mic, trying to rise to the bar that Pauline set last week, are poets Gabrielle Daniels (This Bridge Called My Back contributor!! Who remembers, “I was going to California / where Disneyland was only a block away / from San Francisco”), Ivy Johnson (Oakland writer operating between genres and websites) & Oki Sogumi (“And we may hold hands with people we disagree with, but are with us in that definitive hour, that’s important too”). [Tamarack Weekly Reading Series Schedule]

DONNA SUMMER BOOK CLUB: Don Sainte-Johnn, 6:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda). The Donna Summer Book Club hosts Don Sainte-Johnn, longtime DJ on the Bay's old favorite station KFRC, sharing his memoir: San Francisco's Last Top 40 Disc Jockey. The man with a name made for radio talks about what it was like to work as a Top 40 DJ as the industry slowly consolidated and squeezed out personality and local control. [eventbrite]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Zyzzyva in the Poetry Loft, 7pm, Golden Sardine (North Beach). Issue 132 release party! This issue features Kevin Cantwell, Geraldine Jorge, Jonathon Keats, Caroline Kessler, and Noelani Piters, so probably at least some of them will show up at the mic. [insta]

In Transit Vol. 2, 7:30pm, Bathers Library (Telegraphic). Poetry! Tiff Dressen (Of Mineral published by Nightboat Books, lives in Oakland), Alex Mattraw (poet and host of Lone Glen, fifteen-yearlong reading series in Berkeley), Adam Stutz (from LA, says, "just keep lighting me up/while we sweat the heavy yellow light of the afternoon/it is lovely"), jimmy vega (who lives and dies in LA and writes poems there too), and Proust-fiend Kelly Egan. [insta]

The House of Bernarda Alba, 7:30pm, Omni Commons (Temescal). A play by Federico García Lorca, adapted by Chay Yew, and directed by Michael Socrates Moran. Matriarch, eight-year mourning, repression, jealousy, tragic climax, things of that nature. [Oakland Theater Project]

Also: Hilando Resistencia/Threading Resistance Art Exhibit at Rockridge Branch OPL (Sparkling Shafter) / Chinese Calligraphy Workshop with Ms. Chanel (Zhaohui) Huang at Asian Branch OPL (Chinatown) / Dim Sum Craft with Picture Book Illustrator Eugenia Yoh at Central Library (Downtown Berkeley) / East Bay Queer Open Mic at Shotgun Studios (Berkeley) / Cats at Julia Morgan Theater (Berkeley) / Setting the Table at Oakland Bloom Open Test Kitchen (Downtown) / Apus雨燕 Vol. 02: Symbiosis, 共生 book launch at Now Place (West Bay).

Saturday, May 23

Port Costa Town-Wide Yard Sale All Day, 9am, Port Costa (The Port Costa part of Port Costa). If you've been to Port Costa, you'll read this and be like “ok that sounds like a mildly weird and interesting thing to do with the day" and might even contemplate doing so while refreshed with chemical substances. If you haven't been to Port Costa, discover Port Costa on specifically this day. [Port Costa]

Family Story Time with Special Guests--Pigeons!, 10:30am, Central Library (Downtown Berkeley). Usually there's just picture books and maybe some puppets at story time, but this time there's birds inside the building, on purpose. Mo Willems started something no one can put back in the box now. [BPL]

Vietnamese Coffee, 11am, North Branch BPL (North Berkeley). Are we gearing up for a Great Coffee Off between the originators of coffee and the improvers of it? You've tried Yemeni coffee, now take a workshop on Vietnamese coffee with Vina Vo, and choose your fighter. [BPL]

The Spill Session, 11am, Cafe con carino (Old Oakland). Talk through life over a free cup of coffee, sharing your thoughts on a whole host of topics you can pick and choose from the host's supply. Share time, space, minds, and hearts to expand and deepen your community. [insta]

Community Conversations for BIPOC: building intimacy and understanding through conflict, 12 noon, Moments Cooperative & Community Space (Downtown). Committed community builders call in, come through, and deal with difficult conversations because we all can harm and heal. If you come with values of liberation, non-disposability, non-hierarchy, and care, you will actually forge the bonds we all crave, in trust that everyone will hold each other and keep each other safe. [insta]

The Movement Book Club, 1pm, North Branch BPL (North Berkeley). Come together to discuss Year of the Tiger by Alice Wong and get really intersectional with the life story of the recently lost Bay Area disability rights activist. Adults and teens can join the discussion, and kids can come and do an activity while they learn by osmosis. [BPL]

Chinatown Records: Music, Memory, and Community, 2:30pm, Asian Branch OPL (Chinatown). Chinatown Records 華埠錄音 and Bay Area–raised DJ yiuyiu are back to share community archives and invite anyone from Chinatown communities to contribute stories and musical memories. [OPL]

The Music of the Word/ La Palabra Musical, 3pm, César E. Chávez Branch (Fruitvale). Words and music once a month! Today with poets Susana Praver-Pérez ("My gaze traces the corrugated bark of a palm tree / towering above the Fruitvale BART."), Joe Navarro (poeta bilingue), Nazelah Jamison (she probably won't read "vanity" in front of the librarians but we live in hope) and Abdul Kenyatta ("an old-school poet from Harlem"). Bring your maracas and congas and words too for the open mic. [OPL]

They Called Us Enemy discussion, 3pm, Dublin Library (Hot Side of the Hills). More ways to wrestle with our history of scapegoating neighbors thanks to local libraries (should El Cerrito get a new one? (un)debatable) even while the feds take down park signage that might suggest Americans did something wrong once. Read George Takei's graphic novel They Called Us Enemy to remember, talk about it with your neighbors. [Alameda County Library]

[West Bay Bonus Event] SUN RA CELEBRATION: Sun Ra: Do the Impossible (plus Q&A with Director Christine Turner), 4:45pm, 4 Star (Richmond the West Bay Neighborhood). Once when I was hitchhiking through rural Sonoma County in 2009, I was picked up by a man in a prehistoric-looking Chevy pickup who introduced himself as Sun Ra. "Wait, like the jazz musician," I asked? "No, not like the jazz musician, I am Sun Ra," he said, offering me a spliff. "I died in 1993, but I have been resurrected." My point is, I can now say from experience that Sun Ra is a great guy (if perhaps a mediocre driver) and you should catch this special documentary screening about his life (and afterlife). Director Christine Turner will be in attendance for Q&A after the film. [4 Star]

Sip & Stir Perfume Workshop, 6:30pm, Fillgood (Solano Ave). Make your version of the Oakland perfume: will you include a whiff of the EBMUD funk, a sharpness of crushed redwood needles, the burnt rubber of sideshows, and the smoke of barbecue at the lake, or maybe your Oakland has another set of smells entirely. [insta]

Adam Mansbach's Go the Fuck to College, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's (Elmwood). Berkeley novelist and humor writer Adam Mansbach will be speaking at Mrs. Dalloway's with Peggy Orenstein to discuss Go the Fuck To College, the latest installment in his wildly successful Go The Fuck literary universe. How does this book all fit into the recent discourse about Mac Barnett and who children's books are actually for? You'll have to go the fuck to Mrs. Dalloway's and ask Adam yourself. [Mrs. Dalloway's]

Continuity, 7pm, Shotgun Players (Berkeley). One of those meta-things, where it’s theater about people making a movie and real life bleeds into it: all set on a Hollywood soundstage where director tries to hold it together and, uh, fix the climate catastrophe? I expected from the description that it would be a satire of Don’t Look Up, but the first reviews are from 2019.  [Shotgun Players]

Also: Memorial Day Weekend Sale - 20% Off All Used Books at Pegasus Bookstores (Oakland & Berkeley) / California Writers Club at Rockridge Branch OPL (Rockridge) / Hands-on Fix A Flat with Bike East Bay at César E. Chávez Branch (Fruitvale) / Neighbor-to-Neighbor: Thriving Solo at Local Economy (Rockridge) / Festival of Knowledge - Series 2 Rooted in Memory: Herbalism, Healing, & Black Culture at African American Museum and Library (Old Oakland) / A KPFA 77th Birthday Celebration with the John Santos Sextet at La Pena Cultural Center (Berkeley)

Sunday, May 24

Ericka Hart’s Nasty Work, 1pm, 2406 Webster St (KONO). Ericka Hart on their book, Nasty Work, about the 400-year-old inherited thoughts and belief systems we use in the twenty-first century to think about sex. A Black, queer, non-binary, disabled femme, Ericka Hart believes that sex ed done right can actually be a tool for liberation. [Marcus Books]

Xochitl Nevel Guerrero: walking with ancestors Poetry Chapbook Release Party, 2pm, EastSide Arts Alliance (Deep East). Celebrate an artist who has made the Bay's buildings into an art gallery and filled them up with poetry too. [ESAA]

Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, 6pm, Moments Co-op (Downtown). Documentary on the instrumental role Ella Baker played in shaping the American civil rights movement. [Moments Co-op]

Also: Mindfulness Meditation for Habit Change at Local Economy (Also Formerly Known as The Chimes District) / Bike Share 101 Workshop at Main Library (The Lake-ish) / Work Tempo: moving & writing workshop at Winslow House (Oakland Part of Vallejo).