You - say - ARTSY! I - say - CHECK!

There are so many great arty events happening soon that rather than posting each individually, I am going to cram them all (daintily I hope) into one burst of fillet-vaaaa.

October 1st : Full Moon Buy Night
Random name, but a great chance to share some of your bucks, big or otherwise, with local artists, restaurateurs, and farmers. The entertainment is sure to delight as well, with stilt walkers, fire jugglers, magicians, DIY classes; basically everything you can imagine besides ice skating. O wait, they have that too (again, random). All is taking place at Jack London. If you are going to be out of town or on your death bed (the only valid reasons for missing it), or if you just can't wait, you can always shop for awesome local goods HERE.

October 2nd : East Bay Express Annual Taste for Art

Yes it's in Berkeley, but it has plenty of representation from its more hard-core neighbor to the south. A night of :

• Small plate tastings; beer, wine, and spirit samples
• 35 artist studios exhibiting and selling locally produced art
• Film screenings, live music, aerial dance, sword fighting demos, live glass blowing

October 2nd : Art Murmur

October 8th-14th : Oakland Film Festival

After recommending the Oakland Underground Film Festival, and then driving around for an hour trying to find it unsuccessfully, I hesitate to recommend another one. Who knows, perhaps it was literally underground, and silly me, I didn't think to look there. Anyhow (grumble, grumble), the fact that this one doesn't have underground in the title surely heightens the plausibility of it actually existing. I was hoping to write a little bit more about the actual films, but their site was down when I just checked (not a good sign).

*And if you are up for crossing the bridge this weekend, don't forget LovEvolution and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. See more details a couple posts back.

**Art above is displayed in the Oakland Museum

Oakland Badass-ness strikes again!

This time I reference the Oakland Underground Film Festival, taking place in Alameda this weekend. Wait, the Oakland Film Fest is in Alameda? Well my fair friends, as you may or may not know, Alameda was once part of modern day Oakland. In fact it was a wee peninsula, covered with one of the largest Oak Groves in the world, which is how Oakland got its name (see history can be fun, or at least interesting). Sadly, 99% of that forest, along with the land that connected us, is now gone. The point being, having the Fest in Alameda is not so far fetched after all. I will leave it to you to sift through the majority of their offerings, but a couple stood out to me, and I wanted to share them here:

Incredibly Strange Creatures who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies

Need I say more? No!

and

Waterlife

Ever since seeing the documentries Flow and Addicted to Plastic, I have been incredibly facinated with the way our water gets to us, what we do to it, and how we can make things better. This flick promises to cover additional ground, like about the Great Lakes, and the aging infastructure that delivers our precious H2O. Needless to say, I am excited!

You can find their website HERE. Tickets are only $7 per show, or $25 for the whole weekend. Trust me, the coolness points you will earn going to an underground festival on an abandoned military base will make those costs seem like a pittance. Check out the vodka tastings at Hanger One while you are out there!

HoodStock 2009

I first went to an event at the house where the Hoodstock Festival will be hosted this weekend, just a couple weeks after arriving in Oakland. Up until that night I still wasn't sure how I felt about my new hood. By the end of it I had jumped off the fence with abandon, and was proclaiming the glories of Oakland to anyone who would listen.

The house is in a slightly gritty neighborhood, but the people who live there are visionary. They invite bands to play in their backyard and host friends and strangers alike. They usually have a keg on tap - glasses in exchange for a small fee - but also encourage people to buy drinks at the liquor store on the corner and bring them back. The festival this weekend will offer several awesome bands, BBQ, and no-doubt, lots of drinking. Squeeze through the hipsters blocking the fence, hold your nose by the bathrooms in the hallway, and make your way into a little slice of Oakland heaven. 2523 Martin Luther King Oakland CA.

Thanks to my friend Justin for letting me know about this!

Music hanging in the proverbial air, or just air period

Anticipating something exciting in the future is often half the fun. It is with this in mind that I here reveal for your auditory pleasure (or at least the promise of it), a few other events that will be rolling into the area relatively soon. Remembering my initial point, you just might want to put them your calendar....

LoveEvolution - October 3rd ($10)

This is the Bay Area's most prolific electronic music festival, which for the Bay Area is saying a lot (consider for instance the upcoming and four-day, and slightly random San Francisco Electronic Music Festival with Oakland's very own Mason Bates performing). It should be a lot of fun, if you are into that sort of thing....

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass - October 2, 3, 4 (Free)

I am planning on going to this, although definitely dipping out on most of Saturday to attend LovEvolution. First of all, as I well know, you can't argue with free (the fact that I will pay twice as much in gas and bridge toll in exchange for a free glass of wine at some art opening in the city, rather than just buying four bottles of Charles Shaw, being my evidence) . Second, as advertised, this is not your typical bluegrass festival, although that would be cool enough to justify a visit. MC Hammer, Nico Case, Dr. Dog, Aimee Man, these are not your typical men in suits lonesomely crooning about Appalachia.

Treasure Island Music Festival - October 17, 18 (135.00 with fees for both days)

Treasure Island is only so big, so since this will be my first year going to the annual music festival there I figured I better get my tickets early before room literally runs out. I also just made this Pandora Station, which you are welcome to check out. I added all the bands from the festival, so if you don't know some of them\want to get a general sense of the kind of music that will be hanging in the air, check it out.