Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, September 2 – September 7

Did you run wild or just dip your toes at Bather’s Summer Symposium last weekend? Report back to the Bather’s Mini Mag, where Justin, wizard in chief of the library, is collecting reflections and reviews to print in the next issue. This week, there’s free BAMPFA on Thursday and free OMCA on Sunday. There’s also one last chance to listen to music in the redwoods. Cal is starting back up with a roar (skip the Federalist Society happy hour, unless your protest muscles are stiff and need stretching). On Saturday, everyone’s getting up and going for a walk: only question is, which one will you be joining? It’s the last couple weeks of the Ballers’ season, and if you can spare it, please donate to the Oakland Black Cowboy Association, which lost its entire budget suddenly and needs your help to continue the annual celebration of the history of Black people in the rural West. Labor Day is behind us, the fall season of books is ahead of us, buckle on your chaps and saddle up (then save them to rewear at Folsom Street Fair at the end of the month). - AB, TC, & MS

Tuesday, September 2

Voices of the Womb: Black Birth in Focus, 2 pm, Oakstop (1721 Broadway). An interactive photo exhibition and community gathering sharing stories from the Black birthing world. [eventbrite]

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan’s Holding, 6pm, Pegasus Books Downtown (Berkeley). Come hear the author chat with local fave Tomas Moniz talk about this memoir of being hooked on mothers, drugs, and other comforts. [Pegasus]

Parapraxis Issue 6 Party, 7 pm, Thee Stork Club (Telegraph). Celebrate the arrival of Issue 6 with the drinking cure. [insta]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Chuck Tingle’s Lucky Day, 7 pm, Internet Archive (Inner Richmond). If you hadn’t heard, the author of My Billionaire Triceratops Craves Gay Ass, Angry Man Pounded by the Fear of His Latent Gayness over a Dinosaur Transitioning into a Unicorn, and Pounded in the Butt by My Book "Pounded in the Butt by My Book 'Pounded in the Butt by My Book "Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt"'" started writing books with real publishers and boring titles like Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays, which, frankly, wtf Chuck Tingle. Anyway, a new book called Lucky Day gets pounded into your ass at the Internet Archive, courtesy of Booksmith. [Booksmith]

Wednesday, September 3

Vietnam’s Literary Tradition and Westernization in the 1930s, 5 p.m., Dwinelle (UC Berkeley). This lecture by Prof Lu Xia examines Số Đỏ, the representative novel of the prominent Vietnamese writer, Vũ Trọng Phụng. Modernity and tradition are less opposites and more both ingredients in a delicious postcolonial sandwich. Xia is a visiting scholar at Duke from Peking University, because our borders are still as open as time and the novel, for now. [Cal] 

Reel Queer Flix! 6:45 pm, Grand Lake Theater (Grand Lake). 80 minutes of, well, really queer flicks, from Bay Area filmmakers, followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers. Featuring: The Space Between Us (Gabriel Diamond), The Young King (Larin Sullivan), Hold Me Close (Aurora Brachman and Tajh Simmons-Weaver), Rainbow Girls (Nana Duffuor), Me Porto Bonita (Cecilia Romo), and After What Happened at the Library (Syra McCarthy). [GLT]

Floating To Shore: Poetry Open Mic, 7pm, NIght Heron (Downtown). You get five minutes at the mic to read poetry, short stories, creative writing, lyrics, meditations, recipes, prayers, spells, memories. Hosted by Alie Jones, this is gonna be lively.  [instagram].  

The Seashell and the Clergyman and The Blood of a Poet, 7 pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). A twin bill of French surrealism, pairing Germaine Dulac and Jean Cocteau. Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) ran afoul of the British Board of Film Classification, which delivered the priceless verdict: "This film is so cryptic as to be meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable." [BAMPFA]

Chris Haft's A Giant Among Giants, 7 pm, Mrs Dalloway’s (College Ave). Chris Haft tells the story of one of baseball’s best hitters and most-beloved players in the first biography of Willie McCovey. In conversation with the local legend’s daughter, Allison McCovey. Just salting the wound of the A’s leaving, a Giants book showing up when we should all be at the Coliseum. [eventbrite]

Also: Grandma Dinner Series: Oscar Michel at Burdell (Temescal) 

Thursday, September 4

“How to Think Impossibly: The History and Art of Ontological Shock,” with Jeffrey Kripal, 4:30 pm, Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall (UC Berkeley). Come out and celebrate the collapse of Western ways of knowing! Kripal helped start the Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism Program at Rice University, and he’s at work on a multivolume study of “paranormal currents in the history of science and American metaphysical literature,” all of which makes him sound like a great hang. His lecture will lay out the principles of “how to think impossibly across our present orders of knowledge.” Fancy prose for “dude’s gonna talk about drugs and spaceships.” [UC Berkeley]

Fire Weather Planning, 5 pm, Berkeley Library North Branch. Go and "more of a comment than a question" at the city about instituting “zone zero” which requires no living plants next to houses even though that’s not how buildings catch on fire. [Berkeley Public Library]  

Josephine Rowe launches "Little World" with Rita Bullwinkel 7pm, Transit Books HQ (Poet's Corner). A conversation about “A dazzling novel about the mysterious body of a child saint and the lives it touches across time.” Wine and hanging to follow, but don't put it past the Transit people to buy 8 boxes of pizza, they love to put out pizza. [eventbrite]

Queer Movies to Show My Friends, 7 pm, 2727 California (Berkeley)  Come watch Happy Together by Wong Kar-Wai, curated by Wallace Yan who says a better title for the series is TBD, but first thought, best thought, Wallace. Sliding scale, with popcorn. [2727]

Turn to Stone by Emily Meg Weinstein, 7 pm, Mrs Dalloway’s (College). A memoir of sex, angst, rock climbing, and the dirtbag life. In conversation with poet and Milkweed’s creative director Mary Austin Speaker, so fingers crossed for lots of geological meditations (and if you really like rocks, also add this perfect book to your TBR pile). [eventbrite] 

[West Bay Bonus Event] Kitchen Table, 7 p.m., York Street Collective (The Mission). Food and literature: Jacquelyn Trần,  Sam Sax , and James Cagney alongside Rize Up Bakery.  [instagram] 

Rhapsody, 7:30pm, Clio’s (The Lake). SOLD OUT. A literary salon for the brave and the righteous, continuing the first Thursday of each month until further notice with the Bay Area's most luminous writers, poets, commentators, and storytellers going in search of Utopia. Carvell Wallace will share an original piece specifically crafted for the evening, an evening that will culminate in dance. Check the website and maybe you’ll get in next month. [Eventbrite]

[West Bay Bonus Event El Segundo] High and Low, 8:55 pm, The Roxie (The Mission). Before catching Spike Lee’s new movie, watch its inspiration. Akira Kurosawa’s domestic drama and police procedural had its finger on the pulse of post WWII-Japan; it tells the story of a wealthy industrialist who ends up at the center of a ransom plot. A word of caution, though: it might make all Netflix thrillers unwatchably bad as a result. If you can’t make this one, catch it again at 12:30PM on Sunday. [The Roxie]

Friday, September 5

[Bonus West Bay Alexis Madrigal] The Alexis Madrigal is Present, Noon until the next noon, Fort Mason (West Bay). The Memory Clerk: recording memories of the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, get an appointment to tell him about your memories, there are lots of free slots early in the morning. [FortMason]

The Posthumanization of Sound, 4:30 p.m., Morrison Hall (UC Berkeley). Nicholas Mathew talks about “vibrational ontologies of sound art and the cyber-mysticism of 90s tech utopians,” Debussy, the connections between Paris and California, and it’s really just vibes all the way down. [Cal]

[West Bay Bonus Event] Poetry in the Alley, 4:45ish pm, Kerouac Alley (North Beach). Come read some words, maybe you wrote them at Bather’s last weekend, to friendly ears in the last of the sunshine on First Friday. Then shut your mouth and listen up at Golden Sardine with us at 6pm at a poetry book launch from Write Bloody Press, and keep it going into the hereafter. Penultimate alley gathering! [instagram]

Poetry! 6:30pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Ángel Alvarez, Claire Star Finch, Noor Khashe Brody, Sophie Appel. Oh please let Judith Butler show up for Claire Finch’s reading, please gods of rhetoric and sex-is-gender-is-performance and town-gown hybridity, come through just this once.

[North Bay Bonus Event] Hamlet, 7 pm, Marin Shakespeare Company (San Rafael). We don’t know why the Oakland Theater Project is in Marin, but, you know, fine, whatever. First we take Piedmont, then we take Marin. ​​”In an America where authoritarianism no longer feels distant, Hamlet resonates with renewed urgency.” First preview friday, official opening night on sunday, more showings at days other that, time out of joint, etc. [OTP]

Repast 7 pm BAMPFA (Berkeley). We love a “sly critique of love, estrangement, and marriage in middle-class Japan.” [BAMPFA]

Saturday, September 6 

Summer Flower Hike, 10 AM, Black Diamond Mines (CoCoCo). Founder of iNaturalist Ken-ichi Ueda (and Eastlake resident) leads a hike with Bay Nature in search of bright, determined, dazzling, occasionally sticky late summer flowers at the foot of Mount Diablo in Contra Costa County. [Bay Nature]  

Miriam’s Place: Jonathan Spector, 10:30 AM, Shotgun Players (Ashby). A seminar series hosted by Patrick Dooley. Featured speaker Spector is a Tony Award-winning playwright based in Northern California, whose work has been produced on and off Broadway, regionally, and internationally. Pay what you can, start your weekend off right. [Shotgun Players]

Time and Place: Poetry and Bookmaking Workshop for Families, 10am, JCAS (The Lake).  Combine poetry and drawing to create handmade books intergenerationally, using stitching and folding to bind. Line and contour drawing and creative writing exercises on offer to encourage creative expression about familiar places and spaces. Highly likely to encounter ORBs parenting while art-ing here [eventbrite] 

Black Liberation Walking Tour, 10 am, West Oakland. Take a walk through Hoover-Foster with David Peters, a third-generation Oaklander and one of the all-time great talkers (as local sports radio listeners can attest). Condé Nast Traveler called this one of the best Black history tours in the United States, and it seems plausible to us, even if Condé Nast Traveler weighing in on such things feels a bit like Lawrence Welk ranking his favorite rappers. There’s another tour next month, in case you miss this one. [Eventbrite] 

San Antonio Station / Neighborhood Walking Tour 11:00 AM, Xochi-the-Dog Cafe (Ivy Hill-ish). Walk hosted in part by Victor Flores (BART Director), Rev. James Polk, Gordon Douglas (urbanist), and Ben Matlaw (city planner and transit advocate). Not sure what Conde Nast thinks, but most of Oakland is East of the Lake, and this is a one off, and maybe BART will still exist in the future and they’ll add a station: Deep East dreaming. [Luma] 

[West Bay Bonus Event ] ZYZZYVA Movie Matinee, 12:30 pm, The Roxie (The Mission).  Ingrid Rojas Contreras and Alexander Chee present the sumptuous, all-time classic The Earrings of Madame de … (1953) French master Max Ophuls’ perhaps most celebrated film, adapted from Louise de Vilmorin’s novel, is described by The Criterion Collection as “a profoundly emotional, cinematographically adventurous tale of deceptive opulence and tragic romance.” The late, great film critic Roger Ebert wrote of Earrings: “It glitters and dazzles, and beneath the artifice it creates a heart, and breaks it.” [roxie] 

Books & BART Takeover with Sistah SciFi, 1:45ish, Orange and Red Lines (BART). For National Read a Book Day, grab your favorite read, hop on BART, and take a silent reading ride that ends in bookish fellowship at Chapter 510 & the Dept. of Make Believe in downtown Oakland. Reading, now with logistics and coordinated schedules. [Eventbrite] 

Berkeley Walks 10th Anniversary, 2 pm, Berkeley Public Library North Branch (Berkeley). Join a history hunt led by coauthors Bob Johnson and Janet Byron, featuring traces of commuter trains along Hopkins Street, Codornices Creek, the Peralta Park development, Japanese American businesses, and the Spanish Peralta adobe. [BPL]

Encounters Opening Reception, 4pm, Dream Farm Commons (Downtown). Tracy Grubbs in the main gallery shows work about interconnected relationships between human and non-human species and our capacity to build  embedded rather than isolated futures, and Susan Wolf is in the annex with Slowly Moving With a Burden Bent, a participatory performance of fiber and collective poetry. Two shows that meditate on the embedded nature of our existence with other species and with language. Artist’s talk at 5 pm. [Dream Farm Commons] 

SoftLive Presents Willie Alexander, 7 pm, ReLove (Grand Ave). Bay Area native Willie Alexander was in residence at a classic Harlem jazz club and recently joined the NY Philharmonic. Willie’s intimate homecoming concert accompanied will also include a reading by poet Alysha English, author of the poetry collection i wrote this to heal. Willie is also sharing their visual art and curated collection of Black ephemera, providing deeper context into the narratives that shape their practice. [Partiful]

Also: Pull ivy at Dimond Canyon (Sausal Creek) / Hella Hyphy Ball at Lake Merritt Amphitheater (The Lake) / End-of-Summer Garden Party at Fig Leaf Gardens (The Laurel)  / Montaigne Mornings at Clio’s (The Lake) /  Grand opening of Satchmo’s Café and showing of The Wiz at Orinda Theatre (Hot Side of the Hills) / A Swedish Love Story at BAMPFA (Berkeley)

Sunday, September 7

Late Chrysanthemums, 4:30pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Aging geishas who contemplate the harsh loneliness of their lives, a “sort of after-the-fall sequel to Naruse’s Flowing” (despite preceding that film by two years, and screening next week). [BAMPFA]

UNION, 12:30pm, the New Parkway (Uptown). Up against one of the most powerful companies on the planet, a group of Amazon workers embark on an unprecedented campaign to unionize their warehouse in Staten Island, New York, led by Chris Smalls. Named one of the best films of 2024 by every critic with a pulse. ⁠Proceeds from this viewing go directly to Strike For Our Rights' strike fund.⁠ [New Parkway]

HOLE, 2 pm and 5 pm, somewhere Muni-accessible (West Bay). The SF Neo-Futurists invite you to dig a big hole in the ground (yes, really). Exact site will be shared with RSVP—a few days before the event, you will receive an email with further instructions about location and what to bring to the show. [eventbrite] 

SĪ思意YÌ:3 Sundays on the Farm / Earth Expressions, 3pm, Ancestral Healing Farm (Hot and up in the Hills). Farm as a playground of sound, food, and art. Music, art installations, interactive moments...creating a space to wonder & connect. Final Sunday at the farm for the summer. [Google Doc]

How They Did It: Imagining a Future California, 3 pm, Page Street (West Berkeley). Courtesy of Litquake and LitCamp, five writers who have conjured different Californias of the future get together to talk about what might lie just over the horizon for us. Mike Chen (A Quantum Love Story), Anita Felicelli (How We Know Our Time Travelers), Sheri T. Joseph (Edge of the Known World), Susanna Kwan (Awake in the Floating City), and Annalee Newitz (Automatic Noodle) will be joined by moderator Zoe Young. [Litquake]

Journey to Justice, 3:30pm, Planting Justice (El Sobrante). Music, food, raffle prizes, and you will be able to see the Journey to Justice bus which is traveling state to state spreading awareness about solitary confinement. Taste fresh fruit and solidarity. [insta]

Spanish/English conversation, 7pm, The New Parkway (Uptown). Hablar juntos! First five people get a free movie token. This is the first of an ongoing weekly gathering. [insta]

Also: The History of Dogs in Hollywood at Orinda Theatre (Hot Side etc) / Lunada Literary Lounge with José Vadi at Galería de la Raza (West Bay)