This week: Land stewardship in the East Bay, tracking birds in the South Bay, and 50 years of wine in Napa Valley. Also, tamale season, unconventional homes, a local middle school record player, the Valkyries DJ's new Oakland club, and new work by '90s Mission School artists.
For many Mission cooks, tamale season starts at La Palma Mexicatessen, where they buy fresh masa for the holidays. One longtime figure in that tradition is Simona Padilla, who ran a meat market at 24th and York for 15 years and cooked Mexican dishes for her neighborhood.
Over time, her food was also served at events for the Mexican consul, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, and local journalism fundraisers. In a recent video with filmmaker Hélène Goupil, Padilla shows how she makes tamales for Christmas, grounding the dish in La Palma's masa and the Mission's home-based cooking traditions. -- Mission Local
DJ Lady Ryan, official DJ for the Golden State Valkyries, co-founded Golden Ratio, a new queer-owned bar and lounge in downtown Oakland. Alongside hospitality leader Dennise Acio, she has shaped the space with years of Bay Area nightlife experience and a focus on community-driven programming.
At Aptos Middle School in San Francisco, librarian Gina Cargas is setting up a vinyl listening station built around a vintage Newcomb record player. After putting out a casual call for records, she was met with dozens of offers from neighbors eager to donate albums for a new generation.
Cargas says many students encounter music as short social media clips, often without context, and the Newcomb turntable creates space to listen to full albums and talk about artists and genres together. The station is now taking shape inside the Aptos Middle School library. -- Coyote Media Collective
At Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Bay Area Then looks back at the Mission School scene of the 1990s while showcasing the collective's current body of work. Guest curator Eungie Joo brings together 21 artists linked to that era, mixing new work with familiar names like Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen to recreate the restless, DIY energy that once defined Bay Area art spaces.
Several pieces confront current political realities, including Gaza, along with the art world's response to controversial works, including YBCA's new leadership. The show runs through January 25. -- Chronicle
In 1976, a blind tasting in Paris quietly upended wine-world assumptions when Napa Valley bottles outscored French standbys, shifting the region's future in a single afternoon. Seven wineries were part of that moment -- Chateau Montelena, Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, Clos du Val, Freemark Abbey, Heitz Cellar, Mayacamas Vineyards, and Spring Mountain Vineyard -- each still tied to the landscapes that shaped those early vintages.
As the 50th anniversary approaches in 2026, the group is marking the occasion with coordinated tastings, historical tours, and food events that trace both the wines and the people behind them. Programming rolls out across Napa Valley throughout the year, centered at the original estates that helped put the region on the global map. -- 7 x 7
In a new book shaped by years of travel and documentation, Berkeley-based filmmakers and writers Kirsten Dirksen and Nicolás Boullosa profile dozens of unconventional homes and their owners. Life-Changing Homes: Eco-Friendly Designs That Promote Well-Being moves from hempcrete roundhouses in Gold Country to shanty boats and restored housebarns, tracing how people's sense of place informs how they build.
Dirksen and Boullosa draw on their Faircompanies archive and their own nomadic years before settling into a renovated 1908 cottage in South Berkeley. -- Marin Independent Journal
Five acres on Mount Diablo have been secured from future development through a land donation made by Bob Nunn in memory of his father, Ron Nunn, a longtime East Contra Costa County farmer and conservation-minded land steward. The parcel, known as the Nunn-Paulsen inholding, fills a small but critical gap inside Mount Diablo State Park, where privately owned land can fracture habitats and complicate long-term protection.
Save Mount Diablo finalized the donation in just over three months, highlighting the land's notable mix of oak woodland, serpentine rock, and wildlife corridor linking the park to Black Diamond Mines. The nonprofit plans to transfer the parcel to California State Parks under a new state law designed to speed up park land acquisitions, with several other inholdings on the mountain still in view. -- Bay Area News Group
At the Coyote Creek Field Station in Alviso, a North San Jose neighborhood at the edge of the Bay, bird banding -- briefly capturing birds to record data and release them -- begins in near-quiet before traffic noise spills in from nearby freeways. Coyote Creek runs from the Diablo Range through San Jose and ends here, where wetlands sit alongside highways, rail lines, and flight paths.
Researchers are paying closer attention to how constant and sudden sounds affect birds' stress and communication, particularly for threatened South Bay wetland species. Conservationists working in places like the Salt Pond Restoration Project are now factoring sound into habitat protection as restoration continues in one of the region's most industrialized ecological zones. -- Monterey Herald
Top image: Rigo 23, Terra Nullius, 2025; Robbie Sweeny/Yerba Buena Center for the Arts