Culture
Today Antique is wearing a black skirt over green tights, a boldly-striped tank top over a black long-sleeve shirt, bright earrings that look like ice cream cones you might find in a Dr. Seuss story, an orange and black bandanna in her hair, and black 1950s-style cat’s eye glasses with sparkles in the corners. “I dress in different eras every day,” she says.
The music she creates, however, is naked.
As the lead vocalist of the ensemble Antique Naked Soul, Antique, along with vocal percussionist Tommy Shepherd, also known as Soulati, and vocalists Jayme Brown and N’gala McCoy, composes songs that consist solely of the human voice. The challenge, she and Shepherd say, is managing to create full-bodied “manifestos” within the limitation of such spare instrumentation.
Over 1,000 scholars, students, and parents attended the five-day National Association of Multicultural Education (NAME) conference, held at the Oakland Marriott City Center, which featured panels, interactive workshops, school tours, and film screenings.
Saturday’s “unconference” at Oakland City Hall featured more than a dozen workshops ranging from the city budget, to neighborhood crime issues, to the digital divide, and open data. Over a hundred technology professionals, city staff, local citizens, and business leaders came together to discuss the often-rocky relationship between technology and local government.
The second annual CityCamp Oakland comes out of a surging tech community in Oakland and a city government looking to become a leader in civic technology. The conference was organized by OpenOakland, a civic hacking group born out of Code for America, the national non-profit that pairs young programmers with local governments.
Body music, for the uninitiated, is an art form composed of sounds and rhythms made solely with the body.
In preparation for the full implementation of Common Core State Standards, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) held a public hearing on Wednesday evening to discuss allocation of funds.
In a black-and-white photograph, John Caybut stands in front of Oakland’s Saint Augustine Catholic Church with his mother, father, sister, and brother. The picture was taken in 1965. Caybut passed away in February. Today, his sister is the photograph’s only surviving subject. Caybut’s widow, Sabina, has placed the picture on a colorful altarcito in the nave of the church on Alcatraz Avenue. There, John and his family join others who have passed on but survive in pictures, placed among bright…
The nonprofit organization, Reading Partners, provides literacy tutoring for at-need children in first through fifth grade.
At the corner of 23rd Street and San Pablo in West Oakland, dozens of people form a packed queue leading in to the free dining room run by The Society of St. Vincent de Paul of Alameda County.
Rob Spiro and Alon Salant founded Good Eggs, a website where local food producers can sell their products in the Bay Area. On this site, food shoppers can load up their virtual shopping cart with anything from locally-caught fish and fresh produce, to vegan pastries and baby food, which they can have delivered to their door step or ready for pick up from various locations in their area.