Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, October 26–November 1
The smoke from last week’s fire in the hills still caught in my nose and the roof of my mouth as I posted up flyers for ORB’s voter guide the other day to inform dogs and their walkers and this weekend’s trick-or-treaters (get ’em young) about the only right way to cast their ballots. This is the most perfect time for a fire, now in the shortening, dampened days of fall, right when this land has always known fire, just right for clearing out the dead thatch to let the coming green growth catch onto the coming rains. Every disturbance reveals the seeds that were deep in the bank, waiting to turn their faces toward yours, and the soil has only become richer with the char. Hand out packets of poppy seeds and lupine at Halloween to disappoint neighbor children. Plant pacific asters wherever you can so you’ll have their purple-fringed sun-buttons to look at next summer. We have gotten just a taste of the rains that always fall at night in California, the clouds are turning that wintery pink every dawn and twilight, now we’re all just waiting for the more, the more we know will be coming down hard and heavy this winter. So we head indoors: There’s a new Martin McDonagh at Grand Lake Theatre, The New Parkway is thoroughly committed to spooky movies and there will surely be many costumes on Halloween featuring the wicker pasties they gave out this week! Sing along with a musical about the West Bay’s Harlem of the West at ACT for another week or so, and that’s about how long Eli’s will still be open (they’re still fighting permitting sludge and are committed to hosting a Dolly-themed Halloween, so keep clapping to keep the club’s light glowing). If you’ve got young folks in East Oakland who want to make poems and art and make money at the same time, they have until 11/4 to apply for a brief internship with Planting Justice. The Oakland libraries and probably all the other ones too are marigolding and monarching and sugar skulling for Dia de los Muertos, and there’s a road show towing fiction writer Erika Krouse all around the outer Oakland neighborhoods of Berkeley, Moraga, and Orinda. Puppets are still getting their strings yanked in Oakland of course (of course!), and while the wave of autumnal events has crested, the East Bay never slows all the way down and never will, there’s no stopping us: the moon got full and so did we, one large orb, glowing for each other.—MS, XL, TC
\O/
Tuesday, October 27
Berkeley Writers at Work: Ken Goldberg, noon, Morrison Library (Cal). No robots, not even for art. Fuck off. [UC]
Fireside Chat with Congresswoman Lateefah Simon, 1pm, Berkeley Law (Cal). Cozy lunchtime at the probably metaphorical hearth with Congresswoman Lateefah Simon, who clearly is not at all worried about her seat or like, actually saving democracy if she’s chewing the fat with law students a week before the election. ORB endorses her and points out the hella Bay Area progressive v progressive minutia of a divide, we can just get a whiff of in her deeply unserious opponent’s candidacy [UC]
Sideways Glances: The Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures at 25, 4pm, Townsend Center (Cal). Trans people have decided not to be negative anymore; one weekend symposium was enough of that. Now we’re back to imagining queer futurity, by looking backwards, sideways, forward with all the coy and meaningful glances. Real abundance is the plus sign in LGBTQ+ you know. [UC]
Catie Cuan // Physical AI: Giving AI a Robot Body, 5:30pm, Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation (Cal). No, we told you already. Fuck right off. [UC]
SOLD OUT A Court of Wine and Roses: ACOTAR Release Party, 6pm, Book Society (A Nightmare on Elmwood). Dress up as whichever fae flirt gets you all tingly and add yourself to the waitlist for the much panted after big romantasy release at the “white wine for white ladies” book store. [booksociety.social]
Fatimah Asghar and Hieu Minh Nguyen on Daughter of the Mountains, 6pm, Local Economy (RockyHorrorPictureRidge). Print out Kashmiri-Pakistani-American Fatimah Asghar’s “Microaggressions Bingo” card poem ahead of the Divali party you’re going to at the end of the week! If you show up for the live from Brooklyn-and-Instagram poet tonight, you might hear them say “My love / for nature is like my love for most things: / fickle & theoretical,” and other snappy lines. Chatting in queer Asian poet solidarity will be Oakland’s Hieu Minh Nguyen. Can’t make it in person? Buy both their books at EBB next door (Asghar’s is pubbed by OneWorld, part of Random House: poet jackpot) [luma]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Panel: Cities as Ancestors, 6pm, Main SFPL Library (Civic Center). Two books inspired this conversation today! Susanna Kwan’s meditative book about clinging to home despite it literally falling apart in a future flooded San Francisco, Awake in the Floating City, and the book that brings in Indigenous ideas of responsibility to build the world our children deserve, What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? We we inherit these places that are still haunted by the ghosts who push and pull on our lives, even as we remake them, and this conversation led by Yakuta Poonawalla with Barnali Ghosh (BART board member and co-leader of the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour), Tere Almaguer (urban farmer and environmental justice advocate), and Kieran Tran (electrification and housing support for APEN) invites everyone to think about loss and change, memory and how we incorporate both displacement and emplacement into our lives. [sfpl.org]
[West Bay Bonus Event Uno Mas] Tom Frank discusses The Creativity Con, 7pm, City Lights Bookstore (North by Northwest Beach). Founder of The Baffler and writer of lefty books Tom Frank comes to town to give us his material history of post-industrial knowledge work that created a whole class of highly paid people who are probably all your friends who put “innovator,” or “design-thinker” in their linkedin bio and go to networking meet-ups for “creatives.” We love a material analysis of culture and vice versa (if you want a quick overview of the knowledge worker and the cultural dominance of the creative class here in the Bay before diving into Frank’s book, read Marthine’s The Millions piece from 2014 because we have BEEN talking about this here [to be clear, her use of the Biz Stone autobiography here was entirely as a case of reading a book against itself: it is the worst memoir she’s ever read: it stops 3/4 of the way through and ends with an ongoing bullet point list because he obviously ran out of ideas before he hit word count]). Anyways, we agree, let’s turn “innovator” into the obvious insult that it already is. [city lights]
All the Tiny Beauties, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake Mungo). Oakland author and waitress Jenn Scott has a new novel from Acre Books about intergenerational friendship between women and men, genderbending selves and wardrobes, and ninety years in Oakland. [eventbrite]
Also: Nicholas Kristof : A Journalist’s Path to Leadership on Global Justice and Climate at Booth Auditorium (Cal) / Stagebridge Presents: Tell Your Story! at Montclair Branch (Montclairvoyance) / Becoming Leaderful: Building the Communities We Want at Oakland Asian Cultural Center (Chinatown) / Graphic Novel Group, with Rina Ayuyang at Rockridge Branch OPL (College Ave) / Grace Lavery: “Personal Demons” at Pegasus (Downtown Berkeley) / Matthew Aldrich’s “THE NATURAL ORDER” Book Launch And Signing at Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore (Elmwood)
Wednesday, October 28
Berkeley Book Chat with David Henkin: Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball, noon, Stephens Hall (Cal). The World Series is on so it’s still time for baseball, even if we lack a real team here in Oakland (the Ballers are like baseball the way that tofurkey is like a Butterball). David Henkin, who has examined the postal service, the week, and public reading in the city, turns his attention to the finest diamond. I learned last week that Republicans are strongly represented in MLB, more than in any other major league sports league, maybe the only bright spot of the A’s leaving town, but Henkins will dig much farther back into the politics, rituals, and racial shifts among baseball enthusiasts and players in the US and around the world (ok, probably just like the Caribbean and Japan). Alva Noë, who likes to think about brains and bodies, is in conversation. [UC]
Maps & More: Candy!, noon, Earth Sciences & Map Library (Caligula). Check out the maps and legacies of candymakers in the Oakland Bay Area! And there will be candy cookbooks too, from a friendly nearby library. We love the geography department, and their library in particular. [UC]
Groundbreaking of Liberation Park Residences, noon, Liberation Park (Eerieastmont). The Black Cultural Zone brought in some big funding and now they’re putting it to use! Building housing, investing in a part of Oakland that has no bookstores or bike shops but plenty of smoke shops, celebrating the people who’ve been there and letting their lives shine even brighter: break that ground and get it started today. [insta]
Geography Colloquia Series—All that is compute transforms into concrete: Monopoly rent and the fixity of AI’s infrastructure, 3:30pm, McCone Hall (Cal). As the geographers and Marxists will tell you, land ownership is power and the material conditions of this “make me a terribly overstuffed flyer for my school harvest festival” moment and its demand for ever more GPUs and the energy to run and cool them mean that we’re seeing a surge in land purchases for data centers in rural outposts (but you knew that already). What Dillon Mahmoudi and Alan Wiig add is that digital capitalism is gobbling up fringes of land that had not been subject to the direct pressures of tech before, though I’d also point out that warehouses taking over former farmland is also a land-use shift that is premised on clicking “order” buttons online in the urban core, and of course we could take it back even further to Estruth’s research into the shift from farmland to housing development in the Santa Clara Valley but listen to the talk or read the paper and see what you think. [UC]
Yu Miri: Remembering in Progress: The Histories We Carry and the Stories We Hear, 4pm, Dwinelle Hall (Cal). Yu Miri is here!! This discussion, one of two with the National Book Award-winning writer at Cal, leaves the novel behind because she’s now writing a play based on research with the Japanese-American community in Chicago (why Chicago? Twenty thousand people relocated there after internment and also U Chicago gave her a fellowship). Go hear about the work in progress, OBON, and how to bear witness as a storyteller who doesn’t want to write herself over her interviewees’ voices. [UC]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Water As Currency Installation—Artists’ Walkthrough and Reception, 5pm, Mining Exchange Museum (FiDi). Closing reception! No more walking tours of the city that used to be a marsh before we filled it and hardened it with sunken ships and pilings. Now it’s the final chance to see the installation by visual artists Hughen/Starkweather and sound artist Joshua-Michéle Ross made out of research into the SF Bay Estuary watershed, the sonic resonances collected, and the gritty, washed textures created. [insta]
Heyday Harvest 2026 with Jane Fonda and Rhae Lynn Barnes, 5pm, The Freight (Downtown Berkeley). Doors at 5, with snacks and wine, program at 5:45! Come through to support Heyday, the stalwart East Bay publisher of California’s finest books about our natural world, histories and counterhistories, Indigenous Californians, and arcs toward justice. Guests of honor are Heyday Lifetime Achievement winner Jane Fonda and Heyday History Award winner Rhae Lynn Barnes. Stories can move people toward a better world, together, and Heyday’s fifty years of publishing have been doing just that, and will keep doing that alongside everyone here who wants to become local in body and mind and heart. See you there! [Heyday]
“Defending Our Rights, Fighting For Our Future”: The ACLU’s Cecillia Wang, 5:30pm, David Brower Center (Downtown Boooookeley). ACLU National Legal Director Cecillia Wang and Jeff Chang will talk about Wang’s work defending birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court, which we thought was resolved in 1898 with Wong Kim Ark, but hey who has ever heard of precedent these days? Make sure to tell them you’re coming ahead of time or the doors will bang shut in your face, a somewhat ironic policy considering the nature of the talk. [eventbrite]
Honoring our Diasporic Plant Relatives: Tending the Vines Book Reading/Conversation with Author Ashia S. Ajani and Community Organizer Keala Uchôa, 6pm, EastSide Arts Alliance (Rancho San Antonio). Build an altar with plant ancestors alongside essayist/poet/scholar Ashia Ajani and community organizer and journalist Keala Uchôa. People move, plants move, and pulling ivy last weekend at Sausal Creek with the Speculative Commoning Artist Collaborative, Ashia’s work was on the lips of my fellow vine-strippers. Handling even the plants labeled invasives with love and care for their strength and possibility is exactly what is on the table tonight with these two bright lights of East Oakland. [ESAA]
WHB October Book Club: Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein, 6:30pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). Ah, a novel of a nameless woman coming into a rural setting where repetitive, domestic tasks create the texture for a plotless novel where the few events that happen take on foreboding and intensified meaning. Sounds refreshing. Talk about the book’s unsettling gendered power dynamics creating a sense of menace made worse by the occasional mention of Microsoft Teams. [eventbrite]
Eric Beck Rubin’s “TEN CLEAR DAYS”, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore (Nightmare on Elmwood). I am confused: is this autofiction? The novelization of a grandmother’s last ten days? The copy keeps referring to the character who dies as the grandmother of Eric Beck Rubin but also to this being a novel and “deeply personal fiction.” Well, ok, write what you know. And we’ll all know death eventually, so read this and get to know Eric’s fictional(?) grandmother and how to die intentionally, like she does (fictionally?). [Mrs D’s]
Our Sister Hedy, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Four sisters and their widowed father share a house in the hills above Hong Kong, in a 1957 comedy that practically dares Western critics less worldly than ourselves to compare it to Little Women. (Is it an accurate comparison? Fuck if we know, we’ve never seen the movie.) The title role is played by Jeanette Lin Tsui, star of Hong Kong cinema, who later had a restaurant in the West Bay. [bampfa]
Angela Davis in conversation with Poulomi Saha, 7:30pm, Zellerbach Hall (Cal). Angela Davis loves to hang out in the East Bay! Going all the way to Upper North Oakland, she brings her wisdom, her ferocious intellect, and her refusal to break to bear on the song of liberation, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” by Nina Simone. What could be better than hearing her tell us about the freedom we’re all trying to find. [UC]
Also: The Quest for Identity and Agency as a Black Scholar and Human Rights Activist with Charles P. Henry at Social Sciences Building (Cal) / Dia De Los Muertos Journaling with the Ancestors Workshop, Arts and Crafts at EastSide Arts Alliance (Rancho San Antonio) / The Betrayal of American Democracy: Mark Danner and Michael Pollan on Trump, the Midterm Elections and What Our Country Has Lost at North Gate Hall (Cal) / Sultry Sessions: Role Play at Zanzi Oakland (Downtown) / Bay Area Queer Writers Presents Bump In The Night (Queer Horror Anthology) at Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown)
Thursday, October 29
Book Talk on Global Racism–A Challenge for the World, 1pm, Booookeley Law (Cal). Racism: it’s bad, and it’s everywhere. Professor Anna Spain Bradley will discuss this theory of hers with Berkeley Law prof Savala Nolan, who will surely agree. [UC]
100 Years Later: The Role of the University of California in the Loss of Ohlone Land Rights and Steps Toward Repair, 1pm, ‘ottoytak, Patio of the Hearst Museum (Cal). Unlike Kroeber, I am going to step aside so the Ohlone speak for themselves here: “‘ottoy is a Chochenyo word and an Ohlone philosophy for repair. In 1925, the University erroneously declared the Ohlone people extinct, subsequently and unjustly leading to the loss of land rights for the Verona Band of Alameda County. A century later, the campus-wide ‘ottoy Initiative is expanding throughout campus as it uplifts Ohlone culture and knowledge in a truthful and legitimate manner. Join ‘ottoy Initiative leaders Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino as they discuss this historic initiative that points to a new way forward in repair between the University and the East Bay Ohlone people. Brownies and tea will be provided.” [UC]
Zoe Donaldson—Neurobiology of bonding and loss, 3:30pm, Barker Hall (Cal). I am so, so, SO into how all our understanding of the neurobiology of pair bonding comes from studying voles. It is perhaps suspiciously convenient that VOLE is an anagram for LOVE. Do you feel satisfied with your spouse, as satisfied as a vole is with theirs? Awesome, until they die. Then what, other than the yawning grief of a scraped out heart? Ask the vole/love expert, maybe she knows. [UC]
Wicker (Baby Brigade), 4pm, The New Parkway Theater (Downtown). Women have gone past choosing between men and bear, now they’re choosing basket. You can pop out your boob to suckle your baby during this showing, but probably not your adult date, it’s not THAT kind of theater, even if they were handing out wicker pasties at the premiere. [TNP]
Holloway Poetry Series | Fady Joudah Reading, 5:30pm, Maude Fife Room (Cal). I have so many favorite poems and lines in [...], Joudah’s last book of poetry from Milkweed, but here’s one for today: “In the desert, you renounce all belonging/ like someone who has so much of it . // The surplus you keep for yourself.” Joudah’s newest book, Exhibit G, is a National Book Award finalist and brings together photographs his friends and allies in Gaza sent him of ordinary, beautiful Palestinian people living despite genocidal terror, and those are placed alongside his own reflections on bearing witness from the position of being a doctor, from the position of living in America, ally of the oppressor. Listen. [UC]
Tomas Moniz & Laleh Khadivi talk about their new books, 6pm, Local Economy (College Ave). Rad dad (and granddad!) Tomas Moniz gets to bring some Latinidad to his local! Shouting out the Mission, where Norteño and Ranchera were blasting out of bars this weekend, his new novel The King of Aloe Vera is a book Jeff Chang calls “a love song for the weird old Bay Area” and Kirkus says is sweet but never cloying. Dueting with Oakland’s Tomas is fellow local novelist Laleh Khadivi, whose novel Female Life on Planet Earth goes way, way darker, into the hidden violences of women whose smooth, controlled surfaces hide raging torrents. Winner of the Golden Poppy, her novel has been blurbed as intoxicating, a fever dream. This is a mango en palo of a night: sweet, sour, spicy. [luma]
General Assembly: A Public History of Occupy Oakland, 6pm, Oakland History Center at OPL (The Lake). We human megaphoned at the Oakland Port blockade during Occupy Oakland, and we’ll do it again, if we have to, depending on the crowd rowdiness in the library. Meeting to think about what Occupy protestors remember and what the impact was of a movement accused of having no goals at all because apparently they weren’t listening when everyone protesting said “get rid of the banks and capitalism” very very clearly. I bet you’ll find this event in each and every alt news outlet’s calendar this week, and I bet you’ll find a lot of us ORB folks here, and the radical poets who were part of the encampment or who supported it like Jasper Bernes and Juliana Spahr, remembering and learning alongside Liam O’Donoghue and the Left in the Bay folks. I found an Occupy Oakland broadside from back then in my attic earlier this year: bring your ephemera to the library and add it to the archive. [OPL]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Tell Them We Were Here Screening, 6:30pm, MarinMOCA (San Rafael). Before there were people calling themselves creatives and pulling down six figures (see: Tom Frank, who just told you what the problem is with all that), there were artists here, who didn’t make much money but made work for each other. That’s why people came here or stayed here, to work under the radar, toward experiment and community and an ethos, and not toward career, that corrosive force that values the capital you can exchange your imagination for over the practice of making itself. Luckily, you all are still here and you can go see Tell Them We Were Here to dig into the stories of people making art in the Bay for the last few decades. [insta]
FLASH FICTION: CLAUDIA MONPERE, KATHRYN SILVER-HAJO, & PATRICIA Q. BIDAR, 6:30pm, Books Inc. Alameda (The Island of Dr. Moreau). Don’t blame the internet for your brief attention span, flash fiction has been a short short thing since the 1920s. Always historicize, Jameson and ORB remind you. And/but what the hell is the difference between flash fiction and prose poetry? Do there have to be characters, narrative, scenes, teeny tiny arcs to make it fiction instead of a poem? With authors Claudia Monpere, Kathryn Silver-Hajo, and Patricia Q. Bidar who will finally sort out this messy genre problem once and for all. [eventbrite]
Public Film Screening: When ICE Melts, 6:30pm, Berkeley City College Auditorium (Downtown Berkeley). Resistance to state-sanctioned violence tends to lead to a heavier hammer coming down, as this story of the Minnesota 15’s participation in collective action against Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis shows us. But it worked. ICE out! What will you do when there’s only one right thing to do: cower, or stand up and take the bitter penalty of rightful disobedience. [indybay.org]
Flight of Poets: Jesse Nathan, Rooja Mohassessy, Ariel Resnikoff, 6:30pm, Solano Cellars (Albooooony). I have children to tenderly mother so can’t be at the wine store with the poets (sigh, grr, hiss) but YOU should go! The Oakland poet, Cal lecturer Jesse Nathan will be reading, I would bet from his forthcoming book-length San Francisco Poem. His publicist promised my ARC is on its way so if the post arrives promptly I’ll just lose myself in that at home once the children are fed and watered, but you there—go listen, he’s a great reader. Jesse pairs well with Rooja Mohassessy who has been “Intoxicated by Verses” and Ariel Resnikoff, who co-directs Litmus Press, lives stumbling distance from Solano, and says how lucky we are to be poets, “just freaks being freaks.” [insta]
Is Hope Necessary: Thinking About Language, Justice, and Melting Glaciers in a Time of Fear and Foreboding, 6:30pm, Parapraxis Books (Downtown). Osha Neumann, long time legal advocate for the homeless in the East Bay, former artist and Back to the Land communard, is writing and thinking about life from the vantage of more than eighty years of looking at people, and has put his thoughts down in a book that Street Spirit is publishing, thirty years after he first defended a Street Spirit vendor from charges of panhandling. He says, like so many who have been trying to use the law to change society for so long, “I think [effecting change requires] more than just [lawsuits]. This has to be traditional organizing, and it has to be organized across class lines,” and he’s right. [insta]
Palestine Book Club: The Eyes of Gaza, 7pm, Sansaar Books (The Oakland Part of El Cerrito). Founded to advocate for the people of Palestine and for Third World Liberation at home and abroad, Sansaar Books is putting people into conversation. Read and discuss The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience by Plestia Alaqad, in order to understand daily life under the storm of Israeli bombardment. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Dana Moshoian Walrath / The Book of Genocides, 7pm, The Booksmith (The Haight Crime). Dana Mashoian Walrath’s book is “an interactive art installation turned disaster comic,” published by Harvard UP, which must be a first. The Book of Genocides makes the point that dehumanization leads to genocide but the purpose is always landgrabs, whether the genocide of the post–Gold Rush Sacramento Valley, the Armenians from which Walrath descends, or the current ongoing genocide in Palestine accompanied by settler encroachment. [booksmith]
Celluloid Frontiers: A Missing Can of Film and Stop Genocide, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). BAMPFA has an exhibition up about “media legacies of the Cold War,” and these short documentaries are being screened as part of the show. Naeem Mohaiemen’s A Missing Can of Film is an experimental documentary from 2025; Zahir Raihan’s Stop Genocide—which figures into A Missing Can—is a 20-minute doc on the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, done up in the socialist realist style. (Raihan was disappeared in the waning days of the war.) Mohaiemen and BAMPFA’s Tausif Noor will be on hand to talk about both films and discuss just how fucked up the Cold War was in its South Asian theater. [bampfa]
Also: In Conversation with Yu Miri: Landscapes and Memories of Fukushima and Setonaikai at AAP Building (Cal) / Mona Fawaz: Planning Amid Division — The Politics of the “Public” in Beirut at Bauer Wurster Hall (UC) / Lauren Kroiz on Living Power: Women’s Suffrage and Modern American Art at The Bancroft Library and 308A Doe Library (Cal) / Bay Area Bats at UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley (Berkeley) / Repulsive Reads: Slewfoot, A Tale of Bewtichery by Brom at North Branch BPL (Northbrae) / Ari’el Stachel’s “Other” at Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life (Downtown Berkeley) / Artists Take Political Action at Et Al. (West Bay) / UNLEARNING: Dismantling Racism Under the Rainbow at QAC Gallery (Grand Lake) / David Maisel and the Apocalyptic Sublime at Clio’s Books (The Lake) / Tessellations, Herb Lore, Zhenia at Spats at Spats (Downtown Berkeley)
Friday, October 30
Friday Nights at OMCA with LA GENTE SF, 5pm, OMCA campus (The Lake). Final OMCA food truck and lawn hang night con la musica, while the weather is still good and the Dia de los muertos altars are still up! Come out and look for some ORB hats floating around if you’re up for the family-friendly kind of rager that ends at sunset. [OMCA]
Get-Hype Open Mic: Final Fall Edition, 6pm, Discover Community Cafe (West Oakland). Poet and performance artist JR Rice hosts, and tonight’s featured poet is educator and Hayward Poet Laureate Mo Kim-Tong, who writes about his life as a gay Asian man, putting his heart into his students and uplifting his community. Bring your songs, your poems, your open heart and ears. Last one of the year! [insta]
Roll Fog Zine Launch, 6pm, Neighborhood Sports Club (Jack the Ripper London Sq). This is a zine launch in some kind of relationship with a documentary about a neighborhood sports club that kicks balls in the West Bay but is having their event in Oakland (I mean, it’s JLS, so barely, but technically Oakland, geographically speaking only). Sports that don't involve bats and no clocks (only hate for the new MLB rules obv) are not generally in my radar, but these folks are personally annoyed at Lurie and the financiers of techtopia, so go buy their zine, kick their balls, and toss them some change to make their sports movie. And I hear the Roots are leaving the Coliseum so if their whole Kezar Stadium for the People thing doesn’t work out, we’ve got room. [humanitix.com]
Driveway Follies 2026, 6pm, 3854 Greenwood Ave (Glenview). The puppets are putting on a show! From dusk to nine pm, their story runs over and over again tonight and tomorrow. All free, all ages, watch the herky-jerky uncanny on this spooky night. [facebook]
Poetry! 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). The poets are back on track and in the building! Tonight Laura Woltag guest hosts Sarah Coolidge (Two Lines editor, usually plays music to go with her lyrics), Mukethe Kawinzi (poet, shepherd, and forthcoming author with an as of presstime unconfirmed East Bay publisher), Nino Claveria (who is always straddling the threshold that separates Ritual from ritual, and likes the word Transmission), and Emily Shapiro, who might be partnered with one of the other poets reading but you have to guess which one. [poetry in the bay]
Wild West Femme Cypher After Hours, 6:30pm, Central Library (Downtown Berkeley). The Oakland Black Cowboy Parade is clip-clopping into Berkeley though I don’t think they’re letting horses into the library. Femmes and ladies of all persuasions have dismounted and are circled up to bring country and hiphop together in a cypher over some heavy beats, perhaps at a trot or a canter, as the sun sets. [BPL]
Beyond the Headlines: A Night of Laughter and Legacy, 7pm, Black Cultural Zone campus (Deep East). Be in community IN the community is the message of the Black Cultural Zone’s annual gala. Ticket sales are closed, so you missed getting sorted into one of seven thematic houses, choosing the couture you planned to wear to the feast, and the entirely LUXE celebration of fifty years of Black cultural legacies in Deep East Oakland. There’s always next year. [BCZ]
A Woman Is a Woman, 7:30pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Here’s what we said when this was screened back in September: “A musical that doesn’t care all that much about the singing or the dancing or even the music for that matter. This was Godard’s first studio production, and it’s too playful not to be charming, despite its own sometimes contemptuous efforts at genre deconstruction. With Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo and some other guy.” We still agree with our past selves. [bampfa]
Also: Halloween Eve Cover Band Night at Stay Gold Deli at Stay Gold Deli (San Pablo Corridor) / Member screening—Lumumba at Sansaar Books (El Cerrito) / Solidarity Cinema: Queer Monstrosity at KALW (West Bay)
Saturday, October 31
Feminist Bird Club Halloween Birding Loop, 8:30am, Berkeley Aquatic Park (Bayshore). It isn’t too late to witness fall migration along the Pacific Flyway! Members of the Feminist Bird Club (known enemies of the rival Patriarchal Bird Club [Audubon??]), invite you to dress up as your favorite you-know-what and join them for a leisurely (~2.2mi) loop around the Berkeley Aquatic Park. Birders online report a spike in sightings of Eurasian Wigeons, Green Herons, and Belted Kingfishers, so ready your life lists. Loaner binoculars will be available, but bring your own if you don’t want to catch eye cooties. [insta]
Plant Gall Gala, 11am, Tilden Nature Area (Berkeley Hills). Did you know that the U.S. Constitution was written on ink made from oak galls? Did you know that over 1400 species of cynipid wasps are known to create plant galls to protect their larvae? Did you know that some plant galls are created by other plants (e.g. mistletoe)?? Do you even know what a gall is??? Over the course of this guided nature walk you will not only learn a great deal about galls, but also create a “costume accessory” before “walk[ing] the green carpet showcasing our creations.” I am honestly not quite sure what this means! [EBRPD]
Performance / Entanglement: Steffani Jemison and Leslie Cuyjet on Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, 1pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Booooooookeley). The vibrant creative relationship between sculptural and performance artists Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi stretches back to their earliest collaborations in Los Angeles in the 1970s, but it has gained renewed attention thanks in part to their traveling exhibition Las Vegas Ikebana. In this piece inspired by Hassinger and Nengudi, Steffani Jemison and Leslie Cuyjet mix archival footage of the LA pair with a live performance of their own. I am really interested in how this piece creates an explicit dialogue between living artists, it’s almost like they’re quote-tweeting one another. [bampfa]
Geologist’s Walk Around Redwood Heights/Leona Heights, 1:30pm, Redwood Heights Recreation Center (The Hills Have Eyes). Andrew Alden gets spooky about the Hayward Fault’s slow motion creeps and sudden shudders, and takes you to an abandoned mine AND an abandoned quarry: ok this is a tour of where you can dump a dead body, isn’t it. [eventbrite]
Vivre sa vie, 4pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). We’ll just quote ourselves here: “Your favorite critic’s favorite Godard, unless your favorite critic is John Simon (but why would it be?). This is the director’s fourth feature, from 1962, another entry in what we might call his Wife Guy Period. Anna Karina is a sex worker in this one, and as with all of Godard’s Karina movies we are watching him fall in love with her over and over again, and maybe hating her a little for it. Manny Farber called it a ‘film of extraordinary purity.’ Susan Sontag said it was perfect.” [bampfa]
Kwaidan, 6:30pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). If arty Japanese horror with excruciatingly languorous tracking shots is your thing, this—an anthology based on four stories by Lafcadio Hearn—is extremely your thing. [bampfa]
Also: Costume Contest at Jo’s Modern Thai at Jo’s Modern Thai (The Laurel) / October Book Swap: Horror, Thriller, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, True Crime, and Mystery at 51 & Tel (Temescal) / Departed Spirits Halloween Party at Clio’s Books (The Lake)
Sunday, November 1
Haunted History Bike Ride, 10am, Camron-Stanford House Lawn (The Lake Merritt Monster). “One need not be a chamber—to be haunted,” Emily Dickinson reminds us, “One need not be a House.” In Oakland, we enjoy an abundance of non-domestic hauntings, with spirits (allegedly!!!) brimming from aircraft carriers and college halls and libraries and regional parks in the hills. This post-Halloween bike ride ends at the Mountain View Cemetery, home of some of the oldest marked gravesites in the East Bay. Costumes encouraged. [insta]
Gaskill Coffee Time, 10am, Aliya & Birk’s house (GasKILL). Gaskill isn’t the most widely-known neighborhood in Oakland, but it holds a very special place in my heart. Once an award-winning peach orchard, the neighborhood has managed to remain comfortably sleepy while avoiding several frustrating real estate rebranding attempts (RIP “NOBE,” you will not be missed). Recently, the Gaskill neighbors association has been hosting a rotating coffee get-together, hosted by a different neighborhood resident each month. This month’s host: Aliya and Birk! [gaskillneighbors.org]
Good Grief with the MoonDrop Poets, 2pm, 2727 California (Berkeley). MoonDrop Productions is a quarterly submission-based and themed poetry show that has been going strong for, as far as I can tell, at least eight years now. An impressive run! This Día de los Muertos-inflected installment will honor “those we lost, but never forgot.” The roster of readers is long, but include Oakland poets such as JR Rice, Tureeda Mikell, and Sara Biel. [insta]
The Valiant Ones, 4pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Look, maybe you don’t know much about King Hu, the Shaw Brothers studio set decorator who rose through the ranks to become one of the most beloved directors of both Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema. Maybe you aren’t already completely addicted to the lush environments, fantastical combat, and disconcertingly compelling nationalist barely-even-subtext of wuxia filmmaking. But listen: this is a movie about a swashbuckling husband-and-wife swordfighting team defending a dying empire from an armada of pirates. Whatever existing plans you had for your Sunday afternoon probably aren’t as fun as this. [bampfa]
Goodfellas, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Booooookeley). The three theses that tie together every Scorsese gangster film: 1. The true history of American capitalism is a history of organized crime; 2. Toxic masculinity will bring you within striking distance of your deepest desires, and then humiliate and/or kill you; 3. Catholic guilt: fun for the whole family! I’m sorry to say that the shitty ex-boyfriend from your freshman year in college was right, because this movie fucking rules. If that sounds like something a shitty ex-boyfriend would say, well, okay, you caught me. [bampfa]
Also: Waitlist: Mushroom Cooking Class with Chef Chad Hyatt at TBA (Berkeley) / Día de Muertos Celebración: Ceremony, Ofrenda, Son Jarocho & Food! at La Peña Cultural Center (Oakland Part of Berkeley)