How many Oakland hip-hop artists fill their tracks with Gertrude Stein references and turn nursery rhymes into extended political allegories? How many tackle issues of gentrification in Oakland? Can’t think of any? Let me introduce you to Daveed Diggs. His free mixtape Small Things to A Giant shows that a new giant has stepped on to Oakland’s trend-setting hip hop scene.

Read my review of Daveed Diggs’s Small Things to a Giant on my blog.

23rd and Telegraph. Photo by Joe Sciarrillo

(Oakland, CA) March 2, 2012: “It’s exciting to see the city come alive” Oakland resident Kait Singley said about Friday night’s Art Murmur. “It’s exciting to see so much creativity coming out of everyone,” she said, pointing out how many parents brought their kids to the free art walk and seeing parents selling their art on the sidewalk with their children selling cupcakes.

Over a thousand people turned out to Oakland’s Art Murmur Friday night, March 2, and the attendees came from diverse backgrounds. There were young hip hop artists, dancers, street performers, and an interesting mix of students, Occupy Oakland folks, working professionals in suits, parents with their kids, can collectors, and hip grandmas.

Read the full post here.

See Joe Sciarrillo’s photos from the night on Google+.

What exactly did renowned U.S. writer and art collector Gertrude Stein mean when she said “there is no there there” about Oakland, California? In honor of Gertrude Stein’s 138th birthday today, I explored the meaning of this oft-quoted phrase on the Inside Google Books blog. Read the full post here:

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/gertrude-stein-puts-there-back-in.html

Gertrude Stein. Courtesy of the Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library

Little did I know that researching for an article on “Gertrude Stein’s Oakland” would put me on a collision course with Occupy Oakland and get me tear gassed today (Jan. 28, 2012).

Read the full story on Oakland Local: http://oaklandlocal.com/posts/2012/01/how-researching-gertrude-stein-got-me-tear-gassed-community-voices

My Kickstarter Project Oakland in Popular Memory was successfully funded!

Learn more at: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mattwerner/oakland-in-popular-memory-book-project/posts/157495

Learn more about Oakland in Popular Memory, my collection of interviews with artists from Oakland and artists who’ve influenced musicians from Oakland, by going to my Kickstarter page and Thought Publishing.

Today I launched a Kickstarter project to fund my next book of artist interviews titled Oakland in Popular Memory:

I went to Occupy Oakland as a spectator on Friday night, October 28, 2011. Here’s the blog post I wrote about my experience published on Oakland Local’s Community Voices today: http://oaklandlocal.com/posts/2011/10/my-visit-occupy-oakland-oct-282011-community-voices

I worked the last week of September in Hyderabad (HITEC City) and Bangalore (Silicon Valley of India). Both areas have very interesting cultures with the intersection of IT. Read about my trip to India on my travel blog.

Today I published a blog post on the Google Books blog honoring Jorge Luis Borges’s 112th birthday, to correspond with the doodle honoring Borges at http://www.google.com.

Read the post here: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2011/08/peering-into-jorge-luis-borgess.html

Matt Werner’s first book of short stories, Papers for the Suppression of Reality, co-authored with Dr. Shaka Freeman will hit bookstores on March 1, 2011. The book is being published by Thought Publishing. You can pre-order a copy of the book here: http://thoughtpublishing.org/purchase/