Sarah grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii. She relocated to the Bay to attend UC Berkeley, where she studied Rhetoric and wrote an award-winning thesis about social media and identity. Sarah started at the Express as an intern while still in school and has gradually become increasingly involved, having served as both the art critic and arts and culture editor in the past. Once in a while she publishes zines, curates shows, lectures about stuff, and acts as a judge for events like storytelling competitions. She has won multiple national journalism awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia while at the Express, including first place in LGBT-gender equality coverage for her story about female independent video game developers, “Moral Combat.”
Darwin BondGraham, Staff Writer East Oakland
Darwin is an investigative journalist who covers politics, business, real estate, labor, healthcare, housing, and more for the Express. Prior to working as a reporter, Darwin was an academic, earning a PhD in Sociology from the University of California Santa Barbara.
Nastia Voynovskaya, Music Editor North Oakland
Nastia Voynovskaya was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia and immigrated to the Bay Area with her family in the late Nineties, when she was in elementary school. She was raised primarily in the East Bay with a brief stint living in Tampa, Florida, before attending UC Berkeley, where she received her BA in Comparative Literature and served as the Arts & Entertainment editor at the student paper, The Daily Californian. After graduating in 2012, Nastia became the web editor at the best-selling art magazine Hi-Fructose before transitioning to freelancing full time for a variety of local and national publications and then finally settling at the Express as the music editor. She’s been known to curate art shows and DJ occasionally. You can catch her collecting Based God memes, lingering the function, or writing articles that explore the intersections of music, Bay Area culture, and social justice issues.
“The Oakland Raiders are one step away from moving to Las Vegas,” from Fox Sports.
“Raiders-to-Vegas talk taking on greater reality?” from the Merc.
Get real. While its true that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell isn’t below shady-ass dealings, and his league is by no means some bastion of virtue and clean fun, there’s just no way pro-football goes to Vegas, let alone da Raiderrzz.
Chalk the rumor-mongering up to another case of Hysterical Clickbait Syndrome.
To the national media’s defense, it’s true that nearly every possible card on the table is basically screwing the silver and black. The team’s rent just went up over in Alameda, from $975,000 to $3.5 million—that’s nearly 4 million bucks a year to play at a stadium with bad plumbing. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf has (sort of) vowed nary a dime of public monies to subsidize a new stadium. And the Raiders were even the odd team out in their former Los Angeles stamping grounds.
Still, real talk: Mark Davis’ plan is exactly the kind of nonsense a person might hatch up after one too many at P.F. Chang’s.
Consider: The rumor is that billionaire GOP benefactor Sheldon Adelson (the guy who gave Newt Gingrich all that cash) and others are going to build Davis and the Raiders a $1.3 billion dome just off the Las Vegas strip on Tropicana Avenue. Really, an NFL team—da Raiderrzzz—are going to play on the strip?
The dome will be shared with the UNLV team. The Raiders and a college team in the same venue? Mmm hmm.
And this project would have to be approved by the Nevada Legislature, which apparently is never in session; they don’t convene until February of next year (talk about a sweet gig).
Anyway, Davis will be in Vegas this Thursday to throw dice and stir the relocation-drama soup. And, according to the LA Daily News report that kickstarted all this nonsense, he’s going to make a commitment to moving to Vegas after meeting with officials.
I don’t buy it. In fact, if the Raiders somehow end up in Vegas, I’ll tell my barber to give me a Mark Davis bowl cut and don it for a week. How’s that for conviction?
As I reported in my March 30 cover story, “Will Oakland’s Legal Weed Industry Leave People of Color Behind?,” one of the significant barriers that could disproportionately prevent people of color from profiting from California’s booming medical cannabis industry is a stipulation in the statewide Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act (MMRSA), which Governor Jerry Brown signed into law last October.
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The MMRSA gives state regulators the right to deny licenses to operate legal cannabis businesses to individuals with felony convictions, including convictions for the cultivation, transportation, and sale of controlled substances like marijuana. Therefore, the same people who were ensnared by the War on Drugs — which disproportionately targeted people of color, who continue to bear the brunt of a racially-biased criminal justice system — are in danger of being excluded from a burgeoning economy.
However, as I detailed in my report, many Oakland city officials don’t agree with that aspect of the statewide regulations and believe that felony drug convictions alone shouldn’t prevent people from obtaining licenses to operate cannabis businesses. And because MMRSA doesn’t take effect until 2018, Oakland has time to set the tone for a more inclusive policy.
In advance of the Oakland City Council’s Public Safety Committee tonight where the city will weigh options to create new categories of licenses for pot businesses (such as delivery services, grow operations, and factories), Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan sent a letter to the California State Legislatures urging them to amend MMRSA so that its language doesn’t encourage discrimination for licensing based on drug felonies.
The letter states:
As you now work on amendments to these regulations, I would like to respectfully request that you include an issue that is of great importance in our community, as well as to justice and equity more broadly — which is to make sure that there is not racial inequality or injustice in excluding people from this growing economic opportunity. Specifically, it is important to remove any impediments for employment for people working to turn their lives around after incarceration.
As many of us know, and as a former staffer to Richard Nixon recently confirmed, the “war on marijuana” has had both the effect, and the intention of disproportionately targeting people of color, especially African Americans, for disparate treatment including arrest and incarceration.
It continues:
It is unfair for people to be excluded from economic opportunities for engaging in conduct which is no longer widely considered illegal — under laws which have been disparately enforced.
Therefore, I urge that the California State Legislature act to:
1) Authorize a system to expunge past arrests and convictions for cannabis-related offenses; and,
2) Remove past convictions as a reason, in itself, to exclude someone from participating in a permitted cannabis business in Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act.
Reached by phone last week, Kaplan said that she wants to see more policies that address the impacts of mass incarceration of people of color and Black people in particular.
“We have a strong local movement for Ban the Box to ensure that ex-offenders are not denied job opportunities,” Kaplan said, referring to the national movement to remove questions about prior criminal convictions from job applications. “That’s something I’ve worked on and others have worked on. It’s important that ex-offenders not be permanently punished and denied opportunities to apply for jobs. In cannabis, it’s especially outrageous because we know the War on Drugs was created to lock up Black people.”
As the Public Safety Committee prepares to meet to expand Oakland’s cannabis licensing regime, Kaplan said that she is encouraging the city to create pathways for the formerly incarcerated to profit from the burgeoning legal weed economy.
“I’ve been asking that [the new system] should support ex-offenders and local hiring to make sure that benefits of economic opportunity are shared in a way that’s equitable,” said Kaplan.
The artist’s influences include Renaissance paintings.
Credits: Cecilia Granata
What do tattoo art, veganism, and Italian home cooking have in common? Maybe not a whole lot — unless you happen to be a vegan tattoo artist who grew up in Italy.
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The book has been a long time in the making. In an interview, Granata explained that she gave up eating animal products many years before she started doing tattoos for a living. This was back in 2005, when Granata still lived in Milan, Italy, where, at the time, it seemed like no one was vegan, and even basic staples such as soy milk proved nearly impossible to get a hold of.
Despite that fact, Granata said she didn’t find the transition to veganism that hard. That’s because, like any good Italian, she learned how to cook for herself from an early age; her mother and nonna made sure of that. Mama Tried is a kind of love letter to that Italian home-cooking education.
Credits: Cecilia Granata
Another reason Granata decided to tackle the project is because she came to the conclusion that there is more that connects veganism and tattoo art than just her own personal enthusiasm for both. Granata, whose day job is at the Albany location of Sacred Rose Tattoo, explained that vegans have formed a sizeable chunk of her customer base, and over the years, they’ve asked her to create an assortment of vegan-themed, “anti-cruelty” tattoos, some of which eventually made it into the book. (One of these, labeled “Cereal Killer,” features a grain-devouring tiger; the design covered a customer’s entire stomach, complete with a spoonful of cereal getting shoved into his belly button.)
More than that, Granata sees the “fresh-edgy-pop” look of her tattoo-style illustrations as a way to keep meat-free cooking fun and to ease some of the “heaviness” that’s sometimes associated with vegan politics.
The cookbook spans multiple regions of Italy, and its one-hundred-plus recipes include some that are naturally vegan (deep-fried chickpea fritters, for instance) and others that Granata has carefully “veganized”— though, given Italy’s famous salumi- and cheese-loving ways, it should come as no surprise that there are more of the latter than the former.
Dedicated vegans won’t be surprised to hear that Granata found cheeses to be the hardest thing to veganize — cheese being “a constant experiment, really, for every vegan,” she explained. Her favorite recipe in the book? Granata cites the saffron-tinged risotto alla Milanese, because it’s the one dish that reminds her the most of her childhood.
I’ve yet to test any of the recipes in Mama Tried, so I won’t comment on their quality. I did appreciate that, in keeping with the traditions of rustic Italian cooking, Granata’s recipes tend toward simplicity — even despite the outsized presence of ingredients such as agar-agar, nutritional yeast, and various fake meat products.
That said, there’s plenty to recommend the book even if you treat it purely as an art object. Organized alphabetically so that the recipes jump from category to category (homemade limoncello followed by melanzane con capperi e olive, i.e. eggplant with capers and olives), the cookbook resembles a children’s picture book — for the kind of rad kid who’s into horned, vaguely demonic ladies with “Praise Seitan” tattooed across their chests.
Credits: Cecilia Granata
Granata cites a variety of artistic inspirations, which include horror movies, skateboard culture, Renaissance paintings, Hindu iconography, and Mexican folk art.
My favorite illustrations were the “veganized” versions of Renaissance portraits. In one interpretation of a Flemish painting, a well-to-do lady forms a heart shape with her fingertips, to go with a recipe for baci di dama (“lady’s kisses” cookies). The illustration for the limoncello recipe is a version of the 17th-century Italian painter Bernadino Mei’s “Ghismonda with the Heart of Guiscardo,” in which a young woman holds her lover’s heart, which has been stabbed with a dagger, in a little tray.
If ever there was a picture that made being vegan seem badass: In Granata’s version, the heart has been replaced with a lemon.
You can meet Granata and try her cooking at a book signing at the vegan shop Vegan Republic (1624 University Ave., Berkeley) on Friday, May 13, 6–8 p.m. Granata said she plans to prepare two cold “omelets,” two kinds of pizza, and a vegan chocolate “salami” to serve at the event.
We recently wrote about how U.S. medical and recreational legalization efforts this election cycle are “dangerously overextended.” Many campaigns have very little cash and will fail if opposition donors mount a serious effort.
That appears to be happening in Florida, where activists at United For Care are working to pass a medical-marijuana initiative, after failing to gather a 60 percent majority vote in 2014.
On Friday, billionaire drug war profiteer Mel Sembler vowed to raise $10 million to defeat Measure 2.
Sembler told a Florida reporter that: “We’re trying to save lives and people’s brains,” the Drug Free America founder said. “It’s not a medicine.”
GOP mogul and pot war profiteer Mel Sembler
Sembler’s criteria for opposing medical marijuana appear to lack any rational basis beyond the profit motive.
States with medical cannabis laws have 25 percent less opioid overdoses than those without, and Florida is in the grips of a raging prescription pill overdose epidemic. Medical-cannabis legalization is also associated with reductions in road fatalities, and does not increase teen use, research shows.
Cannabis’ medical use is supported by a majority of U.S. doctors; 56 percent support full legalization. Twenty-four states now have medical-cannabis laws, covering hundreds of millions of people.
Sembler did not respond to requests for comment.
United for Care did not respond to questions about its viability as of press time this morning. United for Care’s John Morgan wrote in a fundraising email to followers:
“I’ve got a message for Mel Sembler: BRING. IT. ON. No amount of money and lies are going to stop us from winning this time. We will pass Amendment 2 in November. We will bring compassion to Florida. We will match their lies with the truth about medical marijuana.”
Approximately 65-68 percent of Floridians support medical cannabis, twopolls show.
But experts say attack ads will peel away supporters, and getting them back can take four times as much money to counter negative ad spending. Opposition ads promise to be apocalyptic in the opioid-epidemic-ridden Southern state. Opponents of medical-cannabis legalization in 2014 told voters that edibles would be the new teen date-rape drug if Florida legalized medical cannabis.
If Sembler succeeds, it will add fuel the populist streak in American culture — where just one member of the richest one percent can defeat the majority will of 20 million people.
In 2014, a 58 percent majority of Floridians supported medical-cannabis legalization, but Sembler’s spending prevented activists from obtaining the super-majority 60 percent needed to pass the initiative.
The governors in Arizona and Massachusetts have also asked Sembler for money, reports state.
In 2012, The Nation magazine called the strip mall developer Sembler the GOP Mogul behind drug treatment “torture” centers shut down for child abuse allegations. Sembler has taken hundreds of thousands of federal tax dollars to push workplace drug testing. And Sembler’s government-enabled chain of mandatory pot rehab clinics was forced to close after investigations and lawsuits began to mount in several states.
“The Semblers have been waging a war on marijuana for decades.
Before they led Save Our Society from Drugs, and its sister nonprofit, the Drug Free America Foundation, the Semblers were at the helm of STRAIGHT, Inc., which operated drug abuse treatment centers, mostly for teenagers, from 1976 through 1993.
Former clients of the rehab center recount episodes of brutal beatings, rape and systematic psychological abuse.”
“Though the STRAIGHT drug rehab clinic no longer exist, the Sembler network of anti-drug nonprofits have proliferated, in part because of the family’s extensive political connections. Mel, who served as a major fundraiser for George H.W., Jeb and George W. Bush, was appointed as the Ambassador to Italy in 2001. Betty Sembler, awarded “honorary agent status by the DEA,” has led various anti-drug commissions and task forces on the state and federal level.”
Don’t look now, but Oakland is about to get a serious addition to its sushi scene: A few months ago, What the Fork reported that Chikara Ono, chef-owner of AS B-Dama (907 Washington St., Oakland), was planning to open a new sushi restaurant at Swan’s Market, in a stand-alone space at 536 9th Street, adjacent to the main “food court” area that houses AS B-Dama.
That restaurant, which Ono has since dubbed Delage, will softly open with an omakase-style prix-fixe dinner menu this week, with preliminary hours from about 5:30 to 9 p.m., Wednesday through Friday.
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Details are a bit hazy at this point, as Ono is still sorting things out in the eleventh hour. But there’s good reason to think that this will be the most exciting sushi spot to open in Oakland proper since — well, for as long as I can remember. (Ono’s flagship restaurant, AS B-Dama, is hard to categorize, but it’s more of an izakaya than a sushi restaurant.)
1. For starters, Ono has brought on some real firepower to help him launch this endeavor. The opening chef will be one of San Francisco’s most respected sushi chefs, Masa Sasaki, who earned a Michelin star at Maruya before he left the high-end Mission district sushi restaurant in 2014. The plan is for Sasaki to run the show for the first three months or so, in close collaboration with Ono. At that point, either Ono himself or one of his young sous chefs at AS B-Dama will likely take over.
Via Instagram, @as_bdama.
2. Ono didn’t offer much explanation for why the restaurant is called “Delage” (which some might recognize as the name of a defunct French luxury car company), except to say that while the sushi will be strictly traditional (i.e., mostly nigiri), many of the appetizers will be more modern dishes that incorporate classical French technique. To head up that part of the menu, Ono has hired Keisuke Akabori, a chef at Spago — Wolfgang Puck’s iconic California cuisine institution in Beverly Hills.
3. While Ono hasn’t decided yet whether the restaurant will offer an a la carte menu, during the soft opening period Delage will probably do omakase-style service only — omakase being the sushi equivalent to the Western fine-dining tasting menu, except that the sequence of dishes is chosen at the chef’s whim. Oakland, to my knowledge, doesn’t currently have a sushi restaurant that specializes in omakase. Ono is still finalizing the prices, and deciding whether there will be different omakase “tiers” that customers can choose from. But he said an omakase dinner at Delage will likely run somewhere in the ballpark of $40–$60 a person. While that isn’t cheap, it’s exceedingly reasonable for omakase. Ono said a typical dinner might consist of four or five small appetizers and eight or ten pieces of sushi.
Delage isn’t a very big restaurant — there should be room for ten sushi eaters at the bar, and maybe another twelve seated at four-tops. Mark it down, then: If the food lives up to expectations, those might quickly become some of the Town’s toughest seats to snag.
The restaurant’s soft opening period will likely last a couple of weeks, Ono said. The official grand opening is slated for sometime in May.
Oakland artist Eli Thorne’s 2014 Mills College MFA thesis installation looked like a parody of an Olympian gymnastics gym. Bars crisscrossed each other to form a tower mounting a net filled with yellow tennis balls. Heavy, concrete balls hung from thick blue ropes attached to a wall with a metal bar. And royal blue flags dangled from the ceiling. The installation pinpointed an amusing aesthetic that registered immediately as athletic, yet didn’t actually mimic any existing athletic gear. Now, for a solo show at Royal NoneSuch Gallery (4231 Telegraph Ave.) entitled Yellow No. 5, Bruh, Thorne is going in on normative notions of masculinity with the same style of parody and a similar focus on sports culture. For the show, Thorne will be entirely transforming the space into a hyperbolic metaphor for male-ness made up of materials associated with home gyms, jocks, caffeine and male entitlement. Yellow No. 5, Bruh opens on Friday, April 29, with a reception from 7–10 p.m.
Oakland band Lil Dowager makes hardcore with splintery instrumentation and jarring vocals. Straying outside the genre’s rigid template, the band juxtaposes groovy bass lines with abrasive feedback, static, and short bursts of aggressive, jagged guitar riffs. Their latest record, Never Too Late to Hate, is a concise, four-track auditory assault — which, if you’re a hardcore fan, is definitely a positive thing. The band performers at Hemlock Tavern with San Francisco punk band Toyota, a four-piece that makes hyperactive tracks that parody capitalist clichés and the ethos of efficiency and mass production. Toyota’s debut tape, last year’s Concept Model(s) I-V, contains dense, frenetic instrumentation arranged in asymmetrical and unstable ways. Noise rock bands Lysine and Unraze, the latter of which is celebrating the release of its new 7” record, will also be joining Lil Dowager and Toyota on the bill.
Dearly beloved / We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life, preaches Prince in the sermon-like intro of “Let’s Go Crazy.” In retrospect, much of Prince’s music was hauntingly prophetic, with lyrics about mortality dazzlingly cloaked as celebratory pop. The iconic musician’s untimely death at the age of 57 shocked fans across the world last week. Prince played by his own rules. In addition to being a musical genius, he defied gender norms and proudly displayed his love for the Black community. He was a generous humanitarian that donated to a variety of social justice and environmental causes. He used pop to spur social change, and his work touched several generations. There are many ways to grieve, but one is to celebrate his life at Mezzanine on April 30, with DJ Apollo and D Sharp spinning Prince jams all night. The party is free, but there will be opportunities to donate to three causes Prince supported: The Elton John AIDS Foundation, Sheila E’s Elevate Hope Foundation, and Music for Minors: Music Education for Bay Area Youth.
Malcolm Gibson is a 27-year-old software engineer living in Oakland. When he gets dumped by his fiancé, he and his cousin devote themselves to creating the first successful dating app that uses musical taste to pair people. That’s the premise of Clouds, a new dramatic comedy series that follows Malcolm as he learns the ups and downs of both tech entrepreneurship and dating in the digital age. Clouds is created by local filmmakers Obatala Mawusi and Theo Hollingsworth, and stars a diverse cast of Bay Area actors. The creators are currently promoting the show’s pilot episode, which will premiere at The New Parkway (474 24th St., Oakland) on April 28 at 7 p.m. There will also be a pre-screening happy hour at the nearby Crooked City Cider (477 25th St.), where future fans can prematurely meet the cast and crew. Ticket proceeds will go toward finding a producer for the show so that the creators can complete the first season.
Editorial
Sarah Burke, Managing Editor
West Oakland
Sarah grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii. She relocated to the Bay to attend UC Berkeley, where she studied Rhetoric and wrote an award-winning thesis about social media and identity. Sarah started at the Express as an intern while still in school and has gradually become increasingly involved, having served as both the art critic and arts...
Check out some of today's Google News headlines regarding the Oakland Raiders rumored getaway to Sin City:
"Raiders now seem more likely to move to Las Vegas than Los Angeles," from the Washington Post.
"The Oakland Raiders are one step away from moving to Las Vegas," from Fox Sports.
"Raiders-to-Vegas talk taking on greater reality?" from...
Rebecca Kaplan.
Credits: Bert Johnson
As I reported in my March 30 cover story, "Will Oakland's Legal Weed Industry Leave People of Color Behind?," one of the significant barriers that could disproportionately prevent people of color from profiting from California's booming medical cannabis industry is a stipulation in the statewide Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act (MMRSA), which Governor Jerry Brown...
The artist's influences include Renaissance paintings.
Credits: Cecilia Granata
What do tattoo art, veganism, and Italian home cooking have in common? Maybe not a whole lot — unless you happen to be a vegan tattoo artist who grew up in Italy.
But these are the themes of Mama Tried: Traditional Italian Cooking for the Screwed, Crude, Vegan, and Tattooed, a new illustrated...
We recently wrote about how U.S. medical and recreational legalization efforts this election cycle are “dangerously overextended.” Many campaigns have very little cash and will fail if opposition donors mount a serious effort.
That appears to be happening in Florida, where activists at United For Care are working to pass a medical-marijuana initiative, after failing to gather a 60 percent...
Don't look now, but Oakland is about to get a serious addition to its sushi scene: A few months ago, What the Fork reported that Chikara Ono, chef-owner of AS B-Dama (907 Washington St., Oakland), was planning to open a new sushi restaurant at Swan's Market, in a stand-alone space at 536 9th Street, adjacent to the main "food court"...
Oakland artist Eli Thorne’s 2014 Mills College MFA thesis installation looked like a parody of an Olympian gymnastics gym. Bars crisscrossed each other to form a tower mounting a net filled with yellow tennis balls. Heavy, concrete balls hung from thick blue ropes attached to a wall with a metal bar. And royal blue flags dangled from the ceiling....
Oakland band Lil Dowager makes hardcore with splintery instrumentation and jarring vocals. Straying outside the genre’s rigid template, the band juxtaposes groovy bass lines with abrasive feedback, static, and short bursts of aggressive, jagged guitar riffs. Their latest record, Never Too Late to Hate, is a concise, four-track auditory assault — which, if you’re a hardcore fan, is definitely...
Dearly beloved / We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life, preaches Prince in the sermon-like intro of “Let’s Go Crazy.” In retrospect, much of Prince’s music was hauntingly prophetic, with lyrics about mortality dazzlingly cloaked as celebratory pop. The iconic musician’s untimely death at the age of 57 shocked fans across the world last...
Malcolm Gibson is a 27-year-old software engineer living in Oakland. When he gets dumped by his fiancé, he and his cousin devote themselves to creating the first successful dating app that uses musical taste to pair people. That’s the premise of Clouds, a new dramatic comedy series that follows Malcolm as he learns the ups and downs of both...
