Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, September 8–September 13
Lake Merritt overflowed its banks this week, because storms are surging in the Pacific and tidal gates were open to let the water flow. Sometimes normal fluctuations look unexpected if you’re used to it being managed by invisible infrastructure but tidal sloughs are supposed to slosh. Chicken of the Woods is fruiting, so we’re turning toward mushroom season, and the heatwave that’s coming is also Bay Area summer finally showing up after a cool few months, did you remember to buy a fan? Sansaar, the new world lit bookstore in El Cerrito, is also a mini movie palace, and they’re showing the films of Satyajit Ray all month. And Palestine is still not free so more activism for Gaza gatherings are happening around the Bay, stay on top of them. Justin Carder is a perpetual motion machine infusing you with all his energy so proposals for workshops and reading groups are invited and due next week for Bathers Library this fall! The Germans at Cal are thinking about AI all weekend but instead go to the Oakland International Film Festival starting Wednesday, or dance it out by prepartying and afterpartying all weekend long for the Hella Hyphy Ball. Across the bay, Crushing, the storytelling show about limerence comes back this weekend — sam sax’s fantastic poem about the highs and lows of unrequited love was part of last year’s show, and while there is sadly no sam this year, Tomas Moniz, Danielle Stagger, and many more performers will cringe with you about our naked need to be seen and wanted for three nights only at A.C.T.’s The Strand. It’s the month when the Bay Area is at its best and all your favorite people have birthdays because September Virgos are also the best and apparently there’s a lot of fucking that happens in the first weeks of every new year, so enjoy all the parties and the good weather and avoid making eye contact with the Halloween decor infesting the stores already. -MS, AB
Tuesday, September 8
Storytime for Caregivers with Amanda Montei, 10am, Local Economy (Rockridge). Amanda Montei is the author of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, and dads, moms, and anyone else with a body existing under capitalism, this is the place for you on a Tuesday morning. I've loved Amanda's work since reading this piece in Mutha and her discussion with Tracy Clark-Flory on the figure of the Wine Mom is the smartest, most nuanced conversation about feminism and culture I've heard in a long time. I am, shall we say, touch-forward, but I'm deeply here for Montei stomping dead the lingering cultural concept of woman-as-hausfrau existing only for her family. [luma]
Monthly ORB Happy Hour, 4pm, Club Mallard (El Cerrito Sud). We hang out, have a beer, say hello to you all, and bring you some free books sometimes from EBB. Also, our friends in El Cerrito are claiming Albany, and since city-on-city warfare is one of our hobbies, we're for it. [no link, just show up]
QUEERLY BELOVED BOOK CLUB with author Portia Elan, 6:30pm, Books Inc. Alameda (Temporarily Embarrassed Peninsula). Go back in time to the '80s in sci-fi novel Homebound with local author Portia Elan (who will be there in person for the event) but then, in true Back to the Future fashion, time travel forward in leaps and bounds. Sounds a little confusing to have three timelines and a video game involved, but look that cover is gorgeous, and I did like how Ministry of Time pulled together cli-fi, time travel, and romance all in one book, so I am just saying, it IS possible. [eventbrite]
The Marinaissance, 7pm, Clio’s Books (Grand Lake). Dave Perlis, author of Morning in Marin talks with Steve Wasserman, publisher of Heyday, about the cultural explosion of the counterculture, the scene history of the suburbs, and magic of Mount Tam. Come through for Dave's last talk in the Bay Area and hear how Suzanne Somers, Janis Joplin, and Richard Brautigan all ended up in the same time, place, and story. [eventbrite]
Jon Else's "FRENCHMAN FLAT" with John Adams, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood). Two guys who grew up with nuke drills and who are really into J. Robert Oppenheimer talk about big bombs. At the Q&A ask if they'll carpool tomorrow out to Lawrence Livermore and Sandia to blockade the labs researching and building more of the city-flattening weapons on the hot side of the hills. [Mrs D's]
NOVELISTS IN CONVERSATION: ELIZABETH ROSNER & KAREN JOY FOWLER, 7pm, Pegasus Books on Solano (El Cerrito Sud). Elizabeth Rosner's debut novel At the Speed of Light is still in print, 25 years later! Pretty remarkable, and it might be an interesting conversation to join in regarding the fate of literary fiction as a commercial prospect (read Sinykin first). I talked with an editor who's been in the business two decades last week and she said a novel she would have confidently predicted would sell 10k copies ten years ago will sell 2k today. Have tastes just shifted? Ask hard questions about the material function of literary art as a commercial product, I am sure the novelists will have the answers. [Pegasus]
Also: Sara Kehaulani Goo with Emily Dreyfuss - Kuleana at Book Passage Corte Madera (North Bay) / Tania Ketenjian & Philip Wood // Sound Made Public: The Art of Listening at Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation (Cal)
Wednesday, September 9
Authors Meet Critics: “Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide”, 4pm, Social Sciences Building (Cal). Hear Black Studies and Sociology profs Tianna Paschel and G. Cristina Mora talk about their interviews and research, published as Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide, about how working people conceive of the California Dream and keep believing in it even as they acknowledge the reality of systemic class and racial barriers here. Reminds me of the Musk fanboy in ORB's "The billionaires’ duel at the courthouse," who was so strangely pro-Musk because "I’d like to be a baller like that," by which I am sure he meant "born inheriting South African emerald mines." In conversation with Profs. Desmond Jagmohan and Lisa García Bedolla. [UCB]
Encounters with Race in Alice Diop’s Cinema, 5pm, Maude Fife Room (Cal). Filmmaker Alice Diop in conversation with friend of ORB and scholar of contemporary African literature Farah Bakaari, and some other folks too: Nadia Ellis, Mario Telò, Debarati Sanyal and Julie Catel. If you like movies, French culture, and meeting your heroes, go here, unless you're Aaron, who is stuck in Palo Alto doing a job instead of vibe reporting the fuck out of this. [UCB]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Poolside Poets, 6:30pm, Saint Joseph's Arts Foundation (SoMa). Dress surreally, aesthetics matter, this is literature after all! Ada, curator of Sultry Sessions, will read, Jawno Okhiulu will play music, Fidel Pomajambo Chumbiauca will do their thing, and more poets, writers, and artists will share their work in the most gorgeous decommissioned church in the West Bay. Someone should dress as the pool that will otherwise not be present. [heylo]
[West Bay Bonus Event Again] 1970s: The Decade the Bay Area Changed Our Culture, 7pm, KQED Headquarters (The Mission-ish). In the '90s, we dressed in bell bottoms again and the '70s were just retro, but now it's been fifty years so it's officially history. So many big local institutions got their start then, and keep shaping the Bay and the world today. Speakers include Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery, Stanford historian of the Bay Fred Turner (From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism), Black Panther Party leader Ericka Huggins, and LGBTQ activist Gwenn Craig. What makes a movement, and even more critically, what makes it last? [tixr]
Chatting about The Nerd Reich, 7pm, Clio’s Books (Grand Lake). Bay Area journalists Gil Durán and Adam Becker will talk about the merger of tech power and MAGA fascism in a conversation about Durán's book, which you might have heard of, and which your correspondent saw him go into EBB the other day and buy a bunch of copies of because he was doing an event and he had run out of copies. They've run out of copies too, at least at the moment I'm checking. It's that sort of book, the sort of book that really talks about the thing we're all seeing happen. [eventbrite]
Shigehiro Oishi | Specialization and Its Discontent: Implications for Curiosity and Well-Being, 7:10pm, Berkeley Way West (Cal). This is interesting: research shows that division of labor reduces curiosity, which makes sense: you narrow your vision, you aren't allowed to try new things, you get boring. Yet another reason why Fair Play's insistence on splitting up household labor instead of doing it together is a bad solution to conflict over domesticity. In households and workplaces, stretch yourself and find new delights, pleasure, and skills. Like DIY dishwasher repair, or figuring out the new Chicago Style opinions on capitalization after colons. JOY AWAITS. [UCB]
Nate Adams Volunteer Happy Hour, 8pm, Baggy's By The Lake (E18th East of the Lake). Is Nate Adams OAKLAND's ZOHRAN?! Dunno about that, but he is a Democratic Socialist running for D2 against a pretty Flock-happy council-member; after canvassing, he and his crew will be drinking with The People, so go down there and find out what he's all about (and then tell us). [Nate Adams for Oakland City Council]
Also: Real Estate Populism: Urban Spectacles and the Ecological Origins of Bukelismo in El Salvador at McCone Hall (Cal) / SOLD OUT The True Cost of Every Prompt: The Sustainability of AI and Data Centers at The Faight (West Bay) / Push Buttons and AI at BAMPFA (Berkeley) / The Berkeley Slam ft. Asia Bryant Wilkerson at The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley)
Thursday, September 10
Safer Socials, 4pm, Bloc15 (Jack London-ish). Talk all evening about Big Tech and reclaiming power from monopolies. The keynote is someone named Larz May who has a $15k speaking fee and whose specialty is teaching us how to survive social media, and whose keywords on her speaking agency site include "Social Entrepreneur, Marketing Disruptor, Social Media Influencer." Hmmm. Other speakers include journalists Kate Conger and Jacob Ward, and someone from Free Press (I triple checked, it's not THE Free Press but some other org that seems actually founded to defend freedom of the press). Lush cosmetics is sponsoring it because someone has to pay that girlboss her money. [luma]
Co-Motion: Re-Thinking Power, Subjects and Feminist and Queer Alliances, 5pm, Stephens Hall (Cal). Paola Bacchetta offers a history of activist collectivity from the '70s to today (I'm seeing a theme, we're reflecting on the years that shaped our parents aren't we, fellow midlifers) in international contexts, and points out that identity politics don't actually divide, but rather offer points of intersection and collaboration in her new book Co-Motion: Re-Thinking Power, Subjects and Feminist and Queer Alliances. Prof. Angana P. Chatterji is in conversation. [UC B]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Unsung Surrealists: Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon, 6pm, SFMOMA (SoMa). Double down on the surreal. Wear what you wore to the Decentered Arts poolside poetry party to learn about Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon, founders of the mid-century Dynaton movement and a bridge between European bohemian daring and Marin's growing countercultural arts scene. Yes, they're in the book. [sfmoma]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Monthly Supper Featuring L. Song Wu and Eirinie Carson, 6pm, Headlands Center For the Arts (Marin Headlands). One of the best evenings you can have in the Bay. Eat delicious food family-style with all the other fascinating people who have trekked to the Headlands for art and art people, then check out work by current artists in residence L. Song Wu and North Bay writer Eirinie Carson who is working on her third book, exploring her family's postcolonial Caribbean inheritances after coming back to the imperial center. [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event Der Punkest] Exhibition Opening: NO PUNK. NO FUTURE., 6pm, Goethe Institut (SoMa). More punks! It's the fifty year anniversary of being against the man and pro safety pins. Historians of the Bay Area punk scene and German punks in Kiel compare notes, looking at the network of subcultures and the various scenes' lasting impacts on music and culture. [Goethe]
Women’s Basketball Mania! The story of legendary coach Tara VanDerveer, 6pm, Book Society (Elmwood). Sports journalist Michelle Smith and Cal Women's Basketball Head Coach Charmin Smith (wait I just noticed they have the same last name, is this a coincidence or a conspiracy of the hand-eye coordinated?) will talk about a Stanford women's basketball coach, Tara VanDerveer, who is important enough to women's basketball that Smith the former wrote a biography of her. [Book Society]
Merika Goolsby: A Flower Called Orphan Girl, 6pm, Books Inc. (Alameda the Former Peninsula). In this memoir, West Bay local Merika Goolsby shares her lived experience of surviving family separation, foster care and its attendant harms, and being an adoptee. Now a therapist who guides others through understanding their trauma, she asks that we listen to the voices of those who have been churned through a system that is supposed to help kids but too often fails them. [eventbrite]
How to Close a Camp, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). It's great when people give reasons to close immigration camps like: they're dehumanizing, separate families, treat people trying to economically survive as dangerous, and exist as a state of confinement in cruel and unusual conditions. Cool: now do the same, but with prisons. Author Washington will be joined in conversation by journalist Lauren Markham and lawyer Julia Neusner, who have both worked closely with migrant communities and have seen what happens when immigrants are scapegoated. Before you go, read ORB's own pre-vibe report by Megan Wachspress. [luma]
Meet the Author: Cynthia Gómez — Muñeca, 6pm, Main Library OPL (The Lake-ish). So I guess this story set in 1968 Bay Area communities (including Oakland!) is a horror novel because there are hauntings and spooky spells but also a Goodreads reviewer says it's "a shortie patortie revenge story that's also sapphic & witchy," so maybe its horror like Sinners was horror? In which case I'd overcome my “freaked out by the Chuckie poster” lifetime avoidance of scary stories because a "queer, Latine, working class witch who sets out to rescue a bespelled heiress and loses control of her powers and her heart in the process" sounds like a cheerful tale to me, unless there's some kind of ritual heart-eating at the end. Meet the Oakland author, support local writers and stories that transform cultural and gendered traumas through magic at the library. [OPL]
Struga Poetry Evenings, 6pm, Dwinelle (Cal). Look, I don't know anything about Yugoslavian Studies, but this rocks—you can go collectively discuss a been-going-on-for-fifty-plus-years Balkan poetry festival called "Struga Poetry Evenings" on a Thursday. What a time we live in. To prep you're supposed to read a Seamus Heaney speech, an Allen Ginsburg poem, watch a long video, a short one ("If understanding Macedonian is difficult for you, it might still be interesting to skim through just for a look at the landscapes, people, body language, etc"), and a third video described as "very very short" and "pretty adorable," which also: me. [UCB]
Author Talk: Punk and Archiving, 6pm, North Branch (Berkeley). Local punks grow up, make books! Anna Brown, Judith Ann Peraino, and Tom McEnaney, specifically, will talk about punk history and the photographers who helped make the scene. On key visual archivist Murray Bowles: “Finally getting into one of Murray’s pictures…meant that you were in.” Watching the scene makes the scene. [BPL]
[West Bay Bonus Event] The Best Little Whorehouse in the Castro Theatre, 6:30pm, Castro Theatre (The Castro). Dolly Parton famously said to Andy Warhol of her acting career, "I make a better whore than a secretary," so see her at her best in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, with Burt Reynolds on screen too and a live tribute performance before the movie starts (I can't imagine it will be anything other than drag, that would be blasphemy). Wear your best spurs and ten gallon hat and some fake tits for Dolly. [ticketweb]
Wood Street, with post-film discussion, 6:30pm, The New Parkway Theater (Uptown). One more time! Like we said before, this is the movie about this city displacing unhoused Oakland neighbors who made a community together, thanks to local governments dumping people where they thought no one would notice, until it was time to shuffle along again so the Ballers could have a parking lot. One way to notice the beauty of human collectivity against dehumanization is to check out Joel Bailey's artwork; another would be to watch this movie. This screening includes an in-person discussion with director Caron Creighton. [TNP]
[West Bay Bonus Event The Second] Bay Area Music Journalism: Covering A Changing Scene, 7pm, KALW (FiDi). It may be fifty years since punk began, and K-pop may be filling arenas, but people who noodle around on synths and guitars still cluster together to make bands. Talk with local music writers Jeff Chang, Nastia Voynovskaya, and Chris Zaldua about what there is to say about local music nowadays. [eventbrite]
Art Against Brutality, 7pm, Clio’s Books (Grand Lake). Writer Mark Danner and artist Claudia Bernardi talk about murals as social practice, as community arts, and as resistance to violence in communities targeted by state power across Central, South and North America. [eventbrite]
SOLD OUT Changing Gender: Susan Stryker, 7pm, Oakstop - California Ballroom (Downtown). Bay Area Lesbian Archives and Litquake sold the hell out of this conversation between trans scholar Susan Stryker and local legend, filmmaker Cheryl Dunye. I am pretty sure Foucault's mind-blowing (acid) trip in Death Valley will come up as Stryker discusses the transformational work of gender studies and her role in it. [eventbrite]
A Celebration Of The Life And Work Of Debbie Berne And Her Book "COOKBOOKING", 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood). Debbie was so damn talented. I got to work with her on books that she made make sense. Yes, sometimes she'd look at a page and say "Can you put more words here, there's too much blank space" and I'd have to say no Debbie, that's a recipe, it's done now, but I miss her flair for visually cuing hierarchy and flow so much. Authors and editors need designers because reading is a visual process. Cookbooks are one of the genres most beholden to convention but also have exploded into visually sensuous feasts. Think together about cookbooks as visual expressions, as containers for information, as cultural vessels, as Debbie's artform. [Mrs D's]
Brenda Hillman & Donna Masini: An Evening of Poetry, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). Brenda Hillman is launching her new book in Still House in the Desert (Wesleyan Press), a hometown heroine with poems that end like like
the vote is being tallied, the red seeps across the map & drips from the thick finger of Florida into a sea of pre-named storms, & the sea of blood rises, the small barge carrying corpses of fact & dream, their bones wrapped together in newsprint.
With poet Donna Masini, visiting from Far Deepest Eastern Oakland. [Pegasus]
On Call, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). This wasn't sold out when we told you to get tickets for it last week, but now it sure is. Alice Diop is fantastic. And this one is great—I watched it on Mubi, during the height of the pandemic, and I still think about it—but unless you listened to ORB and got your tickets, you'll never know. This is a lesson about doing whatever ORB tells you to do. [bampfa]
Also: Alex Hack—The Black Body and its Many Histories: Corroborating Black Health and the Death of Medgar Evers at Social Sciences Building (Cal) / Anime Club for Teens at Asian Branch OPL (Chinatown) / BTS Army: Forever We Are Young - Film Screening and Conversation with Directors Grace Lee and Patty Ahn at Sutardja Dai Hall, Banatao Auditorium, Room 310 (Berkeley) / Leamos Autoras: La distancia entre nosotros / Reyna Grande at Central Library (Berkeley) / Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Kainoa Gruspe at Anthropology and Art Practice Building (Cal) / John Perkins - The Art of the Steal at Book Passage Ferry Building (Embarcadero) / TIM PRATT: The Jewel and the Comet at Books Inc. Opera Plaza (West Bay) / The Diversity Principle with Law Professor David B. Oppenheimer and Lois Corrin at Tally Ho! Books (Piedmont the Avenue not the Ethnic Enclave)
Friday, September 11
Neighborhood Business Assistance, 12 noon, Eastmont Branch OPL (Eastmont). Make an appointment (plan ahead, they want two days' notice!), and find out how you can make your small local business make more money so you can stick around a while and become part of the neighborhood's habit. [OPL]
Ask Your Area Home Experts, 12 noon, Rockridge Branch OPL (College Ave). Local experts advise on how to own a home in Rockridge: generally, move here thirty years ago, get born rich or lucky, or vote for senior living towers. But maybe they have other ideas, like turning single family housing into co-ops (worth asking!) [OPL]
Conmemoración 11 de Septiembre 1973, 6pm, La Pena, (Oakland part of Berkeley). Take your local Chilean to remember Allende over mulled wine and talk about what happens when the US meddles in democratic countries. Fascism and autocracy and extracted profits, that’s what. [La Pena]
Poetry! 6pm, Bathers Library (Uptown). Tamarack is getting a facelift, so the poets are bathing in your favorite local arts library around the way instead. Come hear co-founder of the New Orleans Poetry Festival and poet Bill Lavender who is in ongoing conversation with Jack Spicer, Greater East Oakland poet Imogen Xtian Smith whose poem “sunday morning malaise” asks “do i just need to get fucked or is it something more” and “are Medusa’s pubes also snakes,” and West Bay’s David Gorin, who curates the Wavemachine backyard readings over there and is a new Stegner fellow. [Google Doc Schedule]
Vivre sa vie, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). 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]
Lit Nights at Xochi vol. 3, 8pm, Cafe Xochi (Eastlake). Love Cafe Xochi and the Eastlake life! Chill in the garden with writers Sean Sanford, Moxie Carlblom, Derrick Carr (who has really good poems in The Adroit Journal and in Muzzle Magazine), and CE Oldham, and host Mikey Gallagher. I'll bet at least one of them will skateboard out of there at the end of the night. [insta]
Also: Erich Auerbach in Exile: Western Philology and History in His Rediscovered Turkish Essays (1938-1947) at Townsend Center (Cal) / Pink Party: A Legally Blonde Preview Night at Book Society (Elmwood) / Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues - Program 17: Family Portraits/Relational Exercises at Shapeshifters Cinema (Jack London Square) / Chulas Fronteras: Narrating Sound and Space on the Border at Morrison Hall (Cal) / Screening: Standing Above the Clouds at EastSide Arts Alliance (Deep East) / Free Family Outdoor Movie Night: GOAT at Environmental Education Center (Tilden Park)
Saturday, September 12
11th Annual Black-Eyed Pea Festival, 9am, Freedom Farmers Market (Temescal). Celebrating Black traditions persisting in Oakland, from black-eyed peas (first domesticated in West Africa) to indigo dyeing (early plantation crop in the Southeast US). Listen to music, meet Black farmers, and be in community. [Omnira Institute]
Alameda Walks: Crown Beach Stories, 9am, Crown Memorial State Beach (The Temporary Island). Walk along the artificially constructed beach, which piled sand on top of naturally occurring mudflats to protect the road people had decided to build on a shoreline (a beach is a process, not a place, Rosanna Xia told us), and learn about sea level rise, erosion, and cascading consequences of human intervention to maintain hardscapes and alter shorelines. [EBRPD]
Discuss New Yorker Short Stories Meeting 15, 10am, Alameda Free Library (Used to Be a Peninsula). As is the fate of all New Yorker magazines, they have piled up accusingly. But you, you will make the time for the voices assembled with care weekly, just you know, a few months late. Read the June fiction issue with all your fellow procrastinators and revive the short story as an art form, and then you can THROW IT AWAY. Ephemera! [eventbrite]
THE BOOKOUT: Block Party Celebration! Storytime, crafts, games, and more, 10:30am, Marcus Books (Longfellow). A celebration of reading and Oakland and Black stories with local literacy org Storyland! Join in for storytime at the blockparty with Mayor Barbara Lee, along with photos and music, braiding and face painting, running around and art-making, and a raffle. [eventbrite]
Open House: Known and Elsewhere Collective / Parapraxis Books, 12 noon, The Psychosocial Foundation / Parapraxis Books (Uptown). Parapraxis has a house! And there's a bookstore in it with all psychoanalytic texts on the shelves. Think about thinking and feeling while listening to a marathon reading from the journal. ORB would never but what do we know about the human psyche. [insta]
Fruitvale Branch is 60! ¡La Biblioteca Fruitvale cumple 60 años!, 12:30pm, Fruitvale Branch OPL (Fruitvale). The library says: celebrate "the first Spanish-language library in the nation" with a 60th bday party for the Fruitvale Branch! They seem to be following the ORB policy of no readings at parties, because you can twist balloons, get your face painted, hear music, but there's no mention of books in the run of show at all. You can take an ORB-approved break and just go have some silent sustained reading time though. It is a library after all. [OPL]
HELLA HYPHY BALL ~ 5 Year Anniversary, 2pm, Lake Merritt Amphitheater (Adams Point). This is going to be hot. It's ballroom but in the sunshine, with competitions for best Y2K streetwear, best streetwalker aesthetic, best cowboy and reverse cowgirl, and for the big money, embodying place in your vibe, aesthetic, and presentation. Vogue it up until the sun sets! [facebook]
Gallery Walk with Preparator Supervisor and Taxidermist, Alicia Goode, 2pm, OMCA (The Lake). Members only, come hear about taxidermy and dioramas. So the Museum of Mary Roach event later today is sold out; maybe she'll be lurking in the crowd on this tour before her Rockridgian fans assemble, seems like her jam. [OMCA]
Tiny Fest 2026, 3pm, Chabot Regional Park (The Hills). Nature and art and music and poems and whimsy and wonder, and a campout if you so choose. [secretparty]
Antiphony in San Francisco, 4pm, Et Al (The Mission). Antiphony is a Bay Area-based journal and press that's a home for poems that push in the edges, formally inventive and in conversation with language itself. Tonight, in that committed tradition, hear David Buuck (poet, editor of Tripwire, hoster of poetry readings in his kitchen), Carrie Hunter ("To ignore the rules of poetry. / No message beyond 'this is me and I’m poetry.'”), alex cruse ("i body negatively / i am pregnant with my wife;/ a newborn mother" in Baest), and in honor of the new chapbook Into the Bowels by Nikki Dasos published by Antiphony and studded with pearls and peaches. [insta]
Modern Times, 4pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Oh, you need someone to tell you what Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times is? Sure, I'll just be the nine millionth person to praise it, because you can't operate a search bar, or open a book about film history. Let me get right on that. [bampfa]
[West Bay Bonus Event] guttural scream at the sea, 4:30pm, Somewhere (in the Presidiooooooo). Saw this on a pole, here you are. This is what it sounds like, which is choral, throaty, beyond language, and collective. Go scream out the gunk of the year with five hundred close friends on a very Bay Area wavelength. Make some noise, as they say. [particful]
SOLD OUT The Mobile Museum of Mary Roach, 5pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Mary Roach is a collector of fascinating facts, strange objects, and subscriptions to ORB. In other words, a woman of excellent taste. If you got a ticket, you'd be there, but you didn't. Don't worry, she's around, and if you run into our local science explainer at Clio's or other bookish corners of town, maybe you can ask what's in her pockets and she'll tell you about it. [luma]
Hike and Sip: A Night of Redwoods and Stars, 5pm, Chabot Space and Science Center (The Hills). Big tall trees and far away balls of fire and you, beer in one hand and a telescope in the other. The wind has swept away the fog so you might actually get to see something but don't worry redwoods, the creeks will be full and running hard soon. [ebparks]
Launch Party continued: Parapraxis Issue 08, 7pm, Thee Stork Club (Uptown). Test the theories about group dynamics and psychology that are the theme of this issue at a bar. Notice how the people flock on the ground, observe the crows doing the same above. [insta]
Native American Health Center Powwow, 7pm, Merritt College (Leona Heights). If you liked There There — and enough people did that Tommy Orange could afford to move back to Oakland — go to this powwow in Oakland, see it for yourself. Eat some frybread and enjoy the jingle dancers. [News from Native California]
Bricolage at Clio's, 7pm, Clio’s Books (Grand Lake). Two short films connecting ancient texts with Oakland through bricolage. Enjoy a ninety minute break in between to talk about experimental film over a cocktail, then dive back in. [eventbrite]
Taxi Driver, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). DeNiro as Travis Bickle is talking to you. Is he an incel avant la lettre? Is it a seventies Vietnam movie? Is New York the greatest city in the world? Everyone has already said all the interesting things about this movie, but happy fiftieth birthday to a movie a lot of people saw and were like "wow, that is a good movie" when it came out, and probably still see it and say that. [bampfa]
Also: Milton's Paradise Lost: Four Week Seminar at Clio’s Books (Grand Lake) / Club de Lectura en Español: El Abogado y la Señora por Liano at Fruitvale Branch OPL (Deep East) / Pim Techamuanvivit - Cooking Thai at Ferry Building (Embarcadero) / Moby Dick Marathon 2026 at San Francisco Maritime Museum (West Bay) / What Can Beexwax Do for You? Learn How to Make Resuable Cloth Beeswax Wraps. at Manor Branch Library (San Leandro) / Parks and Community Resource Fair - Richmond at Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline (Point Richmond) / Jason Dove Mark - The Earth Said Remember Me at Book Passage Corte Madera (North Bay) / Albert Flynn DeSilver & Kim Addonizio with Danny Caron - Some Void & Exit Opera at Book Passage Corte Madera (North Bay) / Babylon Salon Fall 2026 Performance at The Sycamore (West Bay) / [West Bay Bonus Event] Samar Reading with Sara Borjas, Nathalie Khankan, and Jason Bayani at Kearny Street Workshop (SoMa) / Safe Haven: Open Mic Night at 2727 California (Berkeley)
Sunday, September 13
Any Birds Around?, 9am, Tilden Nature Area (Berkeley Hills). Well, are there? Report back. [EBRPD]
Sunday Stroll: Sibley, 9am, Sibley Staging Area (Skyline Blvd) (The Hills). Walk on an ancient volcano, or read about it if you prefer your walks to be of the mental venturing kind. [EBRPD]
Sita Singh's INDIGO HANDS, 3:30pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood). South Asian American picture book author Sita Singh comes to town to share her all-ages book telling the story of indigo, which before it was a plantation crop in the Carolinas that shaped the Gullah Geechee community, was a plant grown for its dye properties in India. And then it made blue jeans. Full California circle happening with botanical dyeing this week. [Mrs D's]
Danton’s Death, 3:30pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). A documentary by Alice Diop about a young Black actor from the same region of the racially and class segregated Parisian suburbs she grew up in, following his struggles to get serious acting work even after training at the finest schools. If what you want after one movie is more movie, stay for her short-ish film on Black masculinity: Towards Tenderness. Diop will be there and it's NOT sold out yet so get in there too! [BAMPFA]
Movie Night: Incident at Restigouche, 6:30pm, Moments Co-op (Downtown). Some people are into documentaries, and for them, this is a good week, because here's another one: the 1984 documentary Incident at Restigouche directed by Alanis Obomsawin. Are all Canadians named Alanis? Are only Canadians named Alanis? This particular Alanis is a filmmaker of Abenaki descent who makes films about First Nations people and this one is about fishing rights and salmon and Indigenous treaties being violated by the state, which, typical. Wear a mask they ask, stay to chat after. [insta]
New York, New York, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). This is a film by Martin Scorsese that, uh, well, it is a film by him, an effort to blend the glamour of 1940s Hollywood with the grit of 1970s New York City. It's where that song comes from, and it sits in his filmography right between two movies that were some of the most celebrated movies of all time, and, by contrast, this one is not one of the most celebrated movies of all time. On paper, maybe, it should work—Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro? Directed by Scorsese?—but everyone hated it when it came out, even though it is, at worst, a really strange and fascinating failure. If it helps, when you watch it, tell yourself that everyone make it is fucking each other on comically enormous piles of cocaine, because that's a mild exaggeration of what was happening when they made it. [bampfa]
Also: Crime & Bubbles at Book Society (College Ave) / Tricia Hellman Gibbs, Avery Hellman, Jay Blakesberg and Michael Shapiro - Hardly Strictly Bluegrass at 25 at Book Passage Corte Madera (North Bay)