Photo from Tim in sanhazzay on Flickr

For a celebration of Dia De Los Muertos — the largest in the Bay Area — head to International Boulevard in Fruitvale on Sunday, November 1, between 10 am and 5 pm. There will be music, artist and community alters on display, arts and crafts vendors, children’s activities, and of course food!

Also on Sunday, November 1, from 11 am to 3 pm City Slickers Farm is hosting a groundbreaking ceremony for its newest West Oakland farm. This Community Market Farm, located in  Fitzgerald and Union Plaza Parks at 34th and Peralata, will have fruit trees, raised beds, chickens, a farm stand,  and workshops. Stop by to lend a hand building raised beds, enjoy music from local artists, and learn more about the farm and the potential for urban agriculture in Oakland from farmers, area residents, and city representatives.

(While this final offering is neither free nor in Oakland, it is 50% off and sounds like it could be just the right mix of fun and frightening. What is it? A $12 San Francisco Chinatown Ghost Tour. If this is exactly the eery Halloween activity you’ve been waiting for, you can buy your discounted tickets on Groupon.)

When: Thursday, October 29, from 6 pm to 9 pm.

Where: Pauley Ballroom, MLK Building.

Who: Grad students with grad student ID and proof of age. Non-Berkeley graduate students are welcome as guests. Entry is $5 and includes 1 hot dog (or veggie option) and beer (with free refills). Bring your own cup and save $1.

Loma Prieta earthquake damage to the Bay Bridge

Despite the damage, the 1989 earthquake was much less intense than the 1906 earthquake that struck San Francisco. And chances are good, 63% according to the most recent predictions, that an earthquake of equal or greater magnitude will occur along a Bay Area fault within the next 30 years.

During an earthquake

Loma Prieta earthquake damage to the Old King Library in San Jose

• If you are inside when an earthquake strikes, drop, cover, and hold on. That means take cover under a heavy piece of furniture or drop to the floor against an interior wall. Protect your head and neck with your arms, then stay put until the shaking has stopped. In an earthquake, avoid exterior walls, windows, large hanging objects and mirrors, and large appliances.
• If you’re in bed, stay there and cover your head with a pillow.
• If you’re outside, move to a clear area if possible. Avoid buildings, power lines, and trees. Always assume that fallen power lines are live.
• If you’re in a car, pull over to the side of the road as soon as it’s possible and safe. Avoid anything that might fall on your vehicle, such as an overpass. Remain inside until the shaking has stopped.

And remember, as Emily White of the Red Cross said during a recent interview with the Chronicle, “Most earthquake-related injuries result from falling debris or people trying to move more than a few feet during the shaking.”

Before an earthquake

• Develop an earthquake plan. This includes identifying safe spots in every room in your home and practicing getting into these spots and dropping, covering, and holding on. Also make a plan for how you will communicate with and meet up with family members, friends, or roommates after a quake.
• Put together a disaster kit. This should include the supplies you’ll need to survive for 3 days on your own. Your kit should have bottled water (1 gallon per person per day); nonperishable food; first aid supplies; a flashlight with extra batteries; extra personal supplies, such as medication, contact lenses or glasses, and basic hygiene products; copies of personal identification and insurance information; a list of emergency contact phone numbers; something for warmth; and emergency cash.
• Look around your home for potential hazards, i.e., heavy objects or glass (in picture frames or mirrors) that could fall during an earthquake. Move these items away from places where people sit and sleep.

Related Links:

• How to prepare for an earthquake on SFGate
• Putting down roots in Earthquake Country from the USGS
• Complete SFGate Loma Prieta earthquake anniversary coverage
• What to do in an earthquake from UC Berkeley’s Office of Emergency Preparedness

When: Friday, October 16, from noon to 1 pm.

Where: Stephen’s Hall on the 3rd floor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union.

Don’t tell Harold Bloom, but the lyrical feats of rappers like Raekwon have proven eminently worthy of literary analysis. A successful career in hip-hop requires more than an affinity for girls, cash, and cars. Rappers must employ a sharp wit, an acute sense of rhythm, and a highly developed allusive structure. Lil Wayne’s enigmatic “Who dat one dat do dat boy?” has left many a listener rhythmically entranced but utterly unsure of the question, much less the answer. And Cam’ron’s “But la de da de / We like to party” sounds achingly familiar…but is that elusive allusion just an illusion?

RapGenius.com (formerly, with a nominal nod to biblical hermeneutics, RapExegesis.com) delves into the most opaque of rap’s lyrical mysteries. The extensive index of annotated songs, while not quite comprising a critical edition to the complete works of rap, is likely to alleviate any itching textual anxieties; you’ll need no longer fret about the origins of that Cam reference. And unlike an unwieldy multivolume Pléiade, the site isn’t just for devotees (nor will it cost you half your stipend). Offering everything from the iconic Jay-Z to the more obscure Southern group The Clipse, RapGenius invites curious converts without preaching to the choir, guiding neophyte and initiate alike through the semiotic labyrinth of rap. Just click on the hyperlinked text to reveal instant enlightenment: behind “Beef: I hammer mine / When I get my hands on nines” lies “A double entendre: a butcher ‘hammers’ ground beef; Cam’ron settles ‘beef’ – disagreements – with his ‘hammer’ – his (in this case nine millimeter) gun.” If only reading Milton worked like this.

Sites like RapGenius have, however, sparked some controversy. If rap lyrics need to be somehow translated, the contributors to these sites – often white and highly educated – can be seen as amateur ethnographers: without their expertise in the language of the natives, rap would be unintelligible gibberish. Such criticism, recalling the notorious Ebonics debates of the 90s, has surely not escaped the RapGenius scribes. But the assiduousness of the site’s annotations suggests that they take the language of rap, and all its aesthetic, ethical, and political implications, seriously. The genre may in some respects deserve its “bad rap” as a promoter of violence and misogyny, but RapGenius often succeeds in showing how good rap problematizes the power relations between blacks and whites, men and women, rich and poor. Feminist rap fans – and anyone in Gender & Women’s Studies – will appreciate, if not endorse, an analysis of a Lil Kim track in which she exhorts a male listener to perform a sexual act anatomically impossible within the prevailing gender paradigm. And if one aspect of the oft-off-rhymed connection between the “rap game” and the “crack game” is that both rappers and drug dealers get rich selling powerful substances with little concern for how their customers inevitably abuse their overvalued products, we can conclude that Nas doesn’t care if you are effectively “Otherizing” his language; he drives a much, much nicer car than you.

Yet RapGenius will likely remain deeply problematic for graduate students, even those who can in good faith suspend sociological skepticism: not only does it provide yet another internet distraction from coursework and research, it does so while posing as a quasi-intellectual exercise. So what if you spent the last hour trying to achieve a grasp on par with Lil Wayne’s of the exact relationship between a goon and a goblin; at least you weren’t looking at LOLcats. Come to think of it, those pidgin captions would make for a compelling case study of the internet’s impact on language…“LOLcatechism.com,” anyone?

Banners outside Kroeber Hall during the study-in. The "cemetery" refers to a comment made by UC President Yudof in a New York Times interview

”We have an announcement … This is now our library,” said UC Berkeley senior Andi Walden to more than one hundred students, as well as a few professors and staff members, who gathered at the anthropology library in Kroeber Hall on Friday, October 9^th, shortly before the usual 5 pm closure time. During the next 24 hours, they would study for their midterms, participate in various ”teach-ins”, and even sleep over in the reclaimed space.

The principle of this action, organized in less than a week by an informal student group, was to respond to the University’s decision to close nearly all campus libraries on Saturdays. The library closures are the ”undeniable symptom of a dying university,” Walden said, reminding the attendees of the other impacts of this year’s budget cuts, including the unprecedented 32% tuition fee hike and the pay cuts imposed on UC workers across the board, even those already living under the poverty line.

While various actions were discussed to follow up on the September 24^th walkout against budget cuts, organizers of the “study-in” mentioned the importance of direct actions that create change by themselves — in this case, keeping a library open that should have been closed — in addition to putting pressure on legislators and administrators. For Daniel Nemser, a graduate student in Spanish and Portuguese and one of the organizers of the event, the goal was ”not only to demonstrate the problems” caused by the budget cuts, ”but also establish a place for public dialogue.” Some speakers pointed out that at a deeper level, keeping the library open was a symbol of the need for more openness (i.e., transparency and accessibility) on the public campus.

Anthropology Professor Paul Rabinow was one of the guest speakers on Friday evening.

Some of the lively discussions that took place in one half of the library – the other was reserved for quiet studying – covered such topics as non-violent resistance, the history of public education since the New Deal, and power and privilege within the student movement. On Saturday afternoon, Professor Bob Meister from UC Santa Cruz delivered a much-anticipated talk on his analysis of the UC budget and how tuition fee increases were used by the University of California to receive cheap credit for its building projects.

In the end, with the volunteer participation of dedicated library staff, students were able to remain in the space for the entire 24-hour period. That the University police were ordered not to intervene by the Chancellor, and remained outside the library as the result of negotiation with the organizers was also seen as a success, according to Nemser.

Related links:

• Professor Bob Meister’s article
• Reclaim UC Blog
• UC Solidarity: an online hub for groups organizing against the budget cuts
• A statewide conference to defend public education on Oct. 24
• President Yudof’s New York Times interview

Also of note: Journalism Professor Michael Pollan has an article on rules for eating in the annual Food Issue of the New York Times Magazine.