Category Archives: Events
Berkeley ramps up Dìa de los Muertos celebrations
This year, if there’s one thing Dìa de Los Muertos in the Gourmet Ghetto promises not to be, it’s low-key. “We are going all out,” said organizer Lisa Bullwinkel. The fact that the event will coincide with November 2nd’s Off The Grid, Berkeley’s popular weekly street-food fest — and takes place right next to the food trucks — should ensure a lively and engaged crowd.
Dìa de Los Muertos celebrates those who have passed on, and it has been marked in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto for the past two years. The additions to the festivities this year include interactive craft stalls, a beer and wine stand, and the Con Permiso Mariachi band. A community altar, or ofrenda, is being created for and by community members who may bring photos or stories of their loved ones, candles, breads, or flowers to add to the altar.
Masked participants at last year's Dia de los Muertos celebration in Berkeley
Berkeley author explores the tragedy of Jonestown
Julia Scheeres was only eleven in 1978 when 918 people in Jonestown committed mass suicide. She learned of the episode when she spotted her family’s copies of Time and Newsweek, both of which featured cover photos of bloated bodies rotting in the jungle. Scheeres’ parents quickly realized the images were not appropriate for young children and spirited away the magazines.
It was not until 30 years later, when Scheeres was working on a novel about a charismatic preacher in Indiana, that she thought again of Jim Jones, the Pentecostal leader of the People’s Temple and the man who created Jonestown in Guyana and induced so many of his followers to kill themselves. Jones was from Indiana and Scheeres googled him to see if there was some aspect of his life that might inform her fiction.
She found herself at the Jonestown Institute website and started to poke around. Soon Scheeres was reading FBI documents about Jonestown, as well as letters and diaries from those who lived and died there. Scheeres, who had herself spent time in a strict, religious reform school (which her bestselling memoir, Jesus Land chronicles) was fascinated by the stories. They resonated with her. … Continue reading »
Food Day: Growing a movement around what we eat
Can Food Day, which is on October 24th, do for the growing food movement what Earth Day did for the nascent environmental movement back in 1970?
The organizers, the Center for Science in the Public Interest in D.C., certainly hope so. A national, grassroots campaign, Food Day is designed to celebrate what we eat while drawing our attention to the need to overhaul this country’s food system from farm to fork. In this way it is similar to Earth Day which sparked widespread interest in the fragile nature of our planet.
Events planned for Monday, including in Berkeley and around the Bay Area, will highlight the good, bad, and ugly of the way we consume food in this country.
Simply put, how we grow, transport, process, market, and eat is not sustainable for the environment or our health, said Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of CSPI and the creator of Food Day in a recent piece for The Atlantic. Dietary diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks are rising at alarming rates. Industrially raised meat sucks up energy, pollutes the land and water, and is cruel to beast and worker alike.
Even in places like Berkeley where local, seasonal, organic, sustainable, and fresh food is available in abundance, too many people lack access to good grub and/or go hungry or malnourished. … Continue reading »
Town-gown panel to examine Berkeley and sustainability
The second event in The University and the City: Ideas for Partnership, a fall series of evening discussions, will be held tonight on The Environmentally Sustainable City.
Jason Mark, Editor of Earth Island Journal, with moderate a panel of Timothy Burroughs, Climate Action Coordinator for the City of Berkeley, Lisa McNeilly, Director of Sustainability, UC Berkeley, Jason Trager, Environmental Sustainability Director, Graduate Student Assembly, and Claire Evans, lead coordinator of the UC Berkeley Compost Alliance.
Tonight’s panel will focus on … Continue reading »
The lives of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe in Thousand Oaks
Berkeley’s Thousand Oaks neighborhood and its environs are not only regarded as a swell place to live — they have a rich history too. No doubt the two are connected. Tomorrow night, Alan Leventhal, a tribal ethnohistorian specializing in the Ohlone will speak at the invitation of the Thousand Oaks Neighborhood Association about the lives of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe who lived in Thousand Oaks.
The TONA General Meeting, which will feature the talk and an accompanying slideshow, takes … Continue reading »
Johnny Depp and Tom Waits storm through Berkeley
Berkeley got a taste of Hollywood Monday night when actor Johnny Depp and musician Tom Waits rolled into town.
The pair started their night eating at Prospect restaurant in San Francisco, where they got to sample the fare cooked by the newly appointed chef Pamela Mazzola (Depp had the duck.) Then Depp went to UC Berkeley for a Q&A session about his new film, The Rum Diary. It was a private, invitation-only screening. Journalist Ben Fong-Torres interviewed Depp and the director Bruce Robinson. (See video above.)
After the 9:30 pm discussion, Depp and Waits went to the Shattuck Down Low. The bar served a special “Hunter’s Punch,” (named after Hunter S. Thompson, a central figure in the movie) made with Sailor Jerry rum.
Depp’s movements in the Bay Area were tracked via Twitter (including some tweets from this reporter, who happened to be eating at the same restaurant in San Francisco).
RT @Frannydink: Johnny Depp may be expected at UC Berkeley tonite for Q & A about Rum Diary but he is at Prospect restaurant now w/Tom Waits (around 7:45 pm) … Continue reading »
Urban farm Urban Adamah celebrates the harvest
Urban Adamah, a community organic farm and Jewish environmental education center on Parker and San Pablo, celebrated the holiday of Sukkot on Sunday. There was music, yoga in the sun, a food festival, and good eats. People were asked to bring a can of food to donate to local food banks. Sukkot is a celebration of the harvest.
Crime (mystery that is) flourishes in Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay area, with its picturesque hills and atmospheric fog, has long been a favorite locale for mystery writers.
From the first known Bay Area mystery, The Mysteries and Miseries of San Francisco, published anonymously in 1853, to Dashiell Hammett’s genre-busting 1930 The Maltese Falcon, to Susan Dunlop’s series on Berkeley police officer Jill Smith, the Bay Area has offered fertile ground for stories of murder and mayhem.
There have been at least 1,800 mysteries and detective novels set in the greater nine-county Bay Area region, according to Randal Brandt, the editor of the online bibliography, Golden Gate Mysteries, and co-curator of a new show at UC Berkeley’s Doe Library, “Bullets across the Bay: The San Francisco Bay Area in Crime Fiction.” Writers have not only taken advantage of the weather and signature landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge and Campanile in their books, but of historical events like the 1906 earthquake and fire, the region’s various World Fairs, and notorious murder cases, like the Zodiac killer, he said.
To celebrate the San Francisco and the East Bay’s role in numerous mysteries, UC Berkeley will dedicate its Oct. 14 Story Hour series to mystery writers. A panel of authors, including Lucha Corpi, Eddie Muller, and Kelli Stanley, will talk about the region’s influence on the genre. Janet Randolph will moderate the discussion, which will take place from 4 to 6 pm at 190 Doe, right across from the Morrison Reading Room in the Doe Library. There will be a gallery talk with the curators at 3 pm. … Continue reading »
Of course you want to build your own aerial drone
Build your own biology lab, make foam swords, devise your ingenious escape the MacGyver way, learn about honey harvesting… these are just a handful of the experiences from Berkeley makers you could have at this Sunday’s East Bay Mini Maker Faire, to be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the campus of Park Day School in the Temescal district of Oakland.
Among the 125 makers, performers, crafters, presenters and vendors at the Faire, are a couple of dozen Berkeleyans: among them, Chris Anderson is showing unmanned aerial vehicles you can make in your own garage, Pioneers in Engineering are banging the drum for their new robotics competition (Berkeleyside covered the last one in April), the Fixit Clinic is leading “guided disassembly of your broken stuff”, and Adrian Freed will show you how to build interactive, touch-sensitive surfaces using conductive paper and origami. … Continue reading »
Wall Street protests come to Berkeley
By Judith Scherr
A movement to fight corporate power that began with Occupy Wall Street reached Berkeley Saturday with some 200 people converging around noon outside the downtown Bank of America to plan an October 15 “occupation” of a site in Berkeley.
Students piling up debt, retirees on fixed income, homeless people, the unemployed and underemployed were among those in the crowd. Diane Tober had a particular reason to be there. Her home in Lafayette is in foreclosure, with an auction date slated for October 21. Tober holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, but lost the job she needed to make her mortgage payments. She said Countrywide was the original lender, but now the Bank of America holds the loan.
“The whole process is torture,” said Tober, who moved her family to Berkeley while continuing efforts to save her house. “It’s torture on me. It’s torture on my children. It’s torture on 4.5 million Americans.”
Francis Grinnon is a retired telephone worker with the Communications of America Retired Members Council. “Our priorities are all messed up,” said Grinnon. “We’re spending trillions of dollars on wars, trillions of dollars for bank bailouts, when they gambled and they cheated and they speculated, and we’re supposed to pay for this at the same time they want to cut one-to-two trillion dollars of Medicare, MediCal, Social Security, teachers… All the money going to the 1 percent and not the 99 percent is unsustainable.”
Much of the noontime meeting was taken up with a lively discussion about whether the “occupation” should begin immediately or if it should wait until October 15 – and where it should be held. The group voted to compromise: plan the October 15 occupation, but support the handful of people who wanted to begin camping at the Bank of America immediately. The site of the larger occupation is still to be determined, with some believing that the B of A is an appropriate target, but others arguing that a park would allow for more people. … Continue reading »
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