Culture
by ISABEL ESTERMAN Inside Oakland’s Albo African Gift shop, at the corner of Alcatraz and Telegraph, a deep herbal aroma wafts from a row of colorful bottles labeled ‘frankincense.’ Ethiopian Singer Hamelmal Abate’s mournful vibrato pours out of the stereo, crooning over an incongruously lively beat, while the store’s owner, Genet Asrat, sits behind the counter, her black sweater brightened by a bold patterned scarf with a yellow border. The phone rings nearly continuously, and Asrat switches back and forth…
By MARTIN RICARD There’s an invisible line on West MacArthur Boulevard that divides it these days into two different worlds. On one side of Telegraph Avenue, in the up-and-coming Temescal district, the corridor is full of activity. Up near Broadway and Piedmont Avenue, a new Kaiser facility is being erected, which once built, will literally become a beacon of light for that part of North Oakland. On the other side, a lone church shares another two blocks with a dilapidated…
by SAMSON REINY A few times a year, Liz Maxwell drives from her home in Rockridge up to Calistoga, in the Napa Valley. For the past 40 years, she has walked the scenic little town for inspiration. She’ll bring a point-and-shoot camera and snap everything around her. “It might be a cracked road, moss growing on rock, or the patterns that are left on a wall from dead ivy leaves, they all give me ideas,” she says. But sometimes she…
by KRISTINE WONG The first time Amie Kim heard traditional Korean drumming, the beats went straight to her heart. At 20 years old, the Korean adoptee — raised in the Minneapolis suburbs since the age of 2 — had never been exposed to Korean culture before. As she watched and listened to the Korean drum troupe perform that night 14 years ago, her throat swelled. She remembers that the sound vibrations created a feeling in her heart that she could…
by LINNEA EDMEIER Nov. 18 – On a grassy hillside in Oakland, overlooking the bay, survivors and loved ones gathered this morning to unveil memorial stones to honor the lives of more than 900 people who died in the Jonestown tragedy thirty years ago today. In 1978 the news from Guyana was unfathomable. A group of people had carved out what was supposed to be a utopian existence in a South American jungle community, and then died all at once,…
by HENRY JONES Nov. 13–Rockridge residents met for the fifth time in three months last night to discuss with Safeway representatives the supermarket’s planned reconstruction on College Avenue. It was not a cheerful evening.
Let eight artists loose on a very tight deadline (eight minutes!) for a very good cause–and OK, there’s some mess to clean up afterward. Click here for the story.
By MARTIN RICARD Nov. 4 — When Steve Kirkendoll was 4 years old, in 1960, he remembers sitting on his mother’s lap and watching on TV as black people in the South got hosed down and bitten by police dogs just for trying to register to vote. Kirkendall is 52 now. And after what he saw tonight, he said, he can now sit his 4-year-old granddaughter on his lap and tell her what happened on Nov. 4, 2008, when the…