Welcome to Range, a small Washington town you can never leave. It’s a land inhabited by talking animals, a cute floating ghost thing, an undead lunatic, a pirate (of course), and a whole cast of other characters that are both familiar and strange. It’s also the setting of Oaklander Tom Manning’s comic, Runoff, an epic three-part tale that is finally being published as one collection after eight years of production and self-publishing. Manning will be at Umami Mart (815 Broadway, Oakland) on Friday, November 13 — appropriately timed for this spooky storyline — to officially release the compilation and sign copies. The series, which Manning started in 1999 and completed in 2007, reportedly caught the eye of Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth, etc.) who had set his sights on turning the part mystery, part drama, part comedy into a movie. Whatever came of that isn’t clear, but it is certain that this comic offers more than a dystopian view of humanity with a few laughs. The characters are vivid, poignant, and compelling.
Oakland singer-songwriter Krystle Ahmadyar is known for her vocal-driven solo project, Ruby Mountain, which pairs her soulful singing with ukulele and, occasionally, guitar and minimal electronic production. Since August, Ahmadyar has been the artist-in-residence at Studio Grand, where she has been developing new songs that fuse elements of her background in composing experimental electronic music at Mills College and playing Afghan folk songs with her father. Earlier this year, Ahmadyar visited Afghanistan for the first time, where she spent the majority of her visit with her extended family, listening to elders’ stories, singing traditional music, and taking field recordings. The next performance of her residency, Crescent Moon, pays homage to her heritage with a night of Afghan music and storytelling with an experimental bend. Her father, Fazal Ahmadyar, who is a singer and harmonium player, and percussionist Said Hashemi will join Ahmadyar on stage.
San Francisco producer Pure One (Alexandra Crotta) utilizes her voice as an instrument in her experimental electronic compositions. On many of her tracks, she manipulates her soft, cooing vocals beyond recognition, chopping them up and layering them until they take on fuzzy textures and warped shapes. Throughout “Melchedezek, My Love,” one of her latest tracks, she murmurs lyrics that evoke spontaneous word associations: Let’s go on/Let’s go to war/Let’s go to her. Her repetitive, whispered verses become a haunting mantra that washes over a slow, ambient beat, foregrounding the warbled, ebbing and flowing of her synth. Pure One’s tracks are subtle and atmospheric, and while many of them use hip-hop and trip-hop beat structures as a starting point, they often unravel into avant-garde, electronic sound collages. Pure One is a relatively new music project, and she is releasing her debut EP later this month. She performs at Stork Club on November 14 with producer LoWGritt and indie band Arrows, both from Santa Cruz, as well as Oakland noise rockers Knowles Hand.
Zara’s Faith follows a woman whose two sons were stopped by police. One was murdered and the other wounded. As Zara attempts to work through her anger and grief, she receives advice from her ancestors that leads her to explore her own conception of faith and community amid the plot’s unraveling social conspiracy. The play, which was originally written by Marc Sapir before the Black Lives Matter movement arose, was performed as a staged reading at the Flight Deck by The Lower Bottom Playaz back in June. Now, the Lower Bottom Playaz, led by Ayodele Nzinga, will be presenting a newly revised and fully produced version of the play starring Black Lives Matter organizer Cat Brooks as Zara and Reginald Wilkins as supporting lead, Pastor Simms. The performance will take place at La Peña Cultural Center (3105 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley) on November 13 at 8 p.m.
In Sentimental Taxonomy, currently on view at Random Parts gallery (1206 13th Ave., Oakland) Bay Area photographer Kija Lucas builds a visual dictionary of emotional materials: an old teddy bear, pink vintage sunglasses, Vienna sausage packaging, a ring, a handkerchief, a photograph. Each is photographically documented in front of a black background, and placed in a row with the others. Sentimental Taxonomy is an excerpt from Lucas’ larger ongoing project entitled Objects to Remember You By: An Index of Sentiment, in which she documents objects that hold sentimental meaning for people beyond their utilitarian purpose. Lucas’ catalog is specifically meant to explore the ways in which objects can memorialize people from our pasts, personalize a space, and offer a sense of safety or intimacy. But by decontextualizing the materials, Lucas renders them mysterious, leaving the viewer to wonder what they could have meant to the owner.
Next up in East Bay alternative holiday shopping experiences: The Museum of Children’s Arts (1625 Clay St., Suite 100, Oakland) will be hosting an Oakland Art Market pop-up on Friday, November 13 (5–8 p.m.) and Saturday, November 14 (noon–5 p.m.). Spearheaded by MOCHA “Teaching Artist” Kaya Fortune, the fair will offer a sampling of gifts made by more than 25 local artists and artisans. Many of the artists will be MOCHA’s own Teaching Artists — those who lead the museum’s many youth art classes. MOCHA has been offering hands-on programming intended to inspire children’s creativity in Oakland for more than 27 years. Now, you can buy photography, clothing, jewelry, and paintings from the community of artists that facilitate that education.
To celebrate painter Laurie Shapiro’s latest solo show at Grease Diner, the North Oakland restaurant is hosting an opening reception that features three musical guests: Yoko O.K., Maya Songbird, and Jon Jon Cassagnol. Maya Songbird is a San Francisco native who creates danceable, disco-inspired tracks that evoke post-riot grrrl electro pop artists, such as Le Tigre. While Yoko O.K.’s left-field folk music departs from Songbird’s sonically, both artists champion a similar ethos of self-acceptance and quirkiness. O.K.’s album, Menahan Tree, is a collection of mumblecore, bedroom acoustic songs with a slightly off-beat sense of humor. Jon Jon Cassagnol, co-owner of Grease Diner, creates music in a similar vein, except with a rougher sound that has a noticeable punk influence. This show, which takes place on November 13, will be the first time Cassagnol performs his new, electronic material.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Grease Diner as a restaurant when it is actually an art gallery, shop, and screenprinting studio.
Libby Schaaf.
1. When Mayor Libby Schaaf talks to NFL owners in New York City this week, she won’t be presenting a stadium plan for the Oakland Raiders, the Chron$ reports. Instead, Schaaf will talk up the city of Oakland and it’s economic resurgence, while reiterating the fact that Oakland will not spend public dollars on a new facility for the team and that it will have to be privately financed. The Raiders are about $400 million short of what the team needs to build a new facility at the Coliseum, and team owner Mark Davis wants the city and county to kick in taxpayer dollars.
2. Schaaf’s position on the Raiders matches that of city residents, according to a new poll commissioned by the Oakland Chamber of Commerce, the Chron reports. The poll showed that Oaklanders ranked keeping the Raiders in last place among sixteen priorities — far behind improving schools, cleaning up parks, and reducing crime. The same poll showed that the mayor enjoys a 68-percent approval rating.
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3. UC Berkeley grad students said they have no confidence in Cal’s faculty disciplinary process in the wake of the sexual harassment scandal involving noted astronomer Geoff Marcy, BuzzFeed News reports (h/t Berkeleyside). The grad students are upset that the university essentially gave Marcy a slap on the wrist despite the fact that a campus investigation found that he repeatedly violated the school’s sexual harassment policies. Marcy later resigned amid the uproar.
4. The Bay Area will need a strong regional government if it’s going to remain an economic engine and continue to grow, the Bay Area News Group$ reports, citing a new study from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. The institute said the region needs to overcome anti-growth forces that control some cities in order to build lots more housing and improve transportation infrastructure.
6. US border control agents say they don’t want to wear body cameras, the AP reports (h/t Rough & Tumble). The agents said using body cameras, which record all interactions with the public and are becoming increasingly common in police departments throughout the nation, would hurt their “morale.”
Oakland is moving forward with another major mixed-use development project in Uptown that prioritizes parking on public land. This week, as the San Francisco Business Times first reported, developers Alan Dones and Lane Partners said they intend to build more than two acres of offices, housing, and commercial space at 2100 Telegraph Avenue, around the corner from the Sears building that Uber recently purchased. The proposal for 21st Street and Telegraph Avenue would bring a massive development (and likely more tech companies) to an Uptown block that currently houses a two-story public parking garage with 351 spaces.
Although this underutilized, centrally located site is an obvious location for a new apartment building and offices, housing and transportation advocates were frustrated to learn that the project is slated to spend a significant amount of space and resources on building a new large public parking garage. According to a 2014 exclusive negotiating agreement between Dones’ TB2 Retail Complex LLC and the City of Oakland, the project will build “at least 350 public parking spaces to be owned by the City.” In other words, city officials and private developers have agreed to prioritize car parking on public land that is one block away from BART.
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As I investigated in a recent cover story, “A Green Solution to Oakland’s Housing Crisis,” real estate developers frequently waste a huge amount of money and land on parking garages that are much larger than they need to be. In cities across the country, outdated, car-oriented zoning policies often require new residential and commercial projects to include excessively large parking lots — even in downtown areas that are accessible by public transportation. That’s a problem when you consider how expensive it is to build parking. By some estimates, it costs roughly $50,000 to construct a single space in a structured garage, which means excessive parking requirements can lead to less affordable housing. These development trends are also environmentally backward. Easy access to parking garages can encourage continually high rates of driving and car ownership in dense urban centers that should be prioritizing and promoting greener modes of transportation.
Although Oakland has recently taken a number of steps to make its parking policies much more forward-thinking and environmentally friendly, the new TB2 Retail Complex proposal highlights one way in which urban planning in the city is still stuck in the 20th century. The project is similar to another recently announced mixed-use project at 1800 San Pablo Avenue, which is also right next to the 19th Street BART Station and is also on track to include a large city-run parking garage on public property. While transportation activists in general discourage the development of parking garages on valuable land so close to public transit stops, they argue that it’s especially troubling when the city wastes publicly owned land on car storage. And they further argue that given Oakland’s current housing crisis, the money and land that the city and the developers intend to use for car parking on public lots should instead be used to build more affordable housing.
Some argue that the city’s plans to use public land for parking in Uptown should generate the same kind of backlash that occurred when the city approved a luxury apartment tower proposal on public land on East 12th Street near Lake Merritt. There, housing activists argued that it was wrong for the city to sell public land to a developer who planned a project that lacked affordable housing or other meaningful community benefits. (The deal also turned out to be illegal).
In terms of the supply of public parking in Uptown, city officials have continued to argue that the new developments are essentially maintaining existing levels of parking. In addition to the proposed city-owned parking lots at 2100 Telegraph and 1800 San Pablo, the city also plans to include public parking as part of a project at 23rd and Valdez streets. In total, those three garages would provide roughly seven hundred spaces to the neighborhood, according to the city.
Developer Sid Afshar plans to build a new public parking garage at 1800 San Pablo.
Credits: bert johnson / file photo
Patrick Lane, development manager for the city, told me in an email yesterday that the agreement between TB2 Retail and the city “is following a long term City objective to replace the public parking on the site to support the Paramount Theater and other businesses in the Uptown area.” He added: “It is anticipated that the public parking will be needed even more when other development in the area happens.” He told me that the operators of the Paramount, which is adjacent to the TB2 project, are very concerned about parking and would strongly object to any plans that reduced the number of spaces.
Some transportation experts, however, argue that if the city wants to be aggressive in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it should actively discourage driving to Uptown by building less parking.
According to the exclusive negotiating agreement from 2014, the TB2 Retail Complex would include at least 250 residential units with 15 percent affordable to low- and moderate-income households. Now that Dones is collaborating with Lane Partners — the Menlo Park-based company that sold the Sears building to Uber — the project could possibly include a higher rate of affordable housing, Dones told the Business Times. The agreement also calls for at least 15,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and roughly 220 residential parking spaces (which would be in addition to the spaces in the public garage). Transportation advocates also argue that apartment buildings near BART should include smaller parking garages for residents (as opposed to the standard, which is building at least one-space per unit). The city is now in the process of rewriting zoning rules in a way that would allow developers to build less parking in new residential projects.
Dones and Lane Partners did not respond to my requests for comment today.
1. President Obama today officially rejected the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project, which would have brought dirty tar sands oil from Canada to refineries in the southern United States, The New York Times$ reports. The president’s decision — seven years in the making — represents a major win for the environmental movement, and comes in advance of the Paris climate change talks next month. The Keystone XL would have greatly expanded the excavation and use of tar sands oil and produced huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.
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3. Oakland Mayor Libby is enjoying high approval ratings — 68 percent, the Trib$ reports, citing a new poll commissioned by the chamber of commerce. The poll also showed that Oaklanders apparently feel safer — 45 percent of residents said crime was their top concern, compared to 61 percent last year.
6. Students at Castlemont and Fremont high schools in Oakland will no longer be relegated to “sham” classes — like filing paperwork in school offices — as a result of a settlement of a lawsuit brought by civil rights attorneys against Oakland Unified and other school districts, the Chron reports.
Welcome to Range, a small Washington town you can never leave. It’s a land inhabited by talking animals, a cute floating ghost thing, an undead lunatic, a pirate (of course), and a whole cast of other characters that are both familiar and strange. It’s also the setting of Oaklander Tom Manning’s comic, Runoff, an epic three-part tale that is...
Oakland singer-songwriter Krystle Ahmadyar is known for her vocal-driven solo project, Ruby Mountain, which pairs her soulful singing with ukulele and, occasionally, guitar and minimal electronic production. Since August, Ahmadyar has been the artist-in-residence at Studio Grand, where she has been developing new songs that fuse elements of her background in composing experimental electronic music at Mills College and...
San Francisco producer Pure One (Alexandra Crotta) utilizes her voice as an instrument in her experimental electronic compositions. On many of her tracks, she manipulates her soft, cooing vocals beyond recognition, chopping them up and layering them until they take on fuzzy textures and warped shapes. Throughout “Melchedezek, My Love,” one of her latest tracks, she murmurs lyrics that...
Zara’s Faith follows a woman whose two sons were stopped by police. One was murdered and the other wounded. As Zara attempts to work through her anger and grief, she receives advice from her ancestors that leads her to explore her own conception of faith and community amid the plot’s unraveling social conspiracy. The play, which was originally written...
In Sentimental Taxonomy, currently on view at Random Parts gallery (1206 13th Ave., Oakland) Bay Area photographer Kija Lucas builds a visual dictionary of emotional materials: an old teddy bear, pink vintage sunglasses, Vienna sausage packaging, a ring, a handkerchief, a photograph. Each is photographically documented in front of a black background, and placed in a row with the...
Next up in East Bay alternative holiday shopping experiences: The Museum of Children’s Arts (1625 Clay St., Suite 100, Oakland) will be hosting an Oakland Art Market pop-up on Friday, November 13 (5–8 p.m.) and Saturday, November 14 (noon–5 p.m.). Spearheaded by MOCHA “Teaching Artist” Kaya Fortune, the fair will offer a sampling of gifts made by more than...
To celebrate painter Laurie Shapiro’s latest solo show at Grease Diner, the North Oakland restaurant is hosting an opening reception that features three musical guests: Yoko O.K., Maya Songbird, and Jon Jon Cassagnol. Maya Songbird is a San Francisco native who creates danceable, disco-inspired tracks that evoke post-riot grrrl electro pop artists, such as Le Tigre. While Yoko O.K.’s...
Stories you shouldn’t miss:
1. When Mayor Libby Schaaf talks to NFL owners in New York City this week, she won’t be presenting a stadium plan for the Oakland Raiders, the Chron$ reports. Instead, Schaaf will talk up the city of Oakland and it’s economic resurgence, while reiterating the fact that Oakland will not spend public dollars on a new facility...
21st and Telegraph.
Credits: Google Maps
Oakland is moving forward with another major mixed-use development project in Uptown that prioritizes parking on public land. This week, as the San Francisco Business Times first reported, developers Alan Dones and Lane Partners said they intend to build more than two acres of offices, housing, and commercial space at 2100 Telegraph Avenue, around the corner...
Stories you shouldn’t miss:
1. President Obama today officially rejected the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project, which would have brought dirty tar sands oil from Canada to refineries in the southern United States, The New York Times$ reports. The president’s decision — seven years in the making — represents a major win for the environmental movement, and comes in advance of...
