This is the Oakland blog for people living out loud. True to the Oakbook philosophy, we’ll tell you where to go, what to do, and what’s really going down in the town and around the Bay. From parties to films, peace protests to flag football, if there's a there there, we'll blog it.
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While national poetry month is tucked into 2008 history, poems have been heavy in the Bay Area air for the last few weeks as poets and spoken word artists have been opening their notebooks and spitting verses on stages across the area. Oakland, Berzerkeley and San Fran all recently held their qualifiers for this year’s national slam. The API set repped the page hard at this past weekend’s feature showcase at Eastside Arts Alliance, and tonight Poetry Diversified Oakland features the Wordslanger-Ayodele Nzinga.
Ayodele is like the Muhammad Ali of poetry-the people champ. For the last 7 years she’s been using poetry, especially Shakespeare, to teach urban youth over at the Prescott Joseph Center in West Oakland the ways of the world, from adapting Romeo and Juliet into a coming of age hood tale to remixing the Merchant of Venice with hip hop lyrics.
Tonight the poet “most likely to shatter your illusions of what poetry is, can be, will do, has done” will be holding down the stage with original verses and her own very original performance style. And I know it’s poetry and lyrics we’re talking about here, but sometimes some words just can’t do other words justice, so check the video of a set recorded in West Oakland recently. Word up. -kwanRead the rest of this entry »
A guitar, a mic and a head full of songs combined with a few beers and a reasonably attentive audience-it’s such a simple formula really, and that’s what makes it so damned hard to pull off.
Before the digitization of all things melodic turned everyone and their momma’s into laptop producers, the easiest way to jump into the industry was as a singer/songwriter: get a halfway decent guitar, a few heartfelt lyrics and a couple of people to listen to you and boom-you’re a musician.
But while a hand full of newbies have successfully pulled off the Joni Mitchell/Traci Chapman steez, the road to Bob Dylanhood is littered with discarded guitar cases, cried in beers and song lyrics scribbled on barroom napkins. But for singer/songwriters Emily King and Anthony David, playing tonight at Q’s lounge in Jack London Square, the road has put them on the highway to success and a possible place among the coffeeshop greats.
22 year old Emily King is a bit of a musical prodigy. After leaving school at 16 because classes were moving too slowly, the ambitious New Yorker got her GED and set out to start her own musical movement that so far has led to international acclaim and a 2007 Grammy nomination for her debut album “East Side Story”. From the beginning, King’s music-nimble guitar playing under soul, jazz and pop melodies that lives somewhere between Corinne Bailey Rae, Norah Jones and Mary J Blige, has been drawn from her life story, independent ideology and desire to make a difference in the world. “I think music is such a revolutionary thing” she says “and that’s what it should be.”
Atlanta’s Anthony David isn’t necessarily out to start a revolution, he just wants to make some good music. “Sometimes (my music) is escapism, sometimes it’s sympathy or emotion,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s grounded in the present and some times it’s taking you away from it.” The modern day troubadour calls his style “Millennium Blues” because of the way it “all goes back to the blues. The lyrics, the music, my using everything from acoustic to hip-hop, the story telling…all of it connects through the blues like a bridge.”
A product of Atlanta’s singer songwriter and spoken word scenes, David is signed to close friend India.Arie’s Soulbird Music label and has worked with some of the ATL’s most prolific performers. When he straps on his guitar southern influences drip from his music like molasses. His guitar playing on his new album “Acey Ducey” has a relaxed, “on the front porch” ease to it, and his lyrical honesty paints a picture of a man who’s comfortable in his skin and with what he has to offer.
David’s songs are impressive without trying to impress. From the duet “Words,” that reveals his musical relationship with Arie, to the “Red Clay Chronicles,” a candid depiction of hustling and city life to “Smoke One,” an ode to kicking back with friends-David says this relaxed, no frills approach to music is the only way he’d ever think of creating.When the young revolutionary from back east meets the laid back southern crooner tonight over dueling guitars, it should be a great meeting of the musical minds as well as an instructional session on how to make this deceptively simple style sound as sweet as we all know it can.-kwan
Tonight Moe’s Books in Berkeley hosts a reading by two prominent local mystery writers:
Domenic Stansberry is an Edgar Award winning novelist known for his dark, innovative crime novels, many of which are set in and around San Francisco. His most recent, The Ancient Rain, takes place in the aftermath of 9/ll, when a federal prosecutor re-opens murder charges in a politically charged slaying that occurred some thirty years before. The ghosts of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army–the group that kidnapped Patti Hearst–haunt the streets of San Francisco, intermingling with contemporary demons in this chilling political novel. The Ancient Rain is the third installment of the critically acclaimed series featuring North Beach detective Dante Mancuso. “This brilliantly imagined version of real events packs an emotional wallop genre fiction rarely delivers.” (Kirkus, in a starred review of The Ancient Rain.)
Berkeley author Cornelia Read knows old-school WASP culture firsthand, having been born into the tenth (and last) generation of her mother’s family to live on Oyster Bay’s Centre Island. She was subsequently raised near Big Sur by divorced hippie-renegade parents. Her childhood mentors included Sufis, surfers, single moms, Black Panthers, Ansel Adams, draft dodgers, striking farmworkers, and Henry Miller’s toughest ping-pong rival. From this acclaimed author of A Field of Darkness comes another compelling novel, The Crazy School, which again features the acerbic and memorable voice of ex-debutante Madeline Dare. Madeline Dare has finally escaped rust-belt Syracuse, New York, for the lush Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts. After her husband’s job offer falls through, Maddie signs on as a teacher at the Santangelo Academy, a boarding school for disturbed teenagers. Behind the academy’s ornate gates, she discovers a disturbing realm where students and teachers alike must submit to the founder’s bizarre therapeutic regimen. Cut off from the outside world, Maddie must join forces with a small band of the school’s most violently rebellious students-kids whose troubled grip on reality may well prove to be her only chance of salvation. Read the rest of this entry »
Berkeley author Michael Chabon (that’s “shea as in Shea Stadium, bon as in Bon Jovi”), has had pretty much the ideal writer’s life right from the word go: First novel published while still in an MFA program, second novel turned into a film starring Kirk Douglas, critical acclaim all over the place, international bestsellers up the wazoo, Pulitzer Prize firmly in his back pocket, etc. etc. etc.
But the man has earned his praise. His writing is expansive and metaphorical, wordy without being pretentious. and just damned good reading. In his newest novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the fledgling state of Israel has collapsed in 1948 and the Jewish refugees settled in The Federal District of Sitka. For sixty years the refugees and their descendants have lived in this temporary Federal haven but Sitka is soon going to revert back to Alaskan control. The novel’s hero, Homicide Detective Meyer Landsman, has too much on his plate to worry about the upcoming Reversion; his neighbor has just been found murdered and he’s in love with his new supervisor.
Chabon reads tonight just as the Policeman’s Union is released in paperback and the Coen Brothers start working on the film version. Read the rest of this entry »
Maybe it’s something in the Bay Area water that’s made the region such fertile soil for sultry soul, R&B and funk singers over the years, but whatever it is-from the Pointer Sisters to Sugar Pie DeSanto to the current crop of soul, hip hop and rock influenced musicians-there’s no denying that the Bay’s soul.
MoeSoul and Femi are two of the shining stars in a galaxy of talented but largely underground singers hitting up spoken word spots and jazz joints around the area. The Oakland divas to be have been putting in work for years, gigging from Jack London to Lagos and playing gigs with everyone from Les Nubian to Nelson Mandela.
MoeSoul is more of the straight ahead R&B singer. With sweet songs of lost loves, found loves and all the holdovers in between, she adds a moving soundtrack to the art getting busy. Femi’s music is a bit harder and belies her African and Puerto Rican heritage as she blends soul and hip hop with hints of salsa and rock-a little bit Mary J Blige rolled in with a little Tribe Called Quest and Celia Cruz.
Catch both singers performing with a live band tonight as part of Maxwell’s R&B Friday’s series. Proof that the funky legacy continues.
R & B Fridays w/MoeSoul and Femi
$10 presale, $15 at the door
9pm
Maxwell’s Restaurant & Lounge
341 13th Street, Oakland
(510)839-6169 www.maxwellslounge.com
As far back as we can remember there’s been a mystical aura around art and the people who create it. Artists and creative types have alway held a special place in our hearts for their free spirits, addictions to creativity and willingness to live so close to the poverty line in pursuit of their passions.
But Chi Kung practitioners Kaleo and Elise Ching have a different idea. They believe that we all possess that creative spark and use it all the time, from skipping down the street to singing our favorite song, however off key. In their book Chi and Creativity: Vital Energy and Your Inner Artist, the two draw on everything from acupressure and breathing techniques to Chi Kung movement and meditation to show how we can all harness our creative selves and be more artistic in our everyday lives-whether painting the next Mona Lisa or painting the garage. They’ll demonstrate exorcises from the book and sign copies tonight at Pegasus Books. Read the rest of this entry »
From Oz to Astrology, murder mysteries to musical hipsters, the second week of 08 is looking pretty good for the fun obsessed.Indulge all you want. -Kwan
Friday, Jan. 11
Welcome to Oz
In late 2007 Clean Skateshop and Sense6 Recording got together to form the Oakland Zoo Krew, an arts and events company focusing on urban arts and skater culture. The crew has a full slate of goodness planned for the new year starting tonight with Clean’s already infamous 2nd Friday’s Art show.Tonight’s show features photos and art by Joe Brook and Dylan Maddox of Slap Magazine and tunes by E.T.C and resident beast master DJ Ooh Child.
If you feel like doing something artsy this weekend, you might want to check out a play staged by the Bay Area Repertory Theater at the Milonga Casquelord Center for the Arts in downtown Oakland.
Director James Brooks has adapted Terrence Tyrie Ivory’s tale of coal miners in a segregated town in West Virginia for the stage — In the Midst of Them is a story of a man trying to create a labor union while fighting to keep his family together.
“It’s based on a true story shared by the author’s grandmother about living in coal mines,” says Mr. Brooks. “It talks about love, betrayal, alcoholism, and what coal miners had to go through. It’s got all the slices of life that we, as humans, have to go through.”
Mr. Brooks chose to work with this play because it reminded him of what he saw as a youngster growing up in Richmond, Virginia, where many residents worked in steel mills and on tobacco plantations.
He is one of the founders of the four-year-old Bay Area Rep, a low-key group that’s best known for the play Meeting, a fictional account of the meeting of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
The founders of the Rep have the experience needed — about a hundred years between the three of them — to put up a good show. And if you want to win two free tickets to watch In the Midst of Them, write to editors@novometro.com.
What: In the Midst of Them When: January 11 to January 20, 2008 (except for January 14th); Shows at 8 pm. On Sundays at 3 pm also. Where:Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice Street.
How Much: $20 in advance and $25 at the door — unless you win free tickets by writing to us as soon as you read this piece.
The forecast over the weekend is promising fine weather conditions for ducks, otters and other downpour loving creatures.For the non web footed among us, those brave enough to brave the weekend weather will find tons of events to kick off the new year right.From art openings tonight at Swarm and Joyce Gordon Galleries to Ledisi’s final performance at Yoshi’s Sunday evening.Grab an umbrella and some waterproof boots and get busy!
Hey,when was the last time you checked out the Public Library?If you’re like some of us (but, ahem, no one at the Novometro offices, of course) you’ve got at least a couple of really overdue books that have been borrowing space on your bookshelf for quite some time.If this little detail is what’s kept you from getting lost in the dusty OPL stacks then you might want to head to your neighborhood branch sometime before Dec. 14th-the last day of the Library’s Fine’s and Lost Book Forgiveness program.
“The Forgiveness Campaign is our pre-holiday gift to our community,” Carmen Martinez, Oakland’s Library Director said in a statement.From the overdue to the hopelessly lost, as long as it’s not from the Tool Library, everything will be forgiven.Reps from the library say the amnesty program is meant to encourage children and families to use more of the library’s resources. Just go to any branch location and all fees will be taken off immediately, no questions asked.
For more info call 510 238-3134, or see the Oakland Public Library’s Web site: ww.oaklandlibrary.org
Domenic Stansberry
Berkeley author 
Berkeley author Michael Chabon (that’s “shea as in Shea Stadium, bon as in Bon Jovi”), has had pretty much the ideal writer’s life right from the word go: First novel published while still in an MFA program, second novel turned into a film starring Kirk Douglas, critical acclaim all over the place, international bestsellers up the wazoo, Pulitzer Prize firmly in his back pocket, etc. etc. etc.
As far back as we can remember there’s been a mystical aura around art and the people who create it. Artists and creative types have alway held a special place in our hearts for their free spirits, addictions to creativity and willingness to live so close to the poverty line in pursuit of their passions.
