Culture
On Saturday, Youth Uprising, a not-for-profit organization that develops young leaders, celebrated its third annual For A Safe Town (FAST) festival in East Oakland in an effort to promote peace. Bounce houses, basketball tournaments, skating demos, DJs, and the savory smells of a free BBQ chicken lunch attracted a couple hundred people from the community.
The smoky-sweet scent of barbeque wafted over College Avenue on Sunday during the fourth annual Rockridge Out and About Festival, as Oakland residents turned out in droves, despite the blazing hot sun, to sample local businesses’ culinary and artisanal talents.
Saturday’s sunny skies made for good weather by any standard, and in the calm waters between Treasure Island and Yerba Buena, it was a perfect day for a dragon boat race. Watch the video of the Bay Area’s 15th annual Dragon Boat Festival this weekend. It was the largest event of its kind in the country.
Organic tofu burritos, newly smoked sausages, cold beer and popcorn—the vendors were not serving these at a famers’ market, but at the second night of the Oakland Underground Film Festival, which on Friday turned into a combination of live music, improvised video projection and outdoor film screenings at the Linden Street Brewery.
An aquarium, everyone knows, is a glass case that holds fish. A terrarium is the same thing without the water, so it holds plants, along with the occasional lizard or tarantula. What, then, might be found inside an eight-foot, 3,000-pound sphere called the Wonderarium? Two Oakland artists are trying to decide—and when they do, they want to put it in the middle of Lake Merritt.
In some cities, the annual United Nations’ International Day of Peace on September 21, is marked by large vigils and even ceasefires. For Oakland, which officially celebrated Peace Day for the first time this week, the occasion was a smaller and more musical affair.
This weekend, Oakland movie theaters will host body slamming Bolivian women, an afro-sporting high school funk band, and break dancing. It’s all part of the Oakland Underground Film Festival, opening Thursday night at the Grand Lake Theater.
Oaklanders got down to live music this weekend at the first installment of this fall’s “Sundays in the Redwoods” concert series at Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park.
The gloomy weather and a short-lived drizzle couldn’t deter the eaters and drinkers on Sunday afternoon as they sampled gourmet delicacies, fine wines and desserts on the rooftop of the Kaiser Center in Downtown Oakland for the 28th annual “A Taste of California—Up on the Roof.”