Wednesday  June 8   7:30 pm 

Biographer and music historian Elijah Wald reads from The Mayor of Macdougal Street, a memoir by folk musician Dave Van Ronk that Wald completed after Van Ronk's death in 2002. Dave Van Ronk was a key figure in the 1960s folk and blues revival in Greenwich Village. An esteemed musician himself, Van Ronk was also, many say, the Village's greatest raconteur and oral historian. He knew everyone from Dylan, Baez, Phil Ochs, and Joni Mitchell to Mississippi John Hurt, Roy Berkeley, Tom Paxton, Peter Yarrow, Brownie McGhee, Josh White, and Odetta. "In Greenwich Village, Van Ronk was king of the street, he reigned supreme." Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol.1

Thursday  June 9   7:30 pm 

San Francisco and the Bay Area are graced with both a spectacular natural setting and wonderful architectural landmarks. The definitive guide to our local architecture is Sally Woodbridge, who returns to Black Oak to discuss the new, revised edition of San Francisco Architecture: An Illustrated Guide to Outstanding Buildings, Public Artworks, and Parks in the Bay Area of California. This book covers everything from churches and painted ladies to parks, statues, and noteworthy office buildings, and includes the City, the North Bay, the East Bay, and the Peninsula. Even long-time Bay Area residents will find themselves planning day trips around her information-packed guide. The book includes more than 900 photographs, some of which will be on show for this event.

Monday June 13  7:30 pm  

Black Oak welcomes back novelist Tim Farrington, author of The Monk Downstairs, Blues for Hannah, and The California Book of the Dead, to read from his new book, Lizzie's War. Beginning with the Detroit Riots of 1967 and ending on Labor Day, 1968, Lizzie's War recounts the struggles of Liz O'Reilly, mother of four children and wife of a career Marine officer who has shipped out to Vietnam. While Mike O'Reilly struggles with a war about which he has neither ideals nor illusions, Liz contends with motherhood, career ambitions, her conscience, and her loyalties.

Tuesday  June 14  7:30 pm  

Bob Levin will discuss his book Outlaws, Rebels, Freethinkers, and Pirates: Essays on Cartoons and Cartoonists. For Bob Levin, cartoonists, the outlaws of literature, are both funny and crucial to us because they explore the back roads and the forbidden borders of literary creativity. Levin writes in an essay style that blends journalism, autobiography, cultural history, and scholarship with the distorting lenses of fiction and put-on. It is a style well suited to his discussions of such unbridled and uncategorizable figures as Chester Brown, S. Clay Wilson, Dori Seda, B. N. Duncan, Justin Green, Maxon Crumb, Crockett Johnson, Roy Lichtenstein, Graham Ingels, Jack Katz, and Rory Hayes. Bob Levin shows us that the creations of these outlaw cartoonists are arguments for the value of free and eccentric artistic expression.

Wednesday  June 15  7:30 pm 

Betsy Leondar-Wright, long-time economic justice activist and communications director at United for a Fair Economy, talks about Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists. A persistent myth about America is that it is a classless society. Betsy Leondar-Wright shows us how pervasive and subtle class prejudice really is in America. She argues that class prejudice is probably the single greatest obstacle to broadening movements toward progressive social change. Full of stories, ideas, quotations, tips, and resources, Class Matters discusses frankly the politics of class, the limits of identity politics, what gets in the way of cross-class alliances, and how effective alliances can be built.

Monday  June 20  7:30 pm  

Black Oak will host a discussion of Civic Engagement in the Age of Bush with guests Arthur Blaustein and Krist Novoselic. Professor, essayist, and political activist Arthur Blaustein is author of Make a Difference: America's Guide to Volunteering and Community Service, which has come out in a new, revised edition. This widely acclaimed guide to citizen action challenges Americans to get serious about civic engagement and community participation. Krist Novoselic played bass in Nirvana, the most heralded and influential rock band of the past twenty years. His book Of Grunge and Government: Let's Fix This Broken Democracy is part memoir and part political platform. The book traces Krist's relationship to Kurt Cobain and Nirvana as well as his evolution as a political activist in support of electoral reform and other progressive causes.

Tuesday  June 21  7:30 pm  

Bob Laird was Director of Undergraduate Admissions at the University of California, Berkeley, for six years and an admissions professional for twenty-five years. In The Case for Affirmative Action in University Admissions he argues that without affirmative action policies universities, and public life in general, suffer from de facto racial segregation. Recent Supreme Court decisions should insure that affirmative action will continue to play a central role in creating equal educational opportunities for minority students at public colleges and universities. Laird explains the critical role of affirmative action in creating diverse public institutions, describes the turbulent debates regarding affirmative action programs, and explains the guidelines that will govern admission policies in the immediate future.

Thursday  June 23  7:30 pm 

All cities have secrets, but none more than San Francisco, the city that Ambrose Bierce described as "a point upon a map of fog." This shadowy town of easy vice and hard virtue provided the ideal setting for many of the greatest film noirs, from classics like The Maltese Falcon and Dark Passage to obscure treasures like Woman on the Run and D.O.A., and neo-noirs like Point Blank and The Conversation. Nathaniel Rich comes to Black Oak to discuss San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present, a guide to more than forty film noirs and the locations where they were shot. The book visits the Mission Dolores cemetery, where James Stewart spies Kim Novak visiting Carlotta's grave in Vertigo; the Steinhart Aquarium, where Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth rendezvous in The Lady from Shanghai; and Kezar Stadium, where Clint Eastwood, in Dirty Harry; captures the serial killer Scorpio in a blaze of ghastly white light.

Tuesday  June 28  7:30 pm 

Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows will read from their new translation of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke may be the greatest of late-Romantic poets writing in the twentieth century. In February 1922, after a decade of writer's block, he embarked upon a prodigious binge of poetic creativity in which he wrote his Sonnets to Orpheus. Imbued with a deep reverence for nature, these poems lament industrial modernity, which deprives us of time, imagination, community, and our true relationship to death. Duino Elegies was written ten years earlier, during a visit to Duino Castle on the Adriatic; the elegies endeavor to embrace mortality as part of the great weave of all life and eternity. These beautiful translations have been printed facing the original German texts.

Wednesday  June 29  7:30 pm   

Movie fans and spiritual seekers, unite! Dean Sluyter discusses Cinema Nirvana: Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies. This meditation teacher and award-winning former film critic illuminates the hidden teachings of America's best-loved films. Nirvana, says Sluyter, is where you find it—and the movies are as good a place as any to look. To make his case, he analyzes Jaws, The Graduate, The Godfather, Jailhouse Rock, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Goldfinger, A Night at the Opera, and seven other classic films. He finds surprising spiritual wisdom in everything from the color of Dopey's eyes to the secret weapons in 007's Aston Martin.

Thursday  June 30  7:30 pm 

We welcome back Berkeley's own Mandy Aftel, author, perfume maker, and acclaimed historian of perfume. In Scents and Sensibilities: Creating Solid Perfumes for Well-Being, she explores the effects smells have on our emotions, and how we can create scents to change the way we feel. In the right combination and balance, aromas can influence everything from stress to sensuality. Focusing on solid perfumes, Mandy shows how ingredients such as bitter orange, juniper berry, grapefruit, lavender, nutmeg, and vanilla can be combined to create aromas tailored to our individual sensibilities. This book includes step-by-step instructions, photographs, and lists of equipment that will teach readers enough to make their own mood-changing perfumes. Mandy will be bringing elemental and composite scents to this event for us to sample.