Culture
Jane Powell was a woman who loved her home. Powell, an author and home restoration expert who died in November 2012 from lung cancer, spent the final years of her life fighting the bank to keep her dream home, Oakland’s historical Jesse Matteson House, fondly nicknamed the Bunga-Mansion by Powell and her friends. After losing most of her income during the financial crash of 2008, Powell rallied to keep her home from going into foreclosure, all while struggling with illness….
Dr. Elliot Gann is standing in front of his beat-up and stickered black Mazda Protégé in the parking lot of West Oakland Middle School. In his left ear is a Bluetooth earpiece, which, as he eats a Trader Joes sandwich wrap, enables him to lament to a friend the parking ticket he just received. To his side is a worn green Atlantic suitcase that wobbles with a broken wheel. Inside, its contents are packed tight: two sets of studio monitors,…
Live experimental cinema returned to Temescal Sunday night with the opening night of the second season of Shapeshifters Cinema, a monthly series blending experimental video with live musical accompaniment.
On a barren West Oakland corner, amongst homes where the windows and front yards are gated and dead-bolted protectively from the world outside, now stands a “Tree of Life” — the Attitudinal Healing Connection’s debut traveling mural project. The mural and all seven of its transportable panels were unveiled Thursday afternoon at the West Oakland Youth Center’s construction site on Market Street. Construction on the facility, currently a skeleton of drywall, scaffolding and timber, isn’t expected to be complete until…
Many of the reporters at Oakland North are new to the Bay Area, and one of the first things we noticed while touring the city was its beautiful and sometimes unusual architecture. On the reporting team for this series, one of us is from Brazil and one is from Southern California. We decided it would be great to learn more about some of the structures that represent Oakland’s beautiful landscape. With a great deal of assistance from the representatives at…
The Crucible’s second Hot Couture: A Fusion of Fashion and Fire will run on Friday and Saturday evenings, January 11 and 12. The show features works created by nine teams of fashion designers and artists who have partnered to make fashion pieces out of industrial arts materials.
Former Oakland Tech teacher Tay McArthur, along with his former student Karen Kennedy Freeman, were looking thoughtfully at the lamp posts that line Lake Merritt. “Wouldn’t it be great if we had banners put up all over Oakland that commemorate the contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?” McArthur said as he wrapped his arm around Freeman. “They’d be put up in the beginning of January—a month of remembrance for Dr. King in celebration of his spirit of nonviolence.” Freeman…
Price has a special vantage point on the Resolution Plan, given the fact that he was once a disobedient student, and now sometimes works with students with behavioral issues. He’s a little ambivalent, he said—because he understands how tough classroom teaching can really be.
On the one hand, he said, monitoring their own disciplinary actions more closely will push teachers to find resolutions to kids’ problematic classroom behaviors, without kicking them out so readily. “It will cause teachers to deal with students,” Price said.
On the other hand, it will leave some students with the opportunity to “steal the education” from their classmates, Price said, referring to students who are disruptive to the point that it disturbs the class and ruins the lesson.
Price grew up in East Oakland, graduated from Montera Middle School and Skyline High – and was a self-admitted troublemaker throughout his teens.
At a press conference Wednesday morning, the Oakland Museum of California announced the theft of a historical quartz and gold-encrusted jewel box from its Gallery of California History. The burglary, which occurred early Monday, is the second the museum has recently experienced; in the early morning hours between November 12 and 13, gold nuggets were stolen from the same collection.