Culture
Oakland’s holiday kids’ charity needs toys — lots of toys. This year’s Toy Drive, a city program that provides low-income families gifts for their children during the holiday season, has received more than 2,000 petitions. Its organizers expect this number to quadruple over the next few days.
The Oakland School for the Arts (OSA) Chamber Choir will tour in New Orleans in April 2012.
Oakland North caught up with The California Honeydrops to talk about their unique soulful gospel, second line New Orleans-style second line jazz, blues, swing and R&B sound, how they got their start playing at BART stations, and to confess that they love Oakland.
Occupy protesters throughout the nation managed to create an informational campaign that went globally viral for months. Now, as activists scramble to build a phase two, a look at the creative legacy of Occupy 1.0 shows how Bay Area artists helped develop its artistic language.
The morning light came up around them by degrees. No one was still; there were shaking maracas, beating drums, last-minute adjustments to pieces larger than an Alexander McQueen headdress. They moved their bodies in Mayan tradition—dancing as a form of prayer. Nearly 2000 Catholic worshipers gathered at East Oakland’s St. Louis Bertrand Church Saturday morning for a six mile pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Christ the Light, near Lake Merrit.
Families flocked to the 12th annual Comcast America’s Children’s Holiday parade, lining Broadway from 20th to 11th Streets and stretching all the way to Lake Merritt, where a short while earlier, a religious processional had brought walkers from East Oakland to the the Cathedral of Christ the Light.
The Nightcap is a series that features a favorite Oakland drinking establishment every Friday afternoon. This week, it’s Heart and Dagger Saloon, a beer and a shot, rock ‘n’ roll bar in the Grand Lake area.
As a growing number of Oakland residents embrace urban farming—including the raising of chickens, goats and pigs in their back yards—the city planning commission is investigating the trend’s potentially negative impacts on the surrounding community.
On Sunday morning at the Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, the sounds of high-pitched singing, a ringing organ and a mumbling congregation filled the huge cathedral as people tried to catch on to the new version of the Catholic Mass. Sunday, also the first day of Advent, was the first time the updated Mass text was used at English-speaking Catholic churches across the world.