Rightnowish

A few days ahead of April 15th -- 415 Day -- we're talking to two artists from San Francisco who have lived, fought, partied, and made art for their hometown. Jules Retzlaff (Cereal For The Kids) and Sachiel Rosen (Baghead) are the duo behind the film and album, Dedicated To Those Who. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jackie Keliiaa is a stand-up comedian raised in Hayward and based in Oakland. She's unapologetically Bay, and proud of her Yerington, Paiute and Washoe roots. She's also funny af.   Building off Charlie Hill's legacy, Keliiaa cracks jokes about colonialism, Native culture and family, alongside her trials and tribulations with dating. Before the pandemic, you could catch her shows at Punchline San...

Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye is a legend. She’s best known for her seminal film, Watermelon Woman, which takes a critical look at the depiction of Black women in cinema; 2021 marks 25 years since it debuted. In making that film, Dunye, a graduate of Temple University and Rutgers University, created her own style of filmmaking known as “Dunyementary.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/...

Oakland-based filmmaker Theo Hollingsworth knows about nerds. Back when he attended Howard University, he was given the nickname “spoken nerd” because of his personality and passion for poetry. More recently, Hollingsworth’s independently produced comedic sci-fi series, Sirius Lee: The Problematic Time Transplant, dives into its own nerdom with quantum physics while addressing outdated perspective...

San Francisco State graduates Alba Roland Mejia and Jon Warfield Harrison are in the early stages of their careers as filmmakers. They’ve released a handful of short films which are artistic, a bit experimental and occasionally include a dash of science fiction. Their first collaboration, My Own Mecca, looks at a day in the life of a young man at a crossroads, learning to navigate relationships, r...

Maya Cueva makes documentary films that cover the heavy topics: immigration, reproductive justice and xenophobia. Cueva says her journey into professional storytelling began after covering current events at Youth Radio (now YR Media) as a teen. While attending Ithaca College in New York, she began work on her first film, The Provider, which follows Dr. Shannon Carr as she performs abortions in Tex...

Tongo Eisen-Martin, San Francisco's eighth poet laureate, says it's not enough to simply be a poet. "The poet needs to just come on down to the trenches," he says. His suggestion for writers out there is to get involved in your community, whether that's passing out flyers or organizing a mutual aid program. "That experience is what you synthesize good revolutionary poetry from." This week on Righn...

Antoine Johnson stands at the intersection of hip-hop culture, HIV/ AIDS history, and the great institutions of higher learning in Northern California. A graduate of Oakland's Castlemont High School and Sacramento State University, Johnson is now a PhD candidate at UCSF where he's researching the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and how the community-- including a group of Black women in Oakland-- responded. Le...

Lyricist Champ Green is probably your favorite Bay Area rapper's favorite rapper. He's been putting in work for some time, and over the past calendar year he's been on a music-making mission. And he's not showing any signs of slowing. His clever wordplay and wisdom-filled rhymes can be found on a project with DJ Basta, a recent single and video with Mistah FAB, and multiple tracks with the Grand N...

Neo-soul and hip-hop artist Jada Imani gets her inspiration from a range of lived experiences: parking tickets, lessons from her parents, and Mac Dre lyrics. Despite the pandemic, Jada has been dropping three-track EPs every first Friday since October, and plans to continue to do so until March. It's a legacy of the collaborations and vibe she cultivated while organizing and hosting First Friday e...

For the next month, Rightnowish will be featuring artists with local roots who are taking the sounds of the Bay to a national stage. YMTK is an R&B and hip-hop artist who grew up in Oakland and currently resides in Los Angeles. In his music catalog, you'll find his collaborations with P-Lo, IamSu!, Rexx Life Raj, and many more. YMTK has also written lyrics for emerging artists like the East Bay's ...

Nappy Nina is a lyricist with a smooth-sultry delivery that's almost jazz-like, especially when coupled with some signature Boom-Bap production. In her songs, she raps about breakups, missing Oakland, the disappointing produce in Brooklyn, and navigating rough financial waters. She's gotten mentions from the Grammys and Bandcamp. And she's been working on a streak of exciting projects. For an orga...

Dale Johnson grew up in East Oakland with stories of his grandfather riding horses on a Texas ranch. For years horses were just part of a family story. But one day, a pair of polo boots caught Dale's eye and he was brought back into the world of equestrians. Now Dale and his horse, Sunny, are deep in the horseback community. Last fall, they joined other riders, like Brianna Noble, to ride through...

Breena Nuñez is an Afro Guatemalan-Salvadoran cartoonist who grew up on the Bay Area's peninsula. Now she lives in the East Bay. Nuñez's illustrations cover everything from commentaries about electoral politics to autobiographical comics about gender, sexuality and race. African ancestry in Central America is a through-line in Nuñez's work. Sometimes she explicitly brings it up in the captions, ot...

Alex Trapps-Chabala is a young genealogist whose main focus is tracing the lineage of African American people. He grew up between Sacramento's Oak Park neighborhood and the Bay Area. But as preteen, his family sent him to live with with relatives in Alabama to get some discipline for an attitude problem. It was that time spent in the south that pushed Alex toward becoming a genealogist. Alex says...

Vincent-Ray Williams III is the Operations Coordinator at Oakland's LGBTQ Community Center. Through this position Vincent has a hand in developing the Center's Glenn Burke Wellness Clinic. The clinic, which is named after the Oakland A's player who was discriminated against for being the first openly gay major league player, is set to open early next year. Vincent says the clinic will focus on HIV...

Abdulalim A’Omer grew up in a tight-knit Muslim Eritrean community in South Berkeley. He says that experience exposed him to a little bit of everything-- fashion, basketball, family, politics, religion, technology and more. It all proved to be a foundational part of Abdulalim's multifaceted Everything brand, which wants to ask its users, what's your everything? Abdulalim, or Abdul for short, is th...

Deanna Van Buren is an architect, but she goes far beyond just designing buildings. She uses her craft to demonstrate new structures for justice in our society. Van Buren is the co-founder and Executive Director of Designing Justice, an organization that she says focuses on "ending mass incarceration through innovations in the built environment, using both finance and design together."  Designing...

Comic Luna Malbroux loves to stay informed, and she also loves to laugh. By prioritizing joy in her life, she has the energy to confront racism, sexism and the stress of this election season. Just this week, Malbroux-- who is also a musician and sex coach in training-- spent election night co-hosting a live event for the San Francisco AIDS foundation. She brought the laughs and she brought some de...

Denis Ivan Perez Bravo is an East Bay-based photographer and organizer who isn't shy about jumping right into the action. The images he captures on the front lines of protests in Northern California show the intense struggle of today's social movements. The risk of bodily harm can come from both sides of a scrimmage. While covering the news, Dennis has been hit by projectiles fired from police wea...

Two years ago Tayleur Crenshaw and Maud Alcorn started the arts collective, Gold Beams. It began as an open mic Crenshaw hosted in her living room -- called Second Mondays -- which eventually grew into a larger monthly event at Red Bay Coffee headquarters in East Oakland. "It’s like emotional stories that they kind of leave at the altar at Second Mondays. And us as community aunties, we are there...

In January of this year, Cat Brooks and the Anti Police-Terror Project launched a service where trained professionals respond to mental health crises; it's an alternative to people calling the police to handle the situation. The service, Mental Health First, or M.H. First, initially launched in Sacramento, and began serving Oakland this summer. Brooks says that M.H. First's work is just one part o...

On 17th and Telegraph, on the backside of YR media's Oakland headquarters, there's a mural that stretches the length of the three story building. The colorful artwork was painted by Rachel Wolfe Goldsmith and shows two people: one with their fist raised to the sky wearing a shirt that says "they/them", and another person looking calmly at you, sort of inviting you in. The models for the mural are...

About two years ago photographer Scott La Rockwell started taking photos of longtime Oakland residents, and interviewing them about their roots in the Town. He published the pieces online, calling it: the Townfolk Project. He says he initially planned to take photos of 100 folks from a cross section of backgrounds and neighborhoods, but with COVID-19, things slowed down. He’s sitting on about 20 p...

Regina Y. Evans works with a team of folks to assemble altars on International Boulevard in Oakland, a hub for adult sex workers as well as the sex trafficking of minors. Regina says the goal of the work is to be present for the girls-- "Beloveds" as she calls them. The altars are decorated with art, flowers, letters and fabrics, and since the start of the pandemic, she's been adding hand sanitize...