Sad Francisco

Max Blue is one of San Francisco's few remaining art critics in legacy media (see: his column in SF Examiner); he also contributes regularly to Hyperallergic.  Max gives the best brief introduction of the big art movements San Francisco is most well known for, and names names including:  BXP, the company that benefited from the Vaillancourt fountain's removal)  CIA Operation Mockingbird, the US go...

Brutal honesty is all we have for Boots Riley's overstuffed filmic ode to shoplifters and maybe communism,  I Love Boosters. Topics discussed include: The Coup's early work Betrayal by union leaders Megan Ellison, the alleged black sheep of the Zionist Ellison dynasty Tax credits they give you to film a movie set in the Bay in Georgia The Leaning Tower of Millennium A vow for the next episode to f...

A monologue revisiting a Truthout piece I wrote back in 2014 for this solo episode and stroll down memory lane featuring a Gay Shame action, crying in eviction court, and one of eviction lawyer Daniel Bornstein's boring-ass webinars where he explains the tricks of his trade. Daniel (who runs Bornstein Law—formerly known as Bornstein & Bornstein) is a white guy who's used his adopted Black kids as...

Ian covers local oligarchs and the surveillance state for 48Hills and The Phoenix Project. We talk about FLOCK adding microphones to their camera network, state repression after the anti-cop protests of summer 2020, and how crypto oligarch Chris Larsen bought off the Trump regime. Ian in 48Hills: "Flock keeps spying on us all, and state and local officials aren't protecting us": https://48hills.or...

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) started as a civil rights organization for Jewish people in the US. It's now a pro-Israel group that spies on Leftist organizations and defends Elon Musk when he does a white power salute. Emmaia Gelman's new book The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State details the history of the Zionist group that influences everything from the history written into America...

Two Wasian Americans and one classic, everyday Asian American, all millennials, try to make sense of East Asian American discourses in the zeitgeist of the past six months. Recorded shortly before the cursed Wasian meetups in SF and NY. 1. CS graduation rates fall off a cliff. For a particular class of Asian Americans, computer science degrees were a step in the direction of the American Dream. No...

dee(dee) and Jemma return to dissect another vintage film set in the Bay. Did Hollywood predict Sam Altman would meet his husband in Peter Thiel's hot tub? Seeking an answer in " Electric Dreams " (1984), an extremely 1980s rom-com in which a young architect working out of the Transamerica Pyramid programs an early PC into a Frankenstein-ian monster. Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder: Together in Ele...

Until Land Back, there's land trusts. Kyle Smeallie from the San Francisco Community Land Trust on removing land from the speculative market and the clutches of real estate industrialists. San Francisco Community Land Trust https://sfclt.org/ Proud Stutter (Maya's podcast) https://www.proudstutter.org/ Episode: Abolish Rent with Leonardo Vilchis and Tracy Rosenthal https://www.patreon.com/posts/ab...

May Day 2026, QUEER & TRANS NON/WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE for a tour of some historically significant sites in the Mission, detailed on this episode. All hookers, loiterers, shoplifters, street sellers, truants, 1099 queens, gig workers, students, time theft recidivists, hustlers, welfare fags, & SSDI dykes are encourage to attend. May 1 at 7pm, 16th BART Plaza in San Francisco Gay Shame  https:/...

Prince Shakur is an anarchist political educator with a book dealing with how he was politicized (When They Tell You To Be Good), a big library of video essays on YouTube, and a Black anarchist podcasts he co-hosts called The Dugout. Prince's site https://www.princeshakur.com/ The Dugout's site https://www.thedugoutpodcast.com/ On YouTube: How To Be A (Better) Organizer in 2026 https://www.youtube...

Michael Scarce worked at a now-defunct nonprofit called the Stop AIDS Project till in 2007, he blew the whistle when it began suggesting that to end AIDS, we need to "prevent sexual mixing." Michael's Substack: 'A Parable of Second-Hand Sodomy: Lessons Learned From San Francisco's Failed Attempt at Viral Apartheid in the Name of HIV Prevention' https://gettingbeyondzero.substack.com/p/a-parable-of...

In March, viral depositions of a couple of 20-something white twinks named Justin Fox and Nathan Cavanaugh (referred to on social media as "DOGE bros") made explicit how careless and nihilistic the federal government was in cutting humanities funding last year, as part of Elon Musk's short-lived Department of Government Efficiency. Jane Ward is a Feminist Studies professor at UC Santa Barbara who...

Raquel Willis' resume is long: the first trans lead editor at Out magazine, a TIME 100 awardee, memoirist (The Risk It Takes To Bloom), and co-founder of the group Gender Liberation, whose direct actions at the US capitol calling for basic needs like trans healthcare reverberate far outside the DMV. We discuss the limitations of mainstream visibility in saving trans lives, and her podcast series A...

The return of Susan Stryker! On this episode: The utopian potential of Trans SanFrisco of the 1990s, and why the new third edition of Transgender History may be her last time editing the classic tome. Transgender History https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/susan-stryker/transgender-history-third-edition/9781541605886/ When Monsters Speak https://www.dukeupress.edu/when-monsters-speak Susan's...

Friends Stab and Trung both texted me when about a recent, very Sad Francisco-coded feature in Wired magazine. Here's a little response, inspired partially by an impromptu reading group a few friends did around the piece. Mentioned: Alexandr Wang Barry's Bootcamp  Gawker.com Melania's box office Peter Thiel Sam Altman Tim Cook TW for brief mention of Sam Altman sexually assaulting his sister, and...

First episode covering movies set in the Bay! With dee(dee) and Jemma. Starting with: 1971's DIRTY HARRY, in which Clint Eastwood plays a vigilante cop tracking down a gay Zodiac killer clone in a San Francisco overrun with hippie scum.  Jemma on her book "The Aesthetic Character of Blackness: Sounds Like Us" https://www.patreon.com/posts/ 146458351 dee(dee) on the 1970s queer zine "Gay Sunshine"...

Uncover the lore of four masked comrades who meet up regularly to offer aid to unhoused neighbors and teach self-defense.  We talk about the discourse around wearing frog costumes to ICE protests and giving public comment at San Jose City Hall dressed as Batman (that's the clip at the beginning of the episode). BASH Linktree https://linktr.ee/bayareasuperheroes BASH IG https://www.instagram.com/ba...

Morgan Bassichis brought the 1977 queer cult fairy tale "The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions" back to print and stage a few years ago. Its messages about how to live under patriarchy feel extra prescient in 2026. The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions By Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta With essays by Morgan and Tourmaline https://nightboat.org/book/the-faggots-their-friends-be...

Mama Ganuush is back home in San Francisco after hosting the first JAHA Film Festival in December in Lisbon. The festival features all trans-focused films from the Global South, and begins screening online starting this Friday, Feb. 14. JAHA Film Festival https://www.jahafilmfestival.com/ Trans Liberation Film School https://www.jahafilmfestival.com/transliberationfilmschool

Trung Nguyen teaches Asian American and ethnic studies at San Jose State. His presentation at the last American Studies Association conference covered how the interests of US empire, Airbnb.org, and refugee landlords market property ownership as a humanitarian act. Trung's site https://tpqn.org/ Iyko Day: The Yellow Plague and Romantic Anticapitalism (Monthly Review) https://monthlyreview.org/arti...

"Meet the New Right-Wing Tech Intelligentsia" is Jimmy Wu's recent piece for Bay Area Current, a new publication covering labor, culture and politics based in East Bay. In it, Jimmy beautifully describes some of the aesthetics and icons preoccupying the tech elites and their media mouthpieces right now.  "Meet the New Right-Wing Tech Intelligentsia" https://bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new-right-wi...

In 2022, rightwing influencers began using the term "doom loop" to paint San Francisco as a crime- and fentanyl-ridden hellhole that whose downfall was due to too much woke progressivism. It didn't matter that the doom loop narrative wasn't based in reality: the media took it and ran with it. The narrative has since lost its resonance in San Francisco, but it's now being deployed in several other...

Jenny Chan founded Pacific Atrocities Education in San Francisco after learning about some of Japan's terror campaigns across Asia through World War II. It's history that Japanese conservatives are trying to suppress. The Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731 was the chemical and biological warfare facility that conducted experiments on about 14,000 people in China. None of those 14,000 survived, whil...

Jemma DeCristo RETURNS! Her new book The Aesthetic Character of Blackness is out, and covers how revolutionary Black art is co-opted by capitalists and the state, and art's limits as a revolutionary tool (and it's widespread use as a counterinsurgent one).   The Aesthetic Character of Blackness: Sounds Like Us (Duke University Press) https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-aesthetic-character-of-blackness...

Janetta Johnson and zen blossom speak from the home base of Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) in SF. They speak on Miss Major (who led TGIJP for years); the year Janetta turned down the SF Pride grand marshal title; and the status of the Bay Area's reputation for being a haven for trans people. TGI Justice Project https://tgijp.org Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment a...