Jon Carroll:

Walking the streets with Oakland’s Art Murmur

Art Murmur is a first-Friday-of-themonth event in Oakland, my hometown. Painters, ceramicists, photographers and craftspeople of all stripes open their gallery doors to passers-by. Food trucks, local restaurants and all manner of street vendors get in on the action, setting up shop along Telegraph or on 23rd and 25th streets.

Also, there is music, dancing — performance-quality and spontaneous — and general hanging out. It’s a little scruffy, which is another way of saying unpretentious. I like my hometown a lot, and now I like Art Murmur a lot. Y’all should come on down.

Despite what you read in the newspapers, there’s a good vibe in Oakland these days. Lots of people are experiencing hard times, but they are doing so in an open and collaborative way. Art Murmur is plucky and heartening, just like Oakland itself.

Most of the action is around 25th Street between Telegraph and Broadway. It’s a long block and it’s filled with galleries, workshops, ateliers and you name it. Like all gallery crawls, it’s something of a crapshoot; sometimes you wander into a place, and your first thought is wondering how to get out again.

Sometimes, though, magic is happening. Sometimes you can watch the magic. At the 25th Street collective, a group of artisans looking to market their wares have created a communal work and sell space. My favorite exhibitor there was the guy behind Platinum Dirt, which sells leather jackets made from recycled automobile seat upholstery.

You know that “fine Corinthian leather” thing? Well, this is better — only top-of-the-line cars have been ripped apart to bring you these clothes. Got your buttery BMWs, got your silky Cadillacs. And hanging from the zipper of each jacket is a nameplate taken from the side of the car.

Also highlighting the front of the jacket: the VIN number, complete with bar code. It’s thoroughly modern.

A drum corps passed by while I was there. The burger truck across the street was doing a brisk business. People sat on the curb eating and talking. the twilight descended very slowly indeed. We would have stayed longer, but a breeze came out of the west, as is its custom, and chastened those who had forgotten a light wrap.

Further adventures in Oakland: The next day we went up to Piedmont Avenue, a venerable shopping corridor about 20 blocks north of where Art Murmur hangs its hat. Piedmont (which is not in the city of Piedmont, by the way) was also bustling, a somewhat older crowd, shopping or looking for a bite to eat or a nice movie to attend.

We went to see “Bernie” at the Piedmont Theatre. Well worth a detour, in my opinion. Richard Linklater found a good old East Texas Gothic horror story in the Texas Monthly that he turned into a comedy about rural life and the inexplicable bonds between people.

Do you know the story? An undertaker (sorry, funeral director) took up with the wealthiest widow in the small town of Carthage, Texas, where a gas boom had left rather a lot of people well off. He squired her around town — and other places — in exchange for gifts and, eventually, control over her money.

Then he got tired of being pushed around, so he shot the widow four times in the back and stuffed her into the large freezer in the garage. Then he used the extra money to help out the townspeople, many of whom he had met when he was choral director at the local church.

The kicker here is that the undertaker was perhaps gay. Certainly not straight; very possibly just confused about his own sexual urges. Certainly he had no partner. As portrayed by Jack Black, he seemed to have transcended questions about his sexual orientation by not having any.

One of the genius bits of the movie is that Linklater uses real townspeople to provide a sort of Greek chorus on the events as they take place. One citizen says he figured that Bernie was “light in the loafers,” while another said he thinks that Bernie was just celibate, which seems like the most likely description.

Bernie was eventually caught, of course — else how would the story have become known? — and the townspeople, it would seem, were all rooting for an acquittal. The widow had always been known as a mean woman, whereas Bernie was a real community treasure. Further spoilerage will not be revealed by this reviewer, in order to encourage you to see the movie.

Then the film was over, and we emerged into the Oakland twilight again, happy to be living in our hometown.