Matt Werner, writer & editor
Hiram Lawrence was one-year-old when he was shot in Oakland on November 28, 2011. On Saturday, July 21, 2012 approximately 200 cyclists turned out for the 5th Annual Peace Ride in his honor. The event, sponsored by Bikes 4 Life bike shop, ended in West Oakland with a tree planting and dedication ceremony in Hiram’s honor, attended by Oakland Mayor Jean Quan.
The Huffington Post published an excerpt from Oakland in Popular Memory–the afterword titled “Gertrude Stein’s Oakland.” Read the post here.
This piece is adapted from a blog post I wrote for the Google Books blog for Gertrude Stein’s birthday on February 3, 2012.
Also, the book release party is tonight at University Press Books in Berkeley, California.
Click here for more information about Oakland in Popular Memory.
Oakland in Popular Memory is available from Amazon and Thought Publishing, as well as these Bay Area independent bookstores.
Ever wondered what it’d be like to step back in time? To enter a place that’s surrounded by the post-modern and the digital age, but doesn’t give into the pressures to modernize and refuses to succumb to the latest technology?
Entering St. Hieronymus Press on April 27, 2012, I found a real Berkeley establishment that has stood the test of time. Large letter presses and mechanical offset printing presses from the late 1800s and early 1900s fill the print shop.
Read more about my trip on Oakland Local.
Oakland in Popular Memory is a collection of interviews with 12 innovative artists from Oakland, California and beyond who are putting a new “there” in Oakland. The interviews cover topics like race relations in Oakland in the post-Oscar Grant era, postmodern literary theory, Occupy Oakland, and the changing landscape of the music industry during the digital revolution.
Through Matt Werner’s long-form interviews with artists like MC Lars, Chinaka Hodge, Saul Williams, Talib Kweli, Dahlak Brathwaite, Dave Smallen, George Watsky, Ise Lyfe, K.Flay, Kid Beyond, Rafael Casal, and Kool A.D., Oakland is seen as an engine of cultural innovation, as a city bustling with lively avant-garde art and music scenes, spanning from indie rock to spoken word to hip-hop.
Purchase today from Thought Publishing.
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.
TheRumpus.net just published the final interview I’m including in my book with Rafael Casal. I spoke with Rafael on February 11, 2012 about his third hip hop album Mean Ones, how the Bay Area is similar to the world of Dr. Seuss, his thoughts on Occupy Oakland, and why he moved to LA.
Read the full interview on TheRumpus.net.