Rightnowish

I met Mu'min years ago through creative Bay Area circles, now I count her as a friend, and she's flourished in her craft. From her film, Jinn, winning the SXSW Special Jury Recognition Award for Writing to writing for acclaimed shows, Queen Sugar, the Blindspotting series, Wu-Tang: An American Saga, and Insecure. But way before all of that, Nijla attended UC Berkeley, where her experiences in June...

Babette Thomas is searching for artistic Black utopias. Thomas is the host of the latest season of SFMOMA's Raw Material podcast. In their series, "Visions of Black Futurity," they look at representation, identity and different historical through-lines in Black Art. Woven into the podcast is the story of curator Evangeline "EJ" Montgomery, a major player in the Black Arts scene. And EJ began her s...

Mission District-based muralist Josué Rojas and his mother, Esther García are a dynamic duo. Josué has painted murals across San Francisco and beyond, often using images that celebrate culture and community. Esther picked up painting during the pandemic, but she's been leaving her mark on the neighborhood for decades. As she sold small goods on the street, Esther built a reputation for her sage-li...

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Terisa's poetry emerges from climate change and its impact on marginalized communities. She also writes poems from the perspective of her hyphenated identity: raised in San Francisco with deep Samoan roots. In our conversation, Terisa looks back at January's underwater eruption that caused massive tsunamis in Samoa, Tonga, Fiji and other nations in Oceania. Initially, the disaster made headlines a...

It's a sunny afternoon in McLaren Park in San Francisco's Excelsior District. Throngs of people are gathered on either side of a roadway that snakes down a steep hill. As they watch, a person riding what looks like a giant black Converse sneaker whooshes past. Coming up close behind it, a cast-iron bathtub whizzes by on what could’ve been the frame of a lawn mower. Then another driver — this one c...

Over punchy-uptempo beats with stupid-heavy bass lines, Pallaví AKA Fijiana turns social tropes on their heads. Her evocative visuals mix sexuality with tradition while her lyrics address appropriation and diaspora. Fijiana says her Indo-Fijian heritage, her Richmond upbringing and rap influences like Lil Kim and Ladybug Mecca of Digable Planets, helped create the artist and person she is today. I...

For some young folks, there comes a time when they age out of child-serving social services. Their safety nets get thinner and they can struggle to find their footing with limited resources or experience. These sixteen to twenty-four-year-olds are called "transitional age youth" or TAY. This is the crowd that Desire Johnson-Forte helps. She cares because she was once one of them. Desire is current...

A storm's been brewing over legal cannabis in Oakland. And Chaney Turner thinks it has the potential to wash away small business owners-- especially People of Color. Chaney Turner,  current Chair of the Oakland Cannabis Commission, has seen robberies reach new heights as organized heists hit cannabis supply chains, from grow operations to retailers. It was especially intense during the summer of 2...

Just imagine: you're a poet whose starting out on the scene and you've spent weeks working up the courage to share your work. You get to the venue there’s a raucous crowd of OG poets, they're cheering, but they're also waiting to see what's up with each person as the step to the mic. If the OG poets think your poem is a cheap knockoff of someone else's work, they'll throw peanut shells against the...

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Krea Gomez has seen tough love play out in many ways. As a young adult, she was kicked out of her home for “being bad,” now she’s practicing tough love in her own way. In her work with young adults – and her own children – she sets boundaries and goals while teaching independence with care. Krea is also the Director of Local Initiatives at the Young Women’s Freedom Center and has been a loud voice...

In the Bay Area, “showing love” is something we toss around all the time. One man who embodies this is the tie-dye wearing, weed smoking, big smiling man named Oopz. He and his crew are known for throwing fun-loving parties at the Shmop House where the air grows thick with cannabis smoke. In this episode, he tells us his journey to becoming an extrovert, and the time his community love was tested...

AB Banks, defines love as "doing the right thing with a passion." That means taking care of themselves and their folks, because self-love can be communal and revolutionary. Day-to-day AB works with the People’s Programs in Oakland, supporting their unhoused neighbors through clinics and food donations. Outside of that, AB is deep in the practice of meditation. After setting out on a personal journ...

You don't have to look very long to find tributes to Frida Kahlo in San Francisco. Frida inspired murals cover walls throughout the Mission, street vendors near the Embarcadero sell clothes and earrings with her likeness, and there's a street named after her in the Ingleside neighborhood. This devotion to Frida makes perfect sense because Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived in San Francisco, not on...

As a cancer survivor, Caroline Chung tells me expressing herself through music has been healing. But it's not always smooth sailing. Chung says she's been overlooked for gigs simply because of her identity-- an Asian woman who plays the upright bass. "Hey, I'm a female jazz bassist," says Chung. "It's like nobody really cares, because it's the ‘boys club’."  Despite this, Chung has found collabora...

Erena Shimoda takes photos underwater. She creates majestic images of people in pools. Her subjects can be seen posing in wheelchairs, dancing with tulle, adorned in mermaid attire, or wrapped in Shibari ropes. Some of her models are people who've lived through physical or mental trauma. Erena helps them slip into water, release their experiences, and hopefully reemerge anew. It's a nod to religio...

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This country is extremely divided, always has been. When you combine the issues of racism, sexism and other isms that have plagued us for ages and mix in the division that's risen over this drawn out pandemic, you could see why some people might feel comfortable and complacent in their silos. But let's do something about it. I'm asking you to get out of that comfort zone, reach out and connect wit...

This past Independence Day, Oakland's Marty Aranaydo found himself a long way from the town. Marty had joined up with the NDN Collective to scale a 100-foot grain silo in Rapid City, South Dakota. Atop it, the group unfurled a massive inverted American flag with the words, "LANDBACK" across it. The direct action called for more than the transfer of territory back to indigenous tribes, on the botto...

In the fall of 2019, we interviewed her about taking a quick break from country music to write a roller skating anthem: a vibey R&B song called "Roll Out." In her latest project, Race Records, she's come back to her roots as a country singer. Given that there's been a whole pandemic, a rise in the popularity of rollerskating and new music released that speaks to Miko's origins as a singer, we figu...

This Thanksgiving-- Friendsgiving, Thankstaking, or whatever you call this holiday-- I'm turning the microphones on the Rightnowish team and asking the hard questions about food, friend and feelings. For this episode I'm joined by Rightnowish producer Marisol Medina-Cadena and editor Jessica Placzek. We dive into our holiday experiences, the music that we turn to as the weather gets cold, and we t...

Every Wednesday evening, the 1Up Crew gathers at In The Groove Studios in downtown Oakland for a free open lab session. That's where you'll see folks perfecting their moves and dancing in a variety of styles: turfing, ballroom, pop locking and krumping. It's all in preparation for monthly battles against other crews. Some of the battles are freestyle, others are three-on-three dance-offs where tea...

At first it may seem like an odd-pairing: a white guy who is a silver-spoon-fed techie from the East Coast and a Black woman from Oakland who is a hard working natural genius in the field of engineering. But through a series of events that unravel in the new play, "Cofounders", the two learn to co-exist. This week, we talk art and tech, and what can be done to curb the perceived divisions between...

December 7, 2021 marks 80 years since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, an act that would lead to the United States' formal involvement in WWII. In support of the war effort, the Bay Area soon became home to a number of small factories and larger shipyards where huge vessels were manufactured, like Sausalito's Marinship. As jobs opened up in this industry, hundreds of thousands of African Americans mig...