Culture
The East Bay has a free weekly newspaper, the East Bay Express, which has reported on the culture and politics of the East Bay for over 30 years, and has influenced the identification of the East Bay as a culturally defined region of the Bay Area. The free East Bay Monthly has been published since 1970. In the early years of the evolution of USA Today, during the early 1980s, they operated regional newspapers, with the region's paper entitled East Bay Today.
The Solano Avenue Stroll, the oldest and largest street festival in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, is held every September on the Solano Avenue shopping district in Albany and Berkeley.
The East Bay is the birthplace of many musical acts, including Creedence Clearwater Revival, Counting Crows, Yesterday and Today, Digital Underground, Rancid, Green Day, Primus, Tower of Power (whose debut album is titled East Bay Grease), The Pointer Sisters, MC Hammer, Tony! Toni! Tone! Tupac Shakur, Too Short, en Vogue, Pete Escovedo and Sheila E, Keyshia Cole, and Mac Dre. The region is a major center for the development of rock, folk, funk, jazz, hip-hop, soul and women's music.
Bay Area thrash metal has centered strongly on the East Bay, including the bands Exodus and Metallica, among others. Possessed and Death, both considered the first death metal bands, have roots or connections in the East Bay: Possessed formed in El Sobrante, with Death debuting nationally while in Concord.
Major music (and sports) venues include the Oakland Oracle Arena, home arena of the Golden State Warriors; adjacent McAfee Coliseum, home of the Oakland A's and the Oakland Raiders; the Oakland Paramount Theater, venue for the Oakland East Bay Symphony; the Fox Oakland Theatre, the UC Berkeley Greek Theater, the nonprofit The Freight and Salvage, and the Sleep Train Pavilion, formerly known as the Concord Pavilion.
Major museums include the Oakland Museum of California, the Lawrence Hall of Science and the Chabot Space and Science Center.
The East Bay Regional Parks District operates over fifty parks, many consisting of significant acreage of wildlands, in the East Bay, many directly adjacent to urban centers. Tilden Regional Park, is one of the largest regional parks (2,000 acres (8.1 km2)) located directly adjacent to the urban center of Berkeley. Briones Regional Park, at 5,000 acres, is another large wildlands park near an urban center, Walnut Creek.
The East Bay is home to many of the restaurants central to the creation of California Cuisine, including Chez Panisse.
Read more about this topic: East Bay (San Francisco Bay Area)
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“I’ve finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“The local is a shabby thing. There’s nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)