Alexander Berkman Memorial Festival

July 23, 1892: Anarchist Alexander Berkman tries to assassinate Henry Clay Frick in Frick's office. Berkman's attempt was a gesture of support for the workers then locked in the famous 1892 Homestead strike against Frick and Andrew Carnegie. But as numerous historians later observe, while Berkman's bullet merely wounds Frick, it kills public sympathy for the strikers.

July 23, 2008: The Loose Organization of Surreal Ethereal Realists presents the first annual Alexander Berkman Memorial Music and Labor Festival. 8pm at the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, Oakland.

According to the organizers, as quoted in the City Paper, "The evening also includes a farcical re-enactment of the shooting and a Berkman lookalike contest meant more to encourage period dress than to locate a posthmous body double for the author of Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.