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When the Shotgun Players staged Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” about England’s bloody War of the Roses, they did it without Elizabethan costumes, stage props, elaborate sets, or even seats for the playgoers. Makeshift propane lamps lit the stage – a windy parking lot at King Middle School in North Berkeley. Audience members perched on plastic, five-gallon buckets or tried to get comfortable on the concrete for the nearly three-hour production. Actors wore a random assortment of street clothes, which the audience…
Dia De Los Muertos Rises From the Dead
Safeway supermarkets plans to demolish its Pleasant Valley shopping mall — which at 185,000 square feet is about half the area of the Great Pyramid at Giza — and replace it with one almost two-thirds larger. The new mall would be 304,000 square feet with 1,066 parking spaces, or 50 percent more spaces. Neighborhood critics say the new mall, which would include Long’s Drug and other retailers, would be too big, attract too much traffic and therefore endanger pedestrians accustomed…
By SHILANDA WOOLRIDGE It was rockin’ till the cops came knockin’.
When Mike Kim created the Oakland Facebook page, he didn’t think many people would pay attention to it. “I thought it would be, like, 30 or 40 of my friends,” said Kim. But that was before it went viral.
A number of Oakland artists are trying to pass down the tradition of screen printed posters to a younger generation – including its political history. Melanie Cervantes, Jesus Barraza and Favianna Rodriguez take on the challenge.
Ever since I moved to Berkeley from Japan a year ago, my friend, Josh Allen keeps asking. “How can you survive without a car?” Allen, an associate movie producer, who drives his three-year old Mercedes convertible everywhere he goes, will never understand. But those who ride the buses and need the buses do. AC Transit serves more than 230,000 of us a day. When Privately owned Key System started its streetcar and bus services in East Bay in 1903,…
The Morning Shift. The flat, wide stretch of Telegraph Avenue that runs through the Koreatown-Northgate district is mostly empty when I arrive at Mama Buzz café a few minutes after 7:00 a.m. A man pushes a shopping cart and some bags of bottles and cans down the sidewalk. A lone woman loads up her car with groceries in the parking lot of Koreana Plaza Market. One helmeted biker has already beat me to the door of Mama Buzz; he tries…
Unbeknownst to many, Oakland has a secret: it’s bursting at the seams with women who love women. According to the Gay and Lesbian Atlas, which used information compiled from the 2000 U.S. census, Oakland contains the highest concentration of lesbian couples of any city in the nation and has the second highest number of same-sex couple households– right behind San Francisco. So even as the biggest Bay Area events of Gay Pride Day will take place in San Francisco this…