Podcasts about san franciscan

Send us a textDavid Downie is a native San Franciscan who moved to Paris in the mid-1980s. He divides his time between France and Italy. A longtime journalist, his travel, food and arts features have appeared in over 50 print magazines and newspapers worldwide and on dozens of websites.David is the award-winning author of six novels and over a dozen acclaimed nonfiction books translated into a variety of foreign languages, including French, Italian, Chinese and Korean. His essays have been published in over a dozen anthologies. Downie graduated from UC Berkeley and Brown University. He is married to photographer Alison Harris. His latest book is Shadows of Rome: A Memoir.Praise for other books by David Downie"Zesty and entertaining."—Kirkus"Delightful and thoroughly researched."—Publishers Weekly"Beautifully written and refreshingly original."—The SF Chronicle"Delightful and insightful."—The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Chicago Tribune"Unequaled poignancy and passion."—National Geographic Traveler“Expertly captures the powerlessness and courage of those in peril."—Booklist"Compelling... a rapturous, history-rich love poem."—The Toronto Star"Fabulous company!"—NPRShadows of Romehttps://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Rome-Memoir-Italy-California/dp/B0DWK5FF27/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0 Support the show

We love a good "passenger doing strange things" story at The Red Eye, it's amazing how many of them we get! But this one was a first for us...On a flight, when a passenger mixes medication with alcohol, the cabin crew often end up dealing with a person not in their right mind. Sometimes things get scary, and sometimes it's just plain bizarre!Music Credits for The San Franciscan Shoe StealerDevious Little Smile by GodsmodeLosing Your Marbles - The SoundlingsRunning It Down - Everet Almond 48000 1Sound Effects by freesound_community from PixabaySound Design by Ally MurphySend us a text! If you'd like a reply, please leave an email or numberTo buy The Red Eye's first book click on the following links:Amazon UKAmazon USABarnes and NobleOther E Book Platforms Kaylie has written 6 other fictional novels about the lives of cabin crew! Amazon UKAmazon USABarnes and NobleSupport the showThe Red Eye Podcast is written by Kaylie Kay, and produced and narrated by Ally Murphy.To subscribe to the monthly newsletter and keep up to date with news, visit www.theredeyepod.com. Ot find us on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok & Instagram @theredeyepod, for behind the scenes stories and those funny short stories that only take a minute or less!If you'd like to support the podcast you can "buy us a beer" and subscribe at https://www.buzzsprout.com/2310053/support, we'd be happy to give you a shout out on our newsletter!Ally Murphy is a former flight attendant, and a British voice over artist based in the USA, visit www.allymurphy.co.ukKaylie Kay is a flight attendant and author based in the UK. You can find more of her work at www.kayliekaywrites.comTo buy The Red Eye's first book click on the following links:Amazon UK Amazon USABarnes and Noble Other E Book Platforms

Joy Sterling from Iron Horse Vineyards is our guest today on California Wine Country with Steve Jaxon and Dan Berger. Joy has been on California Wine Country before, on this episode of Sept. 27, 2017. Clark Wolf is sticking around from the previous segment to talk about the Northern California Public Media Awards that are coming back on May 10. This year's honorees are Joy Sterling and her whole family, who are getting the recognition they deserve for all the delicious wines they make and also for all of their other work outside of winemaking. Joy describes Iron Horse as a magical place, with stunning views across rolling hills of vines, with Mt. St. Helena in the distance. "The grapes know they are growing in a gorgeous place." Dan Berger says its magic is a result of its location. The old road has not changed in 100 years. As you cross the bridge, it feels like you are 100 miles from anywhere. While a lot of wineries try to "turn it up so much" as Clark says, Iron Horse is natural. There is wildness thriving around them, including deer, who ate Joy's roses. The turkey vultures that live all around northern California are thriving. Green Valley Creek bisects the property. The Coho Salmon use the river for spawning. Their farming is so careful that the water is clean. Iron Horse has been legendary for making some of the finest Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and sparkling wines in the world, not just in Sonoma County. These wines are "really pristine" such as the 2023 Audrey Chardonnay, named after Joy's mom. Ever since the beginning, they keep the malolactic fermentation to a minimum and they use steam-bent barrels, so there is no smoke on the wood and therefore none in the wine either. Joy describes this wine as gracious and elegant, just like her mom. Dan Berger describes it as having perfect acidity and all the components are subtle, not ostentatious. The aren't "blow your socks off" wines, more like "glide your socks off," says Joy. POP goes the cork! "Who doesn't like a big pop? It just says "party," says Joy. This is their 2021 Spring Rosé. It has a beautiful petal pink color and it really tastes like spring." Dan Berger, who has an extensive personal cellar, says that these wines will improve with age in the bottle. They already have three years on the yeast. It is a limited production wine, only available at their tasting room. The second wine they pour is the one they are best known for, Iron Horse Wedding Cuvée. Joy explains that their sparkling wines have become drier and drier, due to two factors, the increased quality of their craftsmanship and their vineyard practices. Dan Berger also gives credit to Iron Horse's customers, who demand their quality. "We have the best customers!" says Joy. Iron Horse wines have been served at the White House for the last six consecutive administrations, as well as State Department events and to foreign dignitaries and royalty including the Queen of England. The Intimate History of Iron Horse Joy's mother is a San Franciscan and her father was from Los Angeles and they lived in LA when Joy was a child. Then the family moved to France in 1967 and that is where they encountered wine. They would go on trips together to discover wine and their parents felt right at home. When they missed on a vineyard acquisition there, it may have been a blessing because by the mid-1970s they found a property in California. They have 3 generations living on the property in an 1876 house. Next year they will celebrate several big anniversaries. The USA turns 250, Iron Horse turns 50, winemaker David Munksgard celebrates 30 years making wine there. They had a second label for a while called Tin Pony which they don't make anymore. It was for wine made from grapes that did not make it into the Iron Horse blend. Joy said they preferred to focus on their top quality product. Dan thinks that with the market the way it is, Tin Pony could make a comeback, but Joy says she is busy enough.

The chicken. On dick. Kinks. There are plenty of ways choking can manifest in our sex lives. Mike and Kyle talk about the history, Urban Dictionary, gayta, Steven Universe, the Heimlich maneuver, autoerotic asphyxiation, and tips for choking in this live show from San Francisco. In this episode: News- 11:05 || Main Topic (Choking)- 18:22 || Gayest & Straightest- 1:23:22 Buy our book, You're Probably Gayish, available right now at www.gayishpodcast.com/book! Each chapter dissects one gay stereotype ranging from drugs to gaydar to iced coffee. At that same link, you can see our full 2025 live show tour schedule! On the Patreon bonus segment, Kyle and Mike share more about their San Franciscan exploits. If you want to support our show while getting ad-free episodes a day early, go to www.patreon.com/gayishpodcast.

  A weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists. Grace Lee Boggs said, “History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories – triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally – has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.” In our current chaotic time, it feels like we are intentionally ignoring history. Our lack of awareness feels like a de-evolution, as our education department is gutting, books are banned, and so many American institutions are at risk, it feels as though a critical analysis of history is being ignored.  On Tonight's APEX Express, Host Miko Lee focuses on Wong Kim Ark and the importance of Birthright Citizenship. She speaks with historian David Lei, Reverend Deb Lee and lawyer/educator Annie Lee and activist Nick Gee. Discussed by Our Guests: What You Can Do To Protect Birthright Citizenship Our history is tied to the legacy of Wong Kim Ark and birthright citizenship, and it will take ongoing advocacy to protect this fundamental right. Here are four ways you can stay involved in the work ahead: Invite a friend to attend an event as part of Chinese for Affirmative Action's weeklong series commemorating Wong Kim Ark. Take action and oppose Trump's executive order banning birthright citizenship. Learn about Wong Kim Ark and Trump's executive order to end birthright citizenship. Sign up to join Stop AAPI Hate's Many Roots, One Home campaign to fight back against Trump's anti-immigrant agenda.   How you can get engaged to protect immigrants: https://www.im4humanintegrity.org/ https://www.bayresistance.org/ Bay Area Immigration: 24 Hour Hotlines San Francisco 415-200-1548 Alameda County 510-241-4011 Santa Clara County 408-290-1144 Marin County 415-991-4545 San Mateo County 203-666-4472   Know Your Rights (in various Asian languages) Thank you to our guests and Chinese for Affirmative Action for the clip from Wong Kim Ark's great grandson Norman Wong   Show Transcript: Wong Kim Ark Opening: [00:00:00] Apex Express Asian Pacific expression. Community and cultural coverage, music and calendar, new visions and voices, coming to you with an Asian Pacific Islander point of view. It's time to get on board the Apex Express.   Miko Lee: [00:00:35] Grace Lee Boggs said history is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past, how we tell these stories. Triumphantly or self critically metaphysically or dialectically, has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings. I. Well, in our current chaotic times, it feels like we are intentionally ignoring history. Our lack of awareness feels like a de-evolution. As our education department is gutted and books are banned, and so many of our American institutions are at risks, it feels as though a critical analysis of history is just being intentionally ignored. So welcome to Apex Express. I'm your host, Miko Lee, and tonight we're gonna delve back into a moment of history that is very much relevant in our contemporary world. Tonight's show is about long Kim Ark. There's a famous black and white photo of a Chinese American man. His hair is pulled back with a large forehead on display, wide open eyes with eyebrows slightly raised, looking at the camera with an air of confidence and innocence. He is wearing a simple mandarin collared shirt, one frog button straining at his neck, and then two more near his right shoulder. The date stamp is November 15th, 1894. His name is Wong Kim Ark. Tonight we hear more about his story, why it is important, what birthright citizenship means, and what you could do to get involved. So stay tuned. Welcome, David Lei, former social worker, community activist, lifelong San Franciscan, and amazing community storyteller. Welcome to Apex Express.    David Lei: [00:02:21] Thank you, Miko.    Miko Lee: [00:02:23] Can you first start with a personal question and tell me who are your people and what legacy do you carry with you?    David Lei: [00:02:31] I'm now on the board of Chinese Historical Society of America. Chinese American History is pretty important to me for my identity and the story of Chinese in America is American history, and that's where I'm at now.   Miko Lee: [00:02:50] And what legacy do you carry with you from your ancestors?    David Lei: [00:02:56] To pass on the wisdom they pass to me to future descendants. But I'm here in America, so I know after a few generations, my descendants won't look like me. Most likely they won't speak Chinese. They're going to be Americans. So. The lessons and values and wisdoms, my ancestors passed to me, I'm passing to America.   Miko Lee: [00:03:30] we are talking on this episode about Wong Kim Ark and as a community storyteller, I wonder if you can take me back to that time, take me back to Wong Kim Ark growing up in San Francisco, Chinatown, what was happening in San Francisco, Chinatown at that time    David Lei: [00:03:48] Okay, this is the end of the 19th century and we have the Exclusion Act in 1882 where Chinese were excluded from coming to America with few exceptions like merchants, diplomats, and scholars. So if you're Chinese and you're a laborer you just can't come. And there were concerns about. Going, even if you were here, there's a process for your return, the documents you will need. But even that was iffy. But for Chinese in general, there was birthright citizenship. So if you were born here, you have citizenship and that because of the 14th amendment. So many Chinese thought birthright citizenship was important 'cause you can vote, you have more rights, less chance that you will be deported. So the Chinese, born in America, right at 1895, formed a Chinese American Citizens Alliance. The concept of being a American citizen was in everybody's mind in Chinatown at that time. The Chinese been fighting for this birthright citizenship ever since the Exclusion Act. Before Wong Kim Ark, there was Look Tin Sing in the matter regarding Look Tin Sing was a CA federal Court of Appeal case. Look Tin Sing was born in Mendocino, so he's American born. He assumed he was a citizen. His parents sent him back to China before the Exclusion Act, and when he came back after the Exclusion Act, of course he didn't have the paperwork that were required , but he was born here. So to prove that he was a citizen. He had to have a lawyer and had to have white witness, and it went to the federal Court of Appeal, ninth Circuit, and the Chinese sixth company. The City Hall for Chinatown knew this was important for all Chinese, so gave him a lawyer, Thomas Den, and he won the case. Then in 1888, this happened again with a guy named Hong Yin Ming. He was held and he had to go to the Federal Court of Appeal to win again, then Wong Kim Ark 1895. He was stopped and. This time, the Chinese six company, which is a city hall for Chinatown they really went all out. They hired two of the best lawyers money could buy. The former deputy Attorney General for the United States, one of which was the co-founder of the American Bar Association. So these were very expensive, influential lawyers. And because Wong Kim Ark was a young man under 25, he was a cook, so he was poor, but the community backed him. And went to the Supreme Court and won because it was a Supreme Court case. It took precedent over the two prior cases that only went to the Court of Appeal.    Now you might think, here's a guy who has a Supreme Court case that says he's an American citizen. Well, a few years later in 1901, Wong Kim Ark went to Mexico to Juarez. When he came back to El Paso the immigration stopped him at El Paso and says, no you are just a cook. you're not allowed to come in because we have the 1882 Exclusion Act. Wong Kim Ark Says, I have a Supreme Court case saying I'm a US citizen, and the El Paso newspaper also had an article that very week saying they're holding a US citizen who has a Supreme Court case in his favor saying that he is a US citizen. However, immigration still held him for four months in El Paso. I think just to hassle. To make it difficult. Then by 1910, Wong Kim Ark had a few sons in China that he wants to bring to the us so he arranged for his first son to come to America in 1910. His first son was held at Angel Island. Interrogated did not pass, so they deported his firstborn son. So he says, wow, this is my real son, and he can't even get in. So this is dealing with immigration and the US laws and the racist laws is unending. Just because you win the Supreme Court case, that doesn't mean you're safe as we are seeing now. So it takes the community, takes a lot of effort. It takes money to hire the best lawyers. It takes strategizing. It takes someone to go to jail, habeas corpus case oftentimes to test the laws. And even when you win, it's not forever. It's constantly challenged. So I think that's the message in the community. Chinese community had push back on this and have pushed for Birthright citizenship from the very beginning of the Exclusion Act.    Miko Lee: [00:09:48] Thank you so much for that. David. Can we go back a little bit and explain for our audience what the Six Companies meant to Chinatown?    David Lei: [00:09:57] From the very beginning, there were a lot of laws racist laws that were anti-Chinese, and the Chinese always felt they needed representation. Many of the Chinese did not speak English, did not understand the laws, so they formed the Chinese Six Companies. Officially known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. most Chinese come from just the six districts from Guangdong Province. They're like counties. However, in China, each counties most likely will have their own dialect. Unintelligible to the county next to them. They will have their own food ways, their own temples. almost like separate countries. So there were six major counties where the Chinese in America came from. So each county sent representatives to this central organization called the Chinese six companies, and they represented the Chinese in America initially in all of America. Then later on, different states set up their own Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, so they would tax their own membership or get their own membership to pay fees. They had in-house lawyers to negotiate with city government, state government, federal government, and they would raise the money. They were the GoFundMe of their days. Almost every month they were hiring lawyers to protect some Chinese, somewhere in America against unfair unjust laws. The Chinese six company was very important to the Chinese in America, and they were the first to really push back on the Chinese exclusion Act between 1882 and 1905. 105,000 Chinese in America after the exclusion Act sued a federal government more than 10,000 times. This is about 10% of the Chinese population in America, sued the federal government. I'm not including state government, counties nor municipalities. This is just the federal government. About 10% of the Chinese here sued and almost 30 of these went to the Federal Supreme Court, and it was the sixth company that organized many of these winning for all Americans and not just the Chinese right. To a public education. Even if you are an immigrant tape versus Hurley in 1885. Then we have the Yick Wo versus Hopkins case that gave equal protection under law for everyone. Now, the 14th Amendment does have this clause equal protection under law, but everybody thought that meant you had to write a law that was equal for everybody. But in the case of Yick Wo versus Hopkins, it was also important that the law is executed and administered equally for everyone. That's the first time where it was made very clear that equal protection under law also means the administration and the execution of the law. So that is the core of American Civil Rights and the Chinese won this case for all Americans. Of course, Wong Kim Ark.    The concept of political asylum, public law 29 was a Chinese case passed by Congress in 1921, and then we have Miranda Act. If you look into the Miranda Act, it was based on a Chinese case, 1924 Ziang Sun Wan versus the US two Chinese were accused of murder in Washington DC They were tortured, denied sleep. Denied food, denied attorneys, so they confessed. But when it came to trial. They said we didn't do it, we confessed 'cause we were tortured and they won in the Supreme Court, but it was a Washington DC case only applicable to federal jurisdictions. So when Miranda came up, the Supreme Court said, well, we decided this in 1924, but now we'll just make it applicable to state, county and municipality. And then of course, as recently as 1974 Chinese for affirmative action helped bring the Lao versus Nichols case. Where now is required to have bilingual education for immigrant students, if there are enough of them to form a class where they can be taught math, science, history in their original language. These and many more. The Chinese brought and won these cases for all Americans, but few people know this and we just don't talk about it.    Miko Lee: [00:15:35] David, thank you so much for dropping all this knowledge on us. I did not know that the Miranda rights comes from Asian Americans. That's powerful. Yes. And so many other cases. I'm wondering, you said that Chinese Americans and the six companies sued, did you say 10,000 times?    David Lei: [00:15:53] We have 10,000 individual cases. In many of these cases, the Chinese six company helped provide a lawyer or a vice.    Miko Lee: [00:16:03] And where did that come from? Where did that impetus, how did utilizing the legal system become so imbued in their organizing process?   David Lei: [00:16:14] Well, because it worked even with the exclusion act, during the exclusion period most Chinese. Got a lawyer to represent them, got in something like 80%. In many of the years, 80% of the Chinese that hire a lawyer to help them with the immigration process were omitted. So the Chinese knew the courts acted differently from politics. The Chinese did not have a vote. So had no power in the executive branch nor the legislative branch. But they knew if they hire good lawyers, they have power in the court. So regardless of whether their fellow Americans like them or not legally the Chinese had certain rights, and they made sure they received those rights. By organizing, hiring the best lawyers, and this was a strategy. suing slowed down after 1905 because the Chinese lost a important case called Ju Toy versus the us. The Supreme Court decided that since the Chinese sue so much, their courts of appeal were tied up with all these cases. So the Supreme Court says from now on, the Supreme Court will give up his rights to oversight on the executive branch when it comes to immigration because the Chinese sue too much. And that's why today the executive branch. Has so much power when it comes to immigration, cause the court gave up the oversight rights in this ju toy versus the US in 1905. So if we go to the history of the law a lot of the legal policies we live in today, were. Pushback and push for by the Chinese, because the Chinese were the first group that were excluded denied these rights. but the Chinese were very organized one of the most organized group and push back. And that's why we have all these laws that the Chinese won.    Miko Lee: [00:18:30] And in your deep knowledge of all this history of these many cases, what do you think about what is happening right now with all the conversations around birthright citizenship? Can you put that into a historical perspective?    David Lei: [00:18:44] So being an American. We always have to be on the guard for our rights. Who would've thought Roe v. Wade would be overturned? So all these things can be challenged. America's attitude change. Civil disobedience, the Chinese are actually, we have on record the largest number of people practicing civil disobedience over a long period of time. In 1892, when the Exclusion Act, Chinese Exclusion Act had to be renewed, they added this. New requirement that every Chinese must carry a certificate of residency with their photo on it. Well, this is like a internal passport. No one had to have this internal passport, but they made the Chinese do it. So the Chinese six company. Says, no, this is not right. Only dogs need to carry a license around to identify. Itself and only criminals needs to register with a state. And we Chinese are not dogs and we're not criminals, so we're not going to do it 'cause no one else needs to do it. So the six company told all the Chinese 105,000 Chinese not to register. 97% refuse to register. In the meantime, the six companies sued the federal government again. Saying the Federal Go government cannot do this. The Chinese lost this case in the Supreme Court and everybody then had to register, but they didn't register until two years later, 1894. So they held. Held out for two years.   Miko Lee: [00:20:31] How many people was that?    David Lei: [00:20:32] About a hundred thousand. 97% of the 105,000 Chinese refused to do this. So if you look at these certificate of residencies that the Chinese were forced to carry. They were supposed to register in 1892. Almost all of them are 1894. Some of them in fact many of them are May, 1894, the last second that you can register before they start deporting you. So the Chinese. Also practiced civil disobedience and the largest incidents, a hundred thousand people for two years.    Miko Lee: [00:21:15] How did they communicate with each other about that?   David Lei: [00:21:18] The Chinese were very well connected through the six companies, their district association, their surname association oftentimes because of. The racism segregation, the Chinese were forced to live in Chinatowns or relied on their own network. To support each other. So there, there's a lot of letter writing and a lot of institutions, and they kept in touch.That network was very powerful. In fact, the network to interpret a law for everybody interpret uh, any rules of business, and. Just how to conduct themselves in America. They have a lot of institutions doing that. We still have them in the 24 square blocks we call Chinatown. We have almost 300 organizations helping the immigrants. Chinese there with language, with how to do your taxes tutoring for their kids. Advice on schools paying their bills and so on. We have surnames associations, we have district associations, we have gills, we have fraternal organizations, and we certainly have a lot of nonprofits. So it's very, very supportive community. And that's always been the case.    Miko Lee: [00:22:42] I'm wondering what you feel like we can learn from those organizers today. A hundred thousand for civil disobedience. And we're often portrayed as the model minority people just follow along. That's a lot of people during that time. And what do you think we can learn today from those folks that organize for civil disobedience and the Chinese Exclusion Act?    David Lei: [00:23:03] It takes a community. One person can't do it. You have to organize. You have to contribute. You have to hire the best lawyers, the very best. In fact, with the Yik Wo versus Hopkins case, the equal protection under law, the Chinese immediately raised 20,000 equivalent to half a million. It takes collective action. It takes money. You just have to support this to keep our rights.    Miko Lee: [00:23:29] And lastly, what would you like our audience to understand about Wong Kim Ark?    David Lei: [00:23:35] Well, Wong Kim Ark, he was just an average person, a working person that the immigration department made life miserable for him. Is very difficult to be an immigrant anytime, but today is even worse. We have to have some empathy. He was the test case, but there were so many others. I mentioned Look Tin Sing, whose adult name is Look Tin Eli. We know a lot about Look Tin Eli and then this other Hong Yin Ming in 1888 before Wong Kim Ark and so generations of generations of immigrants. Have had a hard time with our immigration department. It's just not a friendly thing we do here. And you know, we're all descendants of immigrants unless you're a Native American. Like I mentioned Look Tin Sing, who was the first case that I could find. For birthright citizenship. His mother was Native American, but Native American didn't even get to be citizens until 1924. You know, that's kind of really strange. But that was the case.    Miko Lee: [00:24:50] That's very absurd in our world.    David Lei: [00:24:52] Yes, Chinatown is where it is today because of Look Tin Sing, his adult name, Look Tin Eli. He saved Chinatown after the earthquake. He's the one that organized all the business people to rebuild Chinatown like a fantasy Chinese land Epcot center with all the pagoda roofs, and he's the one that saved Chinatown. Without him and his Native American mother, we would've been moved to Hunter's Point after the earthquake. He later on became president of the China Bank and also president of the China Mayo Steamship Line. So he was an important figure in Chinese American history, but he had to deal with immigration.   Miko Lee: [00:25:39] David Lei, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. I appreciate hearing this story and folks can find out when you are part of a panel discussion for Wong Kim Ark week, right?    David Lei: [00:25:50] Yes.    Miko Lee: [00:25:51] Great. We will be able to see you there. Thank you so much for being on Apex Express. Annie Lee, managing director of Policy at Chinese for affirmative action. Welcome to Apex Express.    Annie Lee: [00:26:01] Thank you so much for having me Miko.    Miko Lee: [00:26:02] I wanna just start with this, a personal question, which is, who are your people and what legacy do you carry with you?    Annie Lee: [00:26:10] I am the daughter of monolingual working class Chinese immigrants. And so I would say my people hail from Southern China and were able to come to the United States where I was born and was allowed to thrive and call this place home. I do this work at Chinese for Affirmative Action on their behalf and for other folks like them.    Miko Lee: [00:26:31] Thanks Annie, Today we're recording on March 17th, and I'm noting this because as we know, things are changing so quickly in this chaotic administration. By the time this airs on Thursday, things might change. So today's March 17th. Can you as both an educator and a lawyer, give me a little bit of update on where birthright citizenship, where does it stand legally right now?    Annie Lee: [00:26:55] As an educator and a lawyer, I wanna situate us in where birthright citizenship lives in the law, which is in the 14th Amendment. So the 14th Amendment has a birthright citizenship clause, which is very clear, and it states that people who were born in the United States, in subject to the laws thereof are United States citizens. The reason. This clause was explicitly added into the 14th Amendment, was because of chattel slavery in the United States and how this country did not recognize the citizenship of enslaved African Americans for generations. And so after the Civil War and the Union winning that war and the ends of slavery . We had to make African Americans citizens, they had to be full citizens in the eye of the law. And that is why we have the 14th Amendment. And that clause of the 14th Amendment was later litigated all the way to the Supreme Court by Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco, like me, two Chinese immigrant parents. When he left the United States, he went to China to visit his family. He tried to come back. They wouldn't let him in. and he said, I am a citizen because I was born in the United States and this clause in your 14th amendment, our 14th amendment says that I'm a citizen. It went all the way to Supreme Court and the Supreme Court agreed with Wong Kim Ark. Does not matter your parents' citizenship status. Everyone born in the United States is a US citizen, except for a very, very narrow set of exceptions for the kids of foreign diplomats that really is not worth getting into. Everyone is born. Everyone who's born in the United States is a citizen. Okay? So then you all know from Trump's executive order on day one of his second presidency that he is attempting to upends this very consistent piece of law, and he is using these fringe, outlandish legal arguments that we have never heard before and has never merited any discussion because it is just. Facially incorrect based on the law and all of the interpretation of the 14th amendment after that amendment was ratified. So he is using that to try to upend birthright citizenship. There have been a number of lawsuits. Over 10 lawsuits from impacted parties, from states and there have been three federal judges in Maryland, Washington State, and New Hampshire, who have issued nationwide injunctions to stop the executive order from taking effect. That means that despite what Trump says in his executive order. The birthright citizenship clause remains as it is. So any child born today in the United States is still a citizen. The problem we have is that despite what three judges now issuing a nationwide injunction, the Trump's government has now sought assistance from the Supreme Court to consider his request to lift the nationwide pause on his executive order. So the justices, have requested filings from parties by early April, to determine whether or not a nationwide injunction is appropriate. This is extraordinary. This is not the way litigation works in the United States. Usually you let the cases proceed. In the normal process, which goes from a district court to an appeals court, and then eventually to the Supreme Court if it gets appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. This is very different from the normal course of action and I think very troubling.    Miko Lee: [00:30:36] So can you talk a little bit about that? I know we constantly say in this administration it's unprecedented, but talk about how there's three different states that have actually filed this injunction. , how typical is that for then it or it to then go to the Supreme Court?    Annie Lee: [00:30:53] Just to clarify, it's not three different states. It's judges in three different states. In fact, more than many, many states, 18 more than 18 states. There have been two lawsuits related, brought by states one that California was a part of that had multiple states over 18 states as well as San Francisco and District of Columbia. Then there was another lawsuit brought by another set of states. and so many states are opposed to this, for different reasons. I find their complaints to be very, very compelling. Before I get into the fact that multiple judges have ruled against the Trump administration, I did want to explain that the reason states care about this is because birthright citizenship is not an immigration issue. Birthright citizenship is just a fundamental issue of impacting everyone, and I really want people to understand this. If you are white and born in the United States, you are a birthright citizen. If you are black and born in the United States, you are a birthright citizen. It is a fallacy to believe that birthright citizenship only impacts immigrants. That is not true. I am a mother and I gave birth to my second child last year, so I've been through this process. Every person who gives birth in the United States. You go to the hospital primarily, they talk to you after your child is born about how to get a social security card for your child. All you have to do is have your child's birth certificate. That is how every state in this country processes citizenship and how the federal government processes citizenship. It is through a birth certificate, and that is all you need. So you go to your health department in your city, you get the birth certificate, you tell, then you get your social security card. That is how everyone does it. If you change this process, it will impact every state in this country and it will be very, very cumbersome. Which is why all of these states, attorneys general, are up in arms about changing birthright citizenship. It is just the way we function. That again applies to re regardless of your parents' immigration status. This is an issue that impacts every single American. Now, to your question as to what does it mean if multiple judges in different states, in different federal district courts have all ruled against. Donald Trump, I think it really means that the law is clear. You have judges who ha are Reagan appointees saying that the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th amendment is crystal clear. It has, it is clear in terms of the text. If you are a textualist and you read exactly what the text says, if you believe in the context of, The 14th Amendment. If you look at the judicial history and just how this clause has been interpreted since ratification, like everything is consistent, this is not an area of law that has any gray area. And you see that because different judges in different district courts in Maryland, in Washington, in New Hampshire all have cited against Donald Trump.    Miko Lee: [00:33:54] So what is the intention of going to the Supreme Court?    Annie Lee: [00:33:59] I mean, he is trying to forum shop. He's trying to get a court that he believes will favor his interpretation and that is why the right has spent the last half century stacking federal courts. And that is why Mitch McConnell did not let Barack Obama replace Antonin Scalia. The composition of the Supreme Court is. So, so important, and you can see it at times like this.    Miko Lee: [00:34:28] But so many of the conservatives always talk about being constitutionalists, like really standing for the Constitution. So how do those things line up?   Annie Lee: [00:34:38] Oh, Miko, that's a great question. Indeed, yes, if they were the textualist that they say they are, this is a pretty clear case, but, Law is not as cut and dry as people think it is. It is obviously motivated by politics and that means law is subject to interpretation.   Miko Lee: [00:34:59] Annie, thank you so much for this breakdown. Are there any things that you would ask? Are people that are listening to this, how can they get involved? What can they do?    Annie Lee: [00:35:09] I would recommend folks check out StopAAPIHate. We are having monthly town halls as well as weekly videos to help break down what is happening. There's so much news and misinformation out there but we are trying to explain everything to everyone because these anti-immigration. Policies that are coming out be, this is anti-Asian hate and people should know that. You can also check out resources through Chinese for affirmative action. Our website has local resources for those of you who are in the Bay Area, including the rapid response lines for bay Area counties if you need any services, if you. See ICE. , if you want to know where their ICE is in any particular location, please call your rapid response line and ask them for that verifiable information. Thank you.    Miko Lee: [00:36:00] Thank you so much, Annie Lee for joining us today on Apex.    Ayame Keane-Lee: [00:36:04] You are listening to 94.1 KPFA and 89.3 KPFB in Berkeley, 88.1 KFCF in Fresno, 97.5 K248BR in Santa Cruz, 94.3 K232FZ in Monterey, and online worldwide at kpfa.org.   Miko Lee: [00:36:23] Welcome, Nicholas Gee from Chinese for affirmative action. Welcome to Apex Express.    Nicholas Gee: [00:36:29] Thanks so much, Miko. Glad to be here.    Miko Lee: [00:36:31] I'm so glad that you could join us on the fly. I wanted to first just start by asking you a personal question, which is for you to tell me who you are,, who are your people and what legacy do you carry with you.   Nicholas Gee: [00:36:46] I'll start off by saying Miko, thanks so much for having me. My name is Nicholas Gee and I am a third and or fourth generation Chinese American, born and raised in Houston, Texas. And for me, what that means is, is that my great-great-grandparents and great-grandparents migrated from Southern China, fleeing war and famine and looking for opportunity in the middle of the early, like 19 hundreds. And they wanted to start an opportunity here for future generations like me. My people are my family who migrated here over a hundred years ago. who were settling to start a new life. My people are also the people that I advocate with, the Language Access network of San Francisco, the Immigrant Parent Voting Collaborative, my colleagues at Chinese for affirmative action and stop AAPI hate. I think about my people as the people that I'm advocating with on the ground day to day asking and demanding for change.   Miko Lee: [00:37:41] Thank you. And what legacy do you carry with you?    Nicholas Gee: [00:37:45] I carry the legacy of my elders, particularly my grandparents who immigrated here in around the 1940s or so. And when I think about their legacy, I think a lot about the legacy of immigration, what it means to be here, what it means to belong, and the fight for advocacy and the work that I do today.    Miko Lee: [00:38:05] Thanks so much, Nick, and we're here doing this show all about Wong Kim Ark, and I know Chinese for affirmative action has planned this whole week-long celebration to bring up as we're talking about legacy, the legacy of Wong Kim Ark. Can you talk about how this one week celebration came to be and what folks can expect?    Nicholas Gee: [00:38:26] Yeah. As folks may know we are in the midst of many executive orders that have been in place and one of them being the executive order to end birthright citizenship. And Wong Kim Ark was actually born and raised in San Francisco's Chinatown, particularly on seven. 51 Sacramento Street. In the heart of the community and local partners here in this city, we're really trying to figure out how do we advocate and protect birthright citizenship? How do we bring momentum to tell the story of Wong Kim Ark in a moment when birthright citizenship is, in the process of being removed And so we really wanted to create some momentum around the storytelling, around the legacy of Wong Kim Ark, but also the legal implications and what it means for us to advocate and protect for birthright citizenship. And so I joined a couple of our local partners and particularly our team at Chinese for affirmative action to develop and create the first ever Wong Kim Ark Week. Officially known as born in the USA and the Fight for Citizenship, a week long series of events, specifically to honor the 127th anniversary of the Landmark Supreme Court case, US versus Wong Kim Ark, which affirmed birthright citizenship for all in the United States.    Miko Lee: [00:39:44] What will happen during this week-long celebration?   Nicholas Gee: [00:39:48] We have several scheduled events to raise awareness, mobilize the community, and really to stand up for the rights of all immigrants and their families. One is an incredible book Talk in conversation with author and activist Bianca Boutte. Louie, who recently authored a book called Unassimilable. And she tells a personal narrative and provides a sharp analysis for us to think about race and belonging and solidarity in America, particularly through an Asian American lens. This event is hosted by the Chinese Historical Society of America. Following. We have a live in-person community symposium on Wong Kim Ark legacy and the struggle for citizenship. There'll be a powerful community conversation with legal advocates, storytellers, movement builders, to have a dynamic conversation on the impact of birthright citizenship. Who is Wong Kim Ark? What is his enduring legacy and how people can join us for the ongoing struggle for justice? And you know, we actually have a special guest, Norman Wong, who is the great grandson of Wong Kim Ark. He'll be joining us for this special event. We have a couple of more events. One is a Chinatown History and Art Tour hosted by Chinese Culture Center, this is a small group experience where community members can explore Chinatown's vibrant history, art, and activism, and particularly we'll learn about the legacy of Wong Kim Ark and then lastly, we have a in-person press conference that's happening on Friday, which is we're gonna conclude the whole week of, Wong Kim Ark with a birthright, citizenship resolution and a Wong Kim Ark dedication. And so we'll be celebrating his enduring impact on Birthright citizenship and really these ongoing efforts to protect, our fundamental right. and the San Francisco Public Library is actually hosting an Asian American and Pacific Islander book display at the North Beach campus and they'll be highlighting various books and authors and titles inspired by themes of migration, community, and resilience. So those are our scheduled, events We're welcoming folks to join and folks can register, and check out more information at casf.org/WongKimArk    Miko Lee: [00:42:04] Thanks so much and we will post a link to that in our show notes. I'm wondering how many of those are in Chinese as well as English?    Nicholas Gee: [00:42:13] That is a fantastic question, Miko. We currently have the community symposium on Wong Kim Ark legacy in the struggle for citizenship. This event will have live interpretation in both Mandarin and Cantonese.    Miko Lee: [00:42:46] What would you like folks to walk away with? An understanding of what.    Nicholas Gee: [00:42:30] We really want people to continue to learn about the legacy of birthright citizenship and to become an advocate with us. We also have some information on our website, around what you can do to protect birthright citizenship. As an advocate, we are always thinking about how do we get people involved, to think about civic engagement intentional education and to tie that back to our advocacy. And so we have a couple of ways that we're inviting people to take action with us. One is to invite a friend to consider attending one of our events. If you're based here in the San Francisco Bay area or if you're online, join us for the book Talk with Bianca. , two, we're inviting folks to take action and oppose the executive order to ban birthright citizenship. Chinese for affirmative action has. A call to action where we can actually send a letter to petition , to oppose this executive order to send a message directly to our congressman or woman. and lastly, you know, we're asking people to learn about Wong Kim Ark as a whole, and to learn about the impacts of birthright citizenship. My hope is that folks walk away with more of an understanding of what does it mean here to be an advocate? What does it mean to take action across the community and really to communicate this is what resilience will look like in our community    Miko Lee: [00:43:44] Nick Gee, thank you so much for joining me on Apex Express. It was great to hear how people can get involved in the Wong Kim Ark week and learn more about actions and how they can get involved. We appreciate the work you're doing.    Nicholas Gee: [00:43:56] Thanks so much Miko, and I'm excited to launch this.   Miko Lee: [00:43:58] Welcome, Reverend Deb Lee, executive Director of Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity and part of the Network on Religion and justice. Thank you so much for coming on Apex Express.    Rev. Deb Lee: [00:44:09] Great to be here. Miko.    Miko Lee: [00:44:11] I would love you just personally to tell me who are your people and what legacy do you carry with you?   Rev. Deb Lee: [00:44:17] Wow. Well, my people are people in the Chinese diaspora. My family's been in diaspora for seven generations, from southern China to southeast to Asia. and then eventually to the United States. What I carry with me is just a huge sense of resistance and this idea of like, we can survive anywhere and we take our love and our family and our ancestor we gotta carry it with us. We don't always have land or a place to put it down into the ground, and so we carry those things with us. , that sense of resistance and resilience.    Miko Lee: [00:44:56] Thank you so much. I relate to that so much as a fifth generation Chinese American. To me, it's really that sense of resilience is so deep and powerful, and I'm wondering as a person from the faith community, if you could share about the relevance of Wong Kim Ark and Birthright citizenship.   Rev. Deb Lee: [00:45:12] Yeah, Wong Kim Ark is critical because he was somebody who really fought back against racist laws and really asserted his right to be part of this country, his right to have the Constitution apply to him too. I'm just so grateful for him and so many of the other Chinese Americans who fought back legally and resisted against in that huge wave of period of Chinese exclusion to create some of the really important immigration laws that we have today. I wouldn't be a citizen without birthright citizenship myself. Wong Kim Ark really established that every person who is born on this soil has a right to constitutional protection, has a right to be a citizen. And in fact, the Constitution in the 14th Amendment also applies to let equal treatment for everyone here, everyone who is here. You don't even have to be a citizen for the constitutional rights. And the Fourth Amendment, the fifth Amendment, the first amendment to apply to you. And those things are so under attack right now. It's so important to establish the equality. Of every person and the right for people here in this country to have safety and belonging, that everyone here deserves safety and belonging.    Miko Lee: [00:46:24] Thank you so much for lifting up that activist history. as, a person who was raised in a theological setting at a seminary, I was really raised around this ethos of love as an active tool and a way of fighting for civil rights, fighting for things that we believe in. And I'm wondering if you could talk about how you see that playing out in today. And especially as you know, this Trump regime has had such incredible impacts on immigrants and on so much of our activist history. I'm wondering if you have thoughts on that?    Rev. Deb Lee: [00:47:00] Well, so much of the civil rights history in this country, you know, going back to like the activism of Chinese Americans to establish some of those civil rights. You know, it goes back to this idea of like, who is fully human, who can be fully human, whose humanity will be fully recognized? And so I think that's what's connects back to my faith and connects back to faith values of the sacredness of every person, the full humanity, the full participation, the dignity. And so I think, Wong Kim Ark and the other, like Chinese American activists, they were fighting for like, you know, we don't wanna just be, we're gonna just gonna be laborers. We're not just going to be people who you can, Bring in and kick out whenever you want, but like, we want to be fully human and in this context of this nation state, that means being fully citizens.And so I think that that struggle and that striving to say we want that full humanity to be recognized, that is a fundamental kind of belief for many faith traditions, which, you know, speak to the radical equality of all people and the radical dignity of all people, that can't be taken away, but that has to really be recognized. What's under attack right now is. So much dehumanization, stigmatization of people, you know, based on race, based on class, based on gender, based on what country people were born in, what papers they carry, you know, if they ever had contact, prior contact with the law, like all these things. You know, are immediately being used to disregard someone's humanity. And so I think those of us who come from a faith tradition or who just share that kind of sense of, value and, deep humanism in other people, that's where we have to root ourselves in this time in history and really being, you know, we are going to defend one another's humanity and dignity, at all costs.   Miko Lee: [00:48:55] Thank you for that. I'm wondering if there are other lessons that we can learn from Wong Kim Ark, I mean, the time when he fought back against, this was so early in 1894, as you mentioned, the Chinese exclusion acts and I'm wondering if there are other lessons that we can learn from him in, in our time when we are seeing so many of our rights being eroded.   Rev. Deb Lee: [00:49:17] I think that there's so many ways, that we think about how did people organize then like, you know, it's challenging to organize now, but if you can imagine organizing then, and I'm thinking, you know, when Chinese people were required to carry identification papers and you know, on mass they refused to do that and they. Practice, like a form of civil disobedience. And I think we're at this time now, like the Trump administration's telling anybody here who's unauthorized to come forward and to register well, I think people need to think twice about that. And people are, there are many other things that they're trying to impose on the immigrant community and I think one like lesson is like, how do people survive through a period of exclusion and we are today in a period of exclusion. That really goes back to the mid 1980s, when there was, last, a significant immigration reform that created a pathway to citizenship. Only for about 3 million people. But after that, since that time in the mid 1980s, there has been no other pathways to citizenship, no other forms of amnesty, no other ways for people to fix their status.So in fact, we are already in another 40 year period of exclusion again. And so one of those lessons is how do people survive this period? Like right, and left. They're taking away all the laws and protections that we had in our immigration system. They were very narrow already. Now even those are being eliminated and any form of compassion or discretion or leniency or understanding has been removed. So I think people are in a period of. Survival. How do we survive and get through? And a lot of the work that we're doing on sanctuary right now we have a sanctuary people campaign, a sanctuary congregations campaign is how do we walk alongside immigrants to whom there is no path. There is no right way. there is no opening right now. But walk with them and help support them because right now they're trying to squeeze people so badly that they will self deport. And leave on their own. This is part of a process of mass expulsion but if people really believe that they want to stay and be here, how do we help support people to get through this period of exclusion until there will be another opening? And I believe there will be like our, our history kind of spirals in and out, and sometimes there are these openings and that's something I take from the faith communities. If you look at Chinese American history in this country, the role that faith communities played in walking with the immigrant community and in supporting them, and there's many stories that help people get through that period of exclusion as well.   Miko Lee: [00:51:52] Deb, I'm wondering what you would say to folks. I'm hearing from so many people [say] I can't read the news. It's too overwhelming. I don't wanna get involved. I just have to take care of myself. And so I'm just waiting. And even James Carville, the political opponent, say we gotta play dead for a few years. What are your thoughts on this?    Rev. Deb Lee: [00:52:11] Well, we can't play totally dead. I wish the Democrats wouldn't be playing dead, but I think that a person of faith, we have to stay present we don't really have the option to check out and we actually have to be in tune with the suffering. I think it would be irresponsible for us to. You know, turn a blind eye to the suffering. And I wanna encourage people that actually opportunities to walk with people who are being impacted and suffering can actually be deeply, fulfilling and can help give hope and give meaning. And there are people who are looking for solidarity right now. We are getting a lot of calls every week for someone who just wants them, wants someone to go to their court or go to the ice, check-in with them, and literally just like walk three blocks down there with them and wait for them. To make sure they come out. And if they don't come out to call the rapid response hotline, it doesn't take much. But it's a huge act like this is actually what some of the immigrant communities are asking for, who are millions of people who are under surveillance right now and have to report in. So those small acts of kindness can be deeply rewarding in this. Sea of overwhelming cruelty. And I think we have an obligation to find something that we can do. , find a way, find a person, find someone that we can connect to support and be in solidarity with and think about people in our past. Who have accompanied us or accompanied our people and our people's journey. And when those acts of kindness and those acts of neighbors and acts of friendship have meant so much I know like my family, they still tell those stories of like, this one person, you know, in Ohio who welcome them and said hello. We don't even know their names. Those acts can be etched in people's hearts and souls. And right now people need us.    Miko Lee: [00:53:59] Oh, I love that. I've talked with many survivors of the Japanese American concentration camps, and so many of them talk about the people of conscience, meaning the people that were able to step up and help support them during, before and after that time. Lastly, I'm wondering, you're naming some really specific ways that people can get engaged, and I know you're deeply involved in the sanctuary movement. Can you provide us with ways that people can find out more? More ways to get involved in some of the work that you are doing.    Rev. Deb Lee: [00:54:29] I'll put a plug in for our website. It's www dot I am number four, human integrity.org. So it's, iam4humanintegrity.org. We work with families that are impacted facing deportation, looking for all kinds of ways to get the community to rally around folks and support and we work with faith communities who are thinking about how to become sanctuary congregations and how to be an important resource in your local community. The other organizations, I would say sign up for Bay Resistance. They're organizing a lot of volunteers that we call on all the time we're working with. We're, you know, working with many organizations, the Bay Area, to make sure that a new ice detention facility does not get built. They are looking at the potential site of Dublin. We've worked really hard the last decade to get all the detention centers out of Northern California. We don't want them to open up a new one here.   Miko Lee: [00:55:27] Deb Lee, thank you so much for joining us on Apex Express and folks can actually see Deb on Tuesday night in Wong Kim Ark Week as one of the speakers. Thank you so much for joining us.    Rev. Deb Lee: [00:55:38] Thank you, Miko.    Miko Lee: [00:55:39] Thank you so much for joining us on Apex Express. We're gonna close this episode with words from Norman Wong, the great grandson of Wong Kim Ark.   Norman Wong: [00:55:49] So let's fight back. Threats to birthright citizenship will only divide us, and right now we need to come together to continue the impact of my great grandfather's. This is my family's legacy, and now it's part of yours too. Thank you    Miko Lee: [00:56:11] Please check out our website, kpfa.org to find out more about our show tonight. We think all of you listeners out there. Keep resisting, keep organizing, keep creating and sharing your visions with the world because your voices are important. Apex Express is created by Miko Lee, Jalena Keane-Lee, Preti Mangala-Shekar, Swati Rayasam, Aisa Villarosa, Estella Owoimaha-Church, Gabriel Tanglao, Cheryl Truong and Ayame Keane-Lee.    The post APEX Express – 3.20.25- Wong Kim Ark appeared first on KPFA.

For the first episode of 2025, former Rolling Stone staffer and Bay Area photographer Michael Goldberg joins us to reminisce about his music journalism and discuss his new book Jukebox. We start by asking our guest about the influences of San Franciscan "shooters" from Herb Greene to Annie Liebowitz, with special emphasis on Jim Marshall and Baron Wolman. Michael then recounts the story of how — as a 17-year-old living in Mill Valley — he came to interview the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia in 1970 for his self-published zine Hard Road. From there we hear about some of the photos Michael took in the '70s, from Frank Zappa in 1975 to the Sex Pistols' final show in 1978. Mention of the great Taj Mahal — photographed by our guest a decade after the country-blues/world-music pioneer posed for Baron Wolman in Topanga — takes us to clips from (and discussion of) a 1982 audio interview with Taj by John Hutchinson. Finally we ask Michael about his stellar writing career from the San Francisco Chronicle to Rolling Stone — and finally to his trailblazing '90s online magazine Addicted to Noise, for whom he interviewed Prince in 1998. Many thanks to special guest Michael Goldberg. Jukebox: Photographs 1967–2023 is published by Hozac Books and available now. Pieces discussed: Introduction to Jukebox, An interview with Baron Wolman, Jim Marshall's jazz images, Jim Marshall, Taj Mahal audio, An audience with Prince, the Beach Boys, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Eric B. & Rakim and the Smash Hits Tour 2000.

Episode 1598, brought to you by our incredible sponsors: Chubbies: For a limited time, our friends at Chubbies are giving our listeners 20% off with the promo code HARDFACTOR20 at checkout at chubbiesshorts.com. Kalshi: Go to Kalshi.com/hardfactor to get $20 free credit when you deposit $50 in the first and only legal prediction market in the US Hims: Start your free online visit at Hims.com/hardfactor for your personalized ED treatment options Prize Picks: Download the PrizePicks app today and use code HARDFACTOR and get $50 instantly when you play $5!! Timestamps: (00:00:40) - Happy Thanksgiving Eve have fun trying to hook up with your ex and stay safe! (00:03:10) - Mark's new Appwall (apple taped to the wall) (00:06:15) - Boris Epshteyn who looks like a character is out of the Trump sphere for being a little shady with money (00:18:30) - San Franciscan media influencer Ricci Wynne who has shown the homeless problem off, is arrested for being a pimp (00:27:50) - Indonesian man finds out that his wife had a penis the whole time twelve days after marriage (00:35:50) - First ever dog and human cruise is launching from Tampa next year and it's a bad idea Thank you for listening, go to Patreon.com/HardFactor to support the pod and get access to discord chat and bonus podcasts.... But MOST Importantly, HAGFD!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

•  Brian Brady is creating a multi-part detective series •  “As a native San Franciscan, I enjoy writing about my favorite city”  Remember Nash Bridges? How about the Continental Op?  Sam Spade? Or, surely, Dirty Harry.  All were — or are — fictional detectives working the crime beats of San Francisco. They were created by authors who set new standards for the genre, including Dashiell Hammett who could be considered the foundational author of detectives and the “city by the bay.” It might be time to add Brian Brady to the list of authors who have picked the hilly and often foggy streets of San Francisco as the locale for their books. But unlike many of the other authors, Mr. Brady knows real crime and the real streets of San Francisco.   He's been a cop and even chief of policies suburban Novato.  Add a stint as head of security for NBC Universal in Hollywood and you have a background that has now created two San Francisco-based crime thrillers with a third headed into its final editing. His new book is “Hiding in Plain Sight, (Palmetto Publishing, April 2024).  It is the second of a planned trilogy as he develops his characters and plots. The first book is “Oh. What a Tangled Web.” “As a native San Franciscan, I enjoy writing about my favorite city,” Mr. Brady write. “The city is rich in architecture, sports, tradition, and characters.” He says his characters are based on real people with a bit of literary license.

With a new episode comes new levels to unlock! Thank you for tapping in and in the latest installment of Unlocking Levels we bring on a guest by the name of Michael Juan and he is running to be San Francisco's newest Police Sheriff!Michael "Mike" Juan is a U.S. Marine Corps Veteran and he has served the city of San Francisco through multiple positions in law enforcement for over 10 years. He is also a born and raised San Franciscan and as a native to the area his biggest motivation is to serve and help improve the community with fresh ideas, new programs and more collective collaboration.Many San Franciscans may be wondering, "who is Mike Juan?" and this episode aims to help you get to know who Mike is and what he stands for. This man is from the city, he knows the city and he damn sure loves the city. As a native San Franciscan myself, I fully endorse Mike and believe he is the right man for the position he is running for. I, myself, have already voted for him and I strongly encourage you to do so as well. We need better people in position to help improve our city and Mike is one of the good guys!Enjoy the episode y'all and make sure to check out Mike's website and social media profiles if you wish to know more about him before you vote.www.MichaelJuan4Sheriff.comInstagram: @MichaelJuanSFBig love to all y'all!-@CL_TheSourceFollow CL on all these platforms below for all of the latest updates to the brand:⁠https://linktr.ee/CL_T...Instagram: @UnlockingLevels @CL_TheSource @GoodLifewith_CL @FreeMatrixProductionsTwitter: @CL_TheSourceTik Tok: @CL_TheSourceFacebook: Chris Limcaco⁠#wellness⁠ ⁠#selfdevelopment⁠ ⁠#spirituality⁠ ⁠#life⁠ ⁠#mindfulness⁠ ⁠#mentalhealth⁠ ⁠#health⁠ ⁠#fitness⁠ ⁠#motivation⁠ ⁠#meditation⁠ ⁠#selfcare⁠ ⁠#selflove⁠ ⁠#recovery⁠ ⁠#rest⁠ ⁠#healthylifestyle⁠ ⁠#holistichealth⁠ ⁠#yoga⁠ ⁠#wellbeing⁠ ⁠#inspiration⁠ ⁠#mindset⁠ ⁠#positivevibes⁠ ⁠#selfimprovement⁠ ⁠#gratitude⁠ ⁠#happiness⁠ ⁠#personaldevelopment⁠ ⁠#selfawareness⁠ ⁠#growth⁠ ⁠#transformation⁠ ⁠#mindbodysoul⁠ ⁠#wellnessjourney⁠ ⁠#healing⁠ ⁠#lifecoach⁠ ⁠#nutrition⁠ ⁠#energy⁠ ⁠#balance⁠ ⁠#selfhelp⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthawareness⁠ ⁠#wellnesscoach⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessmeditation⁠ ⁠#mentalwellness⁠ ⁠#therapy⁠ ⁠#healthandwellness⁠ ⁠#selfhealing⁠ ⁠#mindfulnesspractice⁠ ⁠#bodymindspirit⁠ ⁠#selfempowerment⁠ ⁠#holistichealing⁠ ⁠#stress⁠ ⁠#anxiety⁠ ⁠#depression⁠ ⁠#positivity⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessmoment⁠ ⁠#wellnesstips⁠ ⁠#mindfulnesscoach⁠ ⁠#healthtips⁠ ⁠#wellnessblogger⁠ ⁠#fitnessmotivation⁠ ⁠#healthylife⁠ ⁠#healthandfitness⁠ ⁠#fitnessjourney⁠ ⁠#workoutmotivation⁠ ⁠#fitspiration⁠ ⁠#motivationmonday⁠ ⁠#wellnesswarrior⁠ ⁠#yogaeverydamnday⁠ ⁠#fitfam⁠ ⁠#healthyhabits⁠ ⁠#healthymindset⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessmatters⁠ ⁠#healingjourney⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthmatters⁠ ⁠#selflovejourney⁠ ⁠#inspirationalquotes⁠ ⁠#personaltransformation⁠ ⁠#selfgrowth⁠ ⁠#positivethoughts⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessmovement⁠ ⁠#wellnesscommunity⁠ ⁠#spiritualawakening⁠ ⁠#lifestyle⁠ ⁠#wellnessgoals⁠ ⁠#selfimprovementjourney⁠ ⁠#wellnesscoachlife⁠ ⁠#selfcaretips⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessliving⁠ ⁠#lifestyleblogger⁠ ⁠#motivationalquotes⁠ ⁠#selfacceptance⁠ ⁠#healthyeating⁠ ⁠#healthyfood⁠ ⁠#fitlife⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessmomentum⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthawarenessmonth⁠ ⁠#mindfulnesstraining⁠ ⁠#healthychoices⁠ ⁠#fitnesslifestyle⁠ ⁠#healthandwellnesscoach⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthrecovery⁠ ⁠#wellnesswednesday⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthsupport⁠ ⁠#wellnessadvocate⁠ ⁠#healthyhabitsforlife⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessmonday⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessretreat⁠ ⁠#healthybodyhealthymind⁠ ⁠#healthandhappiness⁠ ⁠#wellnessquote⁠ ⁠#spiritualgrowth⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthjourney⁠ ⁠#mentalwellnessmatters⁠ ⁠#wellnessjourneybegins⁠ ⁠#selfhealingjourney⁠ ⁠#inspirational⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessquotes⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthquotes⁠ ⁠#healthylifestyletips⁠ ⁠#positiveattitude⁠ ⁠#mindfulnesstechnique⁠ ⁠#healthymindhealthybody⁠ ⁠#wellnessforlife⁠ ⁠#lifestylechange⁠ ⁠#wellnessmindset⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessdaily⁠ ⁠#spiritualjourney⁠ #sanfrancisco #sfpd #police #sfpolice #thecity #vote #politics #voters #michaeljuan #mikejuan #sanfranciscosheriff #leaders #sfpolitics --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/unlockinglevels/support

With a new episode comes new levels to unlock! Thank you for tapping in and in the latest installment of Unlocking Levels we bring on a guest by the name of Michael Juan and he is running to be San Francisco's newest Police Sheriff!Michael "Mike" Juan is a U.S. Marine Corps Veteran and he has served the city of San Francisco through multiple positions in law enforcement for over 10 years. He is also a born and raised San Franciscan and as a native to the area his biggest motivation is to serve and help improve the community with fresh ideas, new programs and more collective collaboration.Many San Franciscans may be wondering, "who is Mike Juan?" and this episode aims to help you get to know who Mike is and what he stands for. This man is from the city, he knows the city and he damn sure loves the city. As a native San Franciscan myself, I fully endorse Mike and believe he is the right man for the position he is running for. I, myself, have already voted for him and I strongly encourage you to do so as well. We need better people in position to help improve our city and Mike is one of the good guys!Enjoy the episode y'all and make sure to check out Mike's website and social media profiles if you wish to know more about him before you vote.www.MichaelJuan4Sheriff.comInstagram: @MichaelJuanSFBig love to all y'all!-@CL_TheSourceFollow CL on all these platforms below for all of the latest updates to the brand:⁠https://linktr.ee/CL_T...Instagram: @UnlockingLevels @CL_TheSource @GoodLifewith_CL @FreeMatrixProductionsTwitter: @CL_TheSourceTik Tok: @CL_TheSourceFacebook: Chris Limcaco⁠#wellness⁠ ⁠#selfdevelopment⁠ ⁠#spirituality⁠ ⁠#life⁠ ⁠#mindfulness⁠ ⁠#mentalhealth⁠ ⁠#health⁠ ⁠#fitness⁠ ⁠#motivation⁠ ⁠#meditation⁠ ⁠#selfcare⁠ ⁠#selflove⁠ ⁠#recovery⁠ ⁠#rest⁠ ⁠#healthylifestyle⁠ ⁠#holistichealth⁠ ⁠#yoga⁠ ⁠#wellbeing⁠ ⁠#inspiration⁠ ⁠#mindset⁠ ⁠#positivevibes⁠ ⁠#selfimprovement⁠ ⁠#gratitude⁠ ⁠#happiness⁠ ⁠#personaldevelopment⁠ ⁠#selfawareness⁠ ⁠#growth⁠ ⁠#transformation⁠ ⁠#mindbodysoul⁠ ⁠#wellnessjourney⁠ ⁠#healing⁠ ⁠#lifecoach⁠ ⁠#nutrition⁠ ⁠#energy⁠ ⁠#balance⁠ ⁠#selfhelp⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthawareness⁠ ⁠#wellnesscoach⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessmeditation⁠ ⁠#mentalwellness⁠ ⁠#therapy⁠ ⁠#healthandwellness⁠ ⁠#selfhealing⁠ ⁠#mindfulnesspractice⁠ ⁠#bodymindspirit⁠ ⁠#selfempowerment⁠ ⁠#holistichealing⁠ ⁠#stress⁠ ⁠#anxiety⁠ ⁠#depression⁠ ⁠#positivity⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessmoment⁠ ⁠#wellnesstips⁠ ⁠#mindfulnesscoach⁠ ⁠#healthtips⁠ ⁠#wellnessblogger⁠ ⁠#fitnessmotivation⁠ ⁠#healthylife⁠ ⁠#healthandfitness⁠ ⁠#fitnessjourney⁠ ⁠#workoutmotivation⁠ ⁠#fitspiration⁠ ⁠#motivationmonday⁠ ⁠#wellnesswarrior⁠ ⁠#yogaeverydamnday⁠ ⁠#fitfam⁠ ⁠#healthyhabits⁠ ⁠#healthymindset⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessmatters⁠ ⁠#healingjourney⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthmatters⁠ ⁠#selflovejourney⁠ ⁠#inspirationalquotes⁠ ⁠#personaltransformation⁠ ⁠#selfgrowth⁠ ⁠#positivethoughts⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessmovement⁠ ⁠#wellnesscommunity⁠ ⁠#spiritualawakening⁠ ⁠#lifestyle⁠ ⁠#wellnessgoals⁠ ⁠#selfimprovementjourney⁠ ⁠#wellnesscoachlife⁠ ⁠#selfcaretips⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessliving⁠ ⁠#lifestyleblogger⁠ ⁠#motivationalquotes⁠ ⁠#selfacceptance⁠ ⁠#healthyeating⁠ ⁠#healthyfood⁠ ⁠#fitlife⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessmomentum⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthawarenessmonth⁠ ⁠#mindfulnesstraining⁠ ⁠#healthychoices⁠ ⁠#fitnesslifestyle⁠ ⁠#healthandwellnesscoach⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthrecovery⁠ ⁠#wellnesswednesday⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthsupport⁠ ⁠#wellnessadvocate⁠ ⁠#healthyhabitsforlife⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessmonday⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessretreat⁠ ⁠#healthybodyhealthymind⁠ ⁠#healthandhappiness⁠ ⁠#wellnessquote⁠ ⁠#spiritualgrowth⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthjourney⁠ ⁠#mentalwellnessmatters⁠ ⁠#wellnessjourneybegins⁠ ⁠#selfhealingjourney⁠ ⁠#inspirational⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessquotes⁠ ⁠#mentalhealthquotes⁠ ⁠#healthylifestyletips⁠ ⁠#positiveattitude⁠ ⁠#mindfulnesstechnique⁠ ⁠#healthymindhealthybody⁠ ⁠#wellnessforlife⁠ ⁠#lifestylechange⁠ ⁠#wellnessmindset⁠ ⁠#mindfulnessdaily⁠ ⁠#spiritualjourney⁠ #sanfrancisco #sfpd #police #sfpolice #thecity #vote #politics #voters #michaeljuan #mikejuan #sanfranciscosheriff #leaders #sfpolitics --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/unlockinglevels/support

On this episode we're talking to fellow podcaster Curtis Chinn, host of the InfatuAsian podcast. His podcast is dedicated to Asian American creators and the culture we all know and love, so naturally we had a lot to talk about. Curtis brings a non-recipe recipe in the form of potstickers, which for him were less family recipe and more college party trick.  We talk about being a multi-generation Chinese American and San Franciscan, and what that means for identity and the road away from and back to Chinese and Asian culture. Plus we take a quick detour into parenting around ethnicity and culture (fellow parents, listen and weigh in please!!) We also go on a mini food history journey and it's very possible that we've started a new podcast (eek!).

Operating outside of the metal infrastructure, but heralding its glory and complexity more so than most “true” metal bands, The Fucking Champs, in their 1994-2007 rampage, cobbled together elements of Trouble, Confessor, Don Caballero, and Kraftwerk and reshaped the geometric possibilities of math metal, all with the insouciance of its indie rock roots. Please join us as we attempt to solve this riddle wrapped in a conundrum. You've got a thirst, Portland! Note I:We talk about the various name changes our San Franciscan heroes have endured…from The Champs to C4AM95 to The Fucking Champs. We failed to mention what might be our favorite name, one they never recorded under but adopted for a short spell: The Champs UK.Note II:Apologies for the confusion on the tracks we sample from V. You'll hear the correction within the episode, and the correct song titles are noted below. Drag City, we are pissed! But…we're already over it.Note III:The Radical Research Patreon page is now set up and ready for your patronage. We are offering tiered subscription levels for those who want a set-it-and-forget-it donation option. As ever, if you choose to support us, we are humbled and grateful! patreon.com/RadicalResearchPodcast Note IV:All past Radical Research episodes can be found here, where you can also find Jeff's Peter Steele and Fates Warning books…and more to come soon! Radicalresearch.orgMusic cited in order of appearance:Intro: “Lamplighter” (IV, 2000) “Guns in Our Schools” (Triumph of the Air Elementals demo, 1994)“So Then I Was All Why'd You Say Fuck My Style” (Songs for Films About Rock demo, 1994)“Merry Go Round” (Songs for Films About Rock demo, 1994)“Flawless Victory” (III, 1997)“Heart to Heart” (III, 1997)“Tonight, We Ride” (III, 1997)“These Glyphs Are Dusty” (IV, 2000)“Esprit De Corpse” (IV, 2000)“Thor is Like Immortal” (IV, 2000)“Children Perceive the Hoax Cluster” (V, 2002)“I Am the Album Cover” (V, 2002)“Major Airbro's Landing” (V, 2002) “A Forgotten Chapter in the History of Ideas” (VI, 2007) “Dolores Park” (VI, 2007) “Earthen Sculptor” (VI, 2007)ep. 120 preview: DBC, “Infinite Universe” (Universe, 1989)Radical Research is a conversation about the inner- and outer-reaches of rock and metal music. This podcast is conceived and conducted by Jeff Wagner and Hunter Ginn. Though we consume music in a variety of ways, we give particular privilege to the immersive, full-album listening experience. Likewise, we believe that tangible music formats help provide the richest, most rewarding immersions and that music, artwork, and song titles cooperate to produce a singular effect on the listener. Great music is worth more than we ever pay for it.

Wine has always been a part of Executive Winemaker Ben Papapietro's life. A native San Franciscan of Italian descent, Ben grew up with wine as part of every family meal and gathering. His passion for wine making caught fire in his early twenties as he explored wines from around the world. But the wines that really turned Ben's head were from the Burgundy region in France. During his 37-year career with the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, Ben met future partner Bruce Perry. Through their common passions—cooking and wine—they became fast friends. They joined together to make wine as a hobby in their garages. To hone their craft. they volunteered to work during harvest at a friend's Sonoma County winery specializing in Pinot Noir. Today, the Papapietro Perry cellar is simply a more elaborate version of Ben's garage wines. He describes his wines as “… an extension of my home and personal hospitality.” I invite you to drink in this conversation with the delightfully complex, yet humble Ben Papapietro. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wine has always been a part of Executive Winemaker Ben Papapietro's life. A native San Franciscan of Italian descent, Ben grew up with wine as part of every family meal and gathering. His passion for wine making caught fire in his early twenties as he explored wines from around the world. But the wines that really turned Ben's head were from the Burgundy region in France. During his 37-year career with the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, Ben met future partner Bruce Perry. Through their common passions—cooking and wine—they became fast friends. They joined together to make wine as a hobby in their garages. To hone their craft. they volunteered to work during harvest at a friend's Sonoma County winery specializing in Pinot Noir. Today, the Papapietro Perry cellar is simply a more elaborate version of Ben's garage wines. He describes his wines as “… an extension of my home and personal hospitality.” I invite you to drink in this conversation with the delightfully complex, yet humble Ben Papapietro.

It's time to talk all about the fine art of ho-ing. And who is going to guide us through this very important lesson? Why, it's Mehgan Sapphire, host of the Sapphire's Earplay podcast. Mehgan joined me to talk about her lost space, The Lexington, a San Franciscan lesbian bar that she went to when she was just a little baby gay in her college days. Along the way we discuss late night hook ups, the road to polyamory, and, of course, the importance of good hygiene... And once you've listened to this conversation make sure you also download this week's episode of Mehgan's show, Sapphire's Earplay, as we did a swap-a-roo and I am the guest on the latest episode! Follow me Instagram: www.instagram.com/lostspacespod Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠www.facebook.com/lostspacespod⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@lostspacespod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sign up to the Queer Word newsletter: https://tinyurl.com/queerqueerword Support me Buy Me A Coffee: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/lostspacespod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow my guest Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/msradiosapphire/

East Coast transplant Bianca Datta is learning to love San Francisco – literally one step at a time.

Join us on the TruVue Podcast for an honest review of "The Last Man In San Francisco." In this episode, we have a barbershop talk about the movie and share our thoughts on the film. Tune in for a conversation with the crew you won't want to miss! Jimmie Fails IV, a black man, is a third generation San Franciscan. Having been pushed out by circumstances like many others, Jimmie, who works a low paying job as a nurse in a seniors' care facility, returned to San Francisco three years ago and has been living in his best friend Montgomery Allen's house that he shares with his blind grandfather, Jimmie who sleeps on the floor in Mont's already cramped bedroom. Despite the house, Mont's situation is not much better than Jimmie's, Mont who works at a supermarket fish counter while he sketches and writes a play on the side. Other black people around him who are showing their anger in also being disenfranchised from San Francisco life are the soapbox preacher who Jimmie and Mont often watch as they wait for the bus, and a group of young black men who hang outside of Mont's house. All of Jimmie's family, whom he rarely sees, are also disenfranchised from that San Francisco life in one way or another: his estranged father lives in an SRO (Single Room Occupancy); his mother and her new husband long moved to Los Angeles; and his paternal Auntie Wanda has been pushed out to the suburbs. Jimmie has long wanted to reclaim what he sees as his place in San Francisco, which to him means the house he grew up in and which his same named paternal grandfather built in the post-war era in a style indicative to the area a century earlier. The problems are that his father lost the house long ago, the neighborhood has since been gentrified from the immigrant neighborhood it once was, increasing the value of the house to the several millions, and a white couple currently lives there, there being no indication that they are either planning on leaving or selling even if Jimmie could afford it. Regardless, Jimmie, with Mont by his side, has and continues to take steps to reclaim the house as his to his standards.—Huggo In this episode of the TruVue Podcast, we give an honest review of the movie "The Last Man In San Francisco." Join us for some barbershop talk and a conversation with the crew as we discuss our thoughts on this film. Thanks for watching! Subscribe to “TruVue Podcast” wherever you listen to podcasts and follow along on social media. We bring the barbershop to the box office. https://www.truvuepodcast.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/truvuepodcastofficial?igshid=NGVhN2U2NjQ0Yg== Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100068470732382&mibextid=LQQJ4d X (Formerly known as Twitter): https://twitter.com/truvue_ TruVueSocial@gmail.com #thelastblackmaninsanfrancisco #sanfrancisco #lastman #jonathanmajors #JimmieFails #tichinaarnold #mikeepps #Dannyglover #noir #blacknoir #darkcomedy #satiricalcomedy #viral #growmychannel #killers #outlaws #outlaw #western #blaxploitation #action #adventure #scifi #drama #thriller #romantic #romance #netflix #netflixrecommendation #netflixkorea #netflixreview #netflixmovies #netflixrecommendations #netflixreviews #youtubechannelgrow2023 #youtubechannelpromotion #youtubechannels #youtubechannel #youtubechannelgrow #youtubechannelgrowth #youtube #moviereview #seriesreview #truvuepodcast #blackpodcast #podcast #subscribe #subscribers #subscribetomychannel #subscriber #subscrib #podcastshow #podcasting #moviereview #truvuepodcast #blackpodcast #podcast #movie #truvue #blackpodcasters #youtube #subscribe #subscribers #subscribetomychannel #sub #subscriber #follow #followers #followme #like #likes #moviecritic #movie #movies #filmreview #film #filmcriticisms #critic #critics #channelgrow #channel #graphicnovel #graphicnovels #anime #comicbooks #thebreakfastclub #brilliantidiots #flagrant #flagrant2 #flagrantpodcast #85south #wgci #hoodcomedy #hood #hbomax #hbo #amazon #amazonprime #showtime #boxoffice #theatre #theater #hulu #hulumovies #huluoriginal #hbomax #hbo #disney #disneyplus #amazonmovies #tubi #quibi #paramount #paramountplus #max #redbox #vudu #bet #betplus #blackfilmmakers #blackhistory #mgm #blackcontentcreators #blackcontent #blackcontentcreator #youtubemoviereview #youtubemoviecommunity

Hour 2 - Steiny & Guru continue to speak and listen about one of the greatest Bay Area citizens we've ever had, Willie Mays. His impact went further than the diamond as someone who also opened doors for people that came after him.

Today, we conversation with Rodrigo Duran, the Executive Director of Carnaval San Francisco. Rodrigo Ehecatl Durán, a proud San Franciscan and the son of Mexican immigrants, and he had work for years to BIPOC cultures in the city. Armed with a Bachelor's in Communications from UC San Diego and a Master's in Public Administration from San Francisco State University, with a focus on Nonprofit Management, Rodrigo leads the charge in making Carnaval San Francisco the biggest and most vibrant multicultural bash in California. He is also a Commissioner for the city for the Human Rights Commission , one of 11 appointed by the Mayor to represent the diverse human rights interests of the City of San Francisco. Carnaval San Francisco isn't just big community party; it's about honoring the rich tapestry of Latinx, Caribbean, and African Diaspora cultures that make San Francisco sparkle. Through dance, music, art, and community education, they create spaces where diversity isn't just celebrated—it's cherished. It started as a local representation of the international Carnaval, on fat Tuesday, but with the weather impediments of February in San Francisco, evolved in to a beginning of summer tradition, with its own personality.  Now in its fourth decade, Carnaval [...]

When the San Francisco Chronicle recently compiled a list of the 20 most influential people working mostly behind the scenes in San Francisco, Kanishka Cheng was first on the list. She co-founded and heads the group TogetherSF Action and its sister organization TogetherSF. Like similar groups recently created in the city, TogetherSF wants to push city policy from the left toward the middle. Cheng joins Scott to talk about their priorities, tactics and potential conflicts of interest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chapter 159 - Buffineff Af Ufual. It's 16.48 on 1st May and there are a lot of stones to clear between now and our August deadline and that's without having a dog with the squits, a child with scarlet fever and a weird dizziness. But the stones must be cleared and boy are about 23 of them cleared today? Yes they are. Will rape seed ever be renamed? Can it hurt a dog? And how big is a gorilla's penis? All questions that are posed without being answered today. And great news for all fans of San Franciscan wrestlers/Batman villains.

Welcome to a brand new episode of the ¿Quién Tú Eres? podcast, where we explore the conflict we often face between "professionalism" & being our authentic selves. This week's guest is Andre Gray.  Andre Gray is a native San Franciscan who's been all over the world. As an executive director, his goal is to tell stories that move people and make people think, whether that's through a documentary on YouTube or a teacup. He says that to put culture and historically excluded people first, you must build environments where everyone can be heard. He also states that this is the most exciting time in the history of ads because today ads can be anything. His client list includes Gatorade, Las Vegas Visitors, Adidas, and more. He's won awards from the Cannes Lions, D&AD, and One Show.  In this week's episode, Andre shares his experience learning how to be his most authentic self no matter where he is in the world. From playing college soccer to going to working in French agencies where there “is no racism,” Andre has had to find himself again and again. And he's also had to learn how to keep himself safe while doing it.  Follow Andre on:  Website: https://www.andreggray.com/  Instagram: @andreggray LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreggray/  Follow Pabel on: Website: https://plurawl.com/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/plurawl/  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@plurawl  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pabelmartinez/  Join our Personal Self-Discovery Coach App's Waitlist here! Click here to book a Pabel for a speaking engagement Podcast production for this episode was provided by CCST. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://feeds.megaphone.fm/SCOSR3144394743

Is the future of San Francisco on the line right now? Since COVID hit, San Francisco has repeatedly made headlines across the world for the challenges the city faces. The pandemic, remote work, downtown retail woes and the perception of rising crime have all contributed to a “doom loop” narrative. In response, city boosters have acknowledged our city's “boom and bust” cycles and looked forward to the city rising again. Join Larry Baer, president and CEO of the San Francisco Giants, in conversation with NBC Bay Area's Raj Mathai to explore how San Francisco's business community is responding and how they propose to ensure the city's best days are still ahead. As co-chair of Advance SF, Baer spearheads a group of business leaders born, raised and living in San Francisco, just like him, who are betting big on the city's future. From his work in the 1990s to keep the Giants in San Francisco to the Giants current role investing in and building Mission Rock, a new mixed-used neighborhood next to Oracle Park, Baer has been at the nexus of sports, business and innovation in the city for decades. And, of course, he will look ahead to the 2024 MLB season as it gets underway and we ask: Should we be betting big on the Giants? A fourth-generation San Franciscan, Baer has gained a national reputation as one of professional sports visionaries leading the San Francisco Giants. Baer joined the team in 1992 as the executive vice president after he and Peter Magowan led the effort to assemble a new ownership group that kept the Giants in the city. A limited partner and board member of the ownership group, Baer was named CEO on January 1, 2012. In his first year as president and CEO, the Giants won their second World Series Championship in three years. In 2014, the Giants won their third World Series title in five years. Baer is responsible for the overall day-to-day operations of the organization and serves as a key strategist and negotiator of the club's major transactions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

George Frederick Gund IV is the President of Gund Real Estate Group and trustee of the George Gund Foundation, and a native San Franciscan. Beyond his professional roles, George finds solace and purpose as a nature photographer, using his lens to bridge people with the roots of real food. Hailing from the Gund Family's legacy in the food industry, George is deeply invested in cultivating this connection. In his trustee role for the family foundation, dedicated to enhancing human well-being and societal progress, George is on a mission to make a meaningful impact in his grandfather's hometown of Cleveland and beyond. What we found most impressive about George is his belief that wealth comes with a responsibility to actively contribute. He doesn't just advocate for donations; he advocates for sleeves rolled up, hands-on service to benefit everyone. Tune in to hear more about George's incredible work. Meet George Gund IV!

Melan Allen is a third-generation San Franciscan. In this episode, we get to know this born-and-raised food artist whom I met last summer at Fillmore Jazz Festival. Melan's grandparents moved here in the Sixties and lived in San Francisco until the 2000s. Her mom's mom came to SF from Texas and was part of a mass migration west, when her mom was very young. In our conversation, Melan says that she sometimes wonders what it would have been like if she had grown up in Texas instead of The City.   Her dad was born here and raised in Western Addition/Hayes Valley. Her mom also grew up in that part of town. Perhaps naturally, when the two met and started to raise a family, they stayed in the area. Her family was there until Melan was 16, in fact. Even though she no longer lives there, Melan says that this hood is home, even though it has changed.   "It's like your first love," Melan says of her hometown. "It feels like growing up in Oz." She left The City when she found herself complaining about changes.   Rewinding a bit, Melan shares the story of her family getting evicted from her grandma's house in Ingleside when she was 19. She had wanted to move out on her own anyway, but wasn't sure how. And so, as it turns out, this unfortunate event forced her to become an adult.   She's the middle kid of three, with one older sister and one younger brother. Melan says that she and her siblings are all different, that they did their own things, and that she is the only artist among them. Her dad is a playwright and her mom's a hard-core crafter. Melan says that she has always been creative, that creativity and expression were fostered in their home.   Her mom collected/hoarded things, and Melan thinks that's where she got her own propensity to pick things up off the street. She feels like she can "McGuyver" anything.   We end Part 1 with Melan explaining that she's consistently cookie-decorating at her home in the East Bay. At the time of our recording last December, she was also making fake cookies out of clay. She rattles off some of the other projects she's currently working on, and ends by proclaiming, "I have to have a lot of space."   Follow Melan on Instagram @melanmadethat. Visit her website here.   Photography by Jeff Hunt   We recorded this podcast in Patricia's Green in Hayes Valley in December 2023.

Dell Smith is a talented musician, coffee roaster, and so much more. If you have ever had the pleasure of seeing Red and the Revelers or Organized Grime, you've heard Dell on the keys. Dell shares his story of growing up in Meridian, MS, moving out to North Texas for college, and finding his way back to Laurel, MS to take over Lee's Coffee and Tea. Dell would invest in a San Franciscan roaster, and now serves the best cup of coffee in the state of Mississippi.www.crossroadscoffeeroasters.comMusic: Tyler Tisdale - Holding Back TimeSponsors: www.manscaped.comPromo Code: PORCHTALKwww.calderalab.com/porchPromo Code: PORCHSubscribe, rate, and review the show!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/porch-talk/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Dive into the latest episode of FOQN Funny featuring the brilliant Hanna Evensen! Get ready for an uproarious journey through IKEA assembly battles, Viking ancestry jokes, and the quirks of being a lawyer. Hanna hilariously navigates through stereotypes, life as a San Franciscan, and the comedic contrasts between different cities. It's a whirlwind of laughter and relatable anecdotes that will leave you in stitches. Don't miss out on Hanna's unique perspective on the absurdities of life. Click play now for your dose of hilarity with FOQN Funny! Love what you're hearing on FOQN Funny? Go a step further and become a member of FOQN Funny+. Enjoy exclusive perks and never-ending laughter. Join now at: https://plus.acast.com/s/foqn-funny. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Part 1, we meet Rudy Corpuz, a born-and-raised San Franciscan who grew up in the South of Market. Rudy's parents came to the US from the Philippines before he was born.   His dad was in the army, which was his ticket to this country. And he brought his wife and some of Rudy's older siblings with him. They went first to Boston, then to Seattle, folllowed by San Pedro, California, and finally, to San Francisco.   The family's first landing spot in The City was Hunters-Point. The family then moved a little north to the South of Market. Rudy is the youngest of nine siblings.   His early days in SOMA took place in the 1970s and ‘80s. He recalls many other ethnicities and lots and lots of families living in SOMA back in those days, and says that he learned a lot from his neighborhood. He ran with a crew of kids that spent a lot of time on Market Street going to shops, arcades, and theaters.   He fondly recalls a South of Market community center called Canon Kip, where he'd go as a kid to play basketball, attend study halls, engage in other forms of recreation, and go on field trips. Rudy cites his time at Canon Kip as playing a role in his current work with United Playaz.   At this point in the recording, I asked Rudy to rattle off San Francisco schools he's attended. The list includes: Buena Vista and Patrick Henry elementary schools, Potrero Middle School, and Mission High School.   In addition to his native SOMA neighborhood, Rudy spent a lot of time in Potrero Hill, getting around mostly on Muni busses. This was the mid-'80s/early '90s, i.e., the crack era. Rudy shares that he both sold and used the drug. His usage got bad, to the point that he crashed. He points to the death of his dad in 1987 as a major contributor to his behavior. He didn't know what to do with the pain of losing his dad, and so he turned to drugs.   Rudy got busted in 1988 and was sent to adult jail. For the next several years, he was In and out of trouble (and jail). It took him a while, but eventually, he figured out that he was broken. Around this time, an adult at the Canon Kip community center offered to get Rudy into City College. He was still in a low period, but when he got to CCSF, he was blown away by the abundance of "pretty women" he saw there. He and I had a hearty laugh about that.   He got a part-time job convincing other teenagers to go to CCSF, and discovered that he liked helping people. In 1994, while waiting for a job assignment, he spotted a posting on a job board. "Gang Prevention Counselor (Filipino)." A light bulb when off. He got the job, which was based in Bernal Heights.   In his new gig, Rudy was tasked with finding Filipino gangs in Bernal/District 11. This brought him to Balboa High School, where h saw plenty of fights and sideshows. The school's principal told him that she needed his help.   After a big riot between Filipinos and Blacks on Oct. 8, 1994, Rudy got the kids who had been involved to sit down together at a table. And they were the ones who came up with their own solutions.   They called it United Playaz.   Check back next week for Part 2 and the history of the non-profit.   Photography by Jeff Hunt   We recorded this episode at the United Playaz Clubhouse in the South of Market in November 2023.

0:00 -- Intro.1:26-- About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel.2:13 -- Start of interview.3:47 -- Ker's "origin story." 7:41 -- His history with the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai (AmCham).9:42 -- About his book “Selling to China. Stories of Success, Failure and Constant Change.” (2023). "We felt that it was important to remind people why we're doing this in the first place, you know, what's good about our relationship with China. We wanted bring the commercial issues back into the conversation."13:31 -- On the current idea of “uncoupling” or “de-risking” the US economy from China."I think it is good to talk about 'de-risking' rather than 'decoupling'." "I don't think a complete decoupling is realistic and it's certainly not in the interest of either side. But I think the de-risking term is helpful, in the sense that it aims at communicating the intent. {The intent] here is not to punish China or isolate China or decouple from China, but it is to protect our interests, whether they're military interests or strategic economic interests."16:46 -- On whether the US policies and sanctions towards China are effective."The narrative is that the export controls and sanctions and de-risking coming out of Washington DC is simply pushing China to be more self-sufficient." "This has to be seen as a temporary measure, that gives us time to resolve the actual conflicts that exist."21:21 -- On the US responding with its own industrial policy to catch up with China (e.g. in batteries and EVs). "We've got to be careful not to slip into outright protectionism and allow this to change who we are as a country and how we've been successful as an economy." "[I]f we get into a situation where we are indeed trying to limit China's economic rise, and literally keep China economically contained, that is a dangerous path, and it's a bad narrative, because it inevitably leads to conflict.""I'm basically conservative when it comes to economic issues and fiscal policy, but I have actually been saying for quite a long time that the US needs to get over its aversion to industrial policy and put some planning in place."30:38 -- On China's private sector."[B]eijing actually kept a remarkably light hand [in the development of the internet industry]. I give the Beijing policymakers full credit there for knowing that they needed to stay out of the way and let that happen." "Now we've seen the pendulum swing back the other way." "Jack Ma was going around visiting countries and he would almost be treated like a head of state. I think Jack Ma must have, because his company is publicly listed in New York, he might have confused himself with a Western CEO. He's not. China is China and the West is the West, especially in the tech sector. So yeah, he's been disciplined as have some other tech leaders."36:21 -- On the fate of TikTok in the US.40:38 -- On the recent APEC meeting in SF, and his take on Presidents Biden and Xi Jinping meetings. "I put it in the category of huge success that the meeting happened, that Xi Jinping actually showed up." "It's critical that Xi and Biden meet face-to-face because of the Chinese political system, it is so concentrated at the top."46:09 -- On the risks of a military conflict between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. "We should not underestimate [China's] willingness to take the island and take it by force. I think at some point you have to just take them at their word. If you listen to the domestic media and domestic speeches that Xi and others make in China, it's quite clear that they're highly motivated to take the island and willing to." "[But] I don't think it's imminent, mostly because of the difficulty of taking the island and of the probability of success on the Chinese side.""I think the probability of an accidental conflict [is] high. And until the agreement of the last week or so, the ability to de-escalate and de-conflict, low." "In other words, without that military-to-military hotline, there would be no way for it to de-escalate."50:35 -- How should boards think about de-risking its China exposure."They should be thinking about what are the hard assets that they have, both in mainland China and in Taiwan? What I'm hearing boards do is that some of them are converting their businesses to more asset light. So, in other words, converting a wholly owned subsidiary to maybe selling off some of the shares to make that into a minority investment or a full asset light model might be literally selling factories and hard assets and then maybe licensing them back or something like that to where they wouldn't have to literally write them off the way many companies had to do in Russia when that took place, and you saw large companies writing off literally billions of dollars of assets off their balance sheets because they could no longer have access to them.""Again, I don't think that we are on the brink here, but it would be wise to have plans in place in the case of, especially in accidental conflict."52:27 -- Books that have greatly influenced his life: Free to Choose by Milton Friedman (1980)All books by James Clavell. [*we cover here his thoughts on Hong Kong]No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin (1994) ("great companion book to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer (1960)57:24 -- His mentors: Robert "Bob" Theleen (a local San Franciscan, former VC and Chairman of AmCham Shanghai)Bob Chang (his boss at the Boston Consulting Group in SF)RT Peng (another boss he worked with in Taiwan)58:36 -- Quotes that he thinks of often or lives her life by: "Don't ever let what you can't do stop you from what you can do." by John Wooden.1:00:20 -- An unusual habit or absurd thing that he loves: his daughter.1:01:21 -- The living person he most admires: Arnold Schwarzenegger.Kerr Gibbs is an EIR at the University of San Francisco. Prior, Ker served as the President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai and worked in various roles giving him broad exposure to US-China relations and business issues facing American companies operating in Asia.__This podcast is sponsored by the American College of Governance Counsel.__ You can follow Evan on social media at:Twitter: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__You can join as a Patron of the Boardroom Governance Podcast at:Patreon: patreon.com/BoardroomGovernancePod__Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License You can follow Evan on social media at:Twitter: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__You can join as a Patron of the Boardroom Governance Podcast at:Patreon: patreon.com/BoardroomGovernancePod__Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

MLW Rewind November 9th Rewind    We honour and Remember Ontario Indy wrestler Rob Rage then we get into the Rewind.    Alex Kane and Jacob Fatu put pen to paper and make their World Heavyweight Championship showdown at Fightland on FITE+ official this week on Fusion with a contract signing. The first state of The Fed takes place as legitimate promoter Saint Laurent promises big plans for Fightland… and reprisals for Alex Kane and Jacob Fatu after last week's Samoan Grand Theft Auto in WTF Superstar® Matt Cardona's newly gifted set of wheels.  The legendary Don King has a FIGHTLAND proclamation. What's the iconic promoter of the Bomaye Fight Club have to say to the fight world? Tune in and find out! A MAJOR announcement with big implications for Fightland drops in the wake of the carnage that ended last week's throwdown between The Calling and The Second Gear Crew. MMA Fighter turned WTF sports entertainment Superstar® “Filthy” Tom Lawlor has a chicken bone to pick and it involves Fusion on Thanksgiving?! World Featherweight Champion Janai Kai competes for the first time since dethroning Delmi Exo at Slaughterhouse to win the gold. Can anyone withstand the violent onslaught of Promociones Dorado's “Kick Demon”? Is there tension between AKIRA and Rickey Shane Page? The Calling has a message for the weak as the wicked ready for war at Fightland. Double champion Rocky Romero has a message for top ranked middleweight Ichiban and his new amigo Máscara Dorada. “Hot Sauce'” Tracy Williams grapples with newcomer Griffin McCoy. Coming off of an impressive showing in the 2023 Opera Cup, which saw the Brooklyn native go to the finals, Williams now looks to get a big win. A win, which could propel him into the mix for the National Openweight Championship.  Standing in his way is the debuting 23-year-old Griffin McCoy. Despite his young age, McCoy is a 7-year veteran, debuting in 2016. Impressing league scouts, the 6'2” San Franciscan has a vicious arsenal of suplexes and strikes.  The Bomaye Fight Club's dual powerhouses Mr Thomas and O'Shay Edwards go head to head with The Mane Event in tag team action! Check the LINK TREE BELOW for more content and Merch https://linktr.ee/StraightTalkWrestling

MLW Rewind November 9th Rewind    We honour and Remember Ontario Indy wrestler Rob Rage then we get into the Rewind.    Alex Kane and Jacob Fatu put pen to paper and make their World Heavyweight Championship showdown at Fightland on FITE+ official this week on Fusion with a contract signing. The first state of The Fed takes place as legitimate promoter Saint Laurent promises big plans for Fightland… and reprisals for Alex Kane and Jacob Fatu after last week's Samoan Grand Theft Auto in WTF Superstar® Matt Cardona's newly gifted set of wheels.  The legendary Don King has a FIGHTLAND proclamation. What's the iconic promoter of the Bomaye Fight Club have to say to the fight world? Tune in and find out! A MAJOR announcement with big implications for Fightland drops in the wake of the carnage that ended last week's throwdown between The Calling and The Second Gear Crew. MMA Fighter turned WTF sports entertainment Superstar® “Filthy” Tom Lawlor has a chicken bone to pick and it involves Fusion on Thanksgiving?! World Featherweight Champion Janai Kai competes for the first time since dethroning Delmi Exo at Slaughterhouse to win the gold. Can anyone withstand the violent onslaught of Promociones Dorado's “Kick Demon”? Is there tension between AKIRA and Rickey Shane Page? The Calling has a message for the weak as the wicked ready for war at Fightland. Double champion Rocky Romero has a message for top ranked middleweight Ichiban and his new amigo Máscara Dorada. “Hot Sauce'” Tracy Williams grapples with newcomer Griffin McCoy. Coming off of an impressive showing in the 2023 Opera Cup, which saw the Brooklyn native go to the finals, Williams now looks to get a big win. A win, which could propel him into the mix for the National Openweight Championship.  Standing in his way is the debuting 23-year-old Griffin McCoy. Despite his young age, McCoy is a 7-year veteran, debuting in 2016. Impressing league scouts, the 6'2” San Franciscan has a vicious arsenal of suplexes and strikes.  The Bomaye Fight Club's dual powerhouses Mr Thomas and O'Shay Edwards go head to head with The Mane Event in tag team action! ​ Check the LINK TREE BELOW for more content and Merch https://linktr.ee/StraightTalkWrestling​  

We're honored to have Uriridiakoghene “Ulili” Onovakpuri, Managing Partner at Kapor Capital, join us on Mission Driven. At Kapor, Ulili leads investments in the health tech and people operations tech companies. She is also the founder of Kapor Capital's Fellows program, the longest running venture capital internship program for underrepresented individuals. Previously, she served as Director of Global Programs at Village Capital, a global accelerator program and venture capital firm. Ulili received her MBA with a concentration in Health Sector Management from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. She is a native San Franciscan and a proud UC Berkeley Alum. In the episode, Ulili digs in to investing with an impact lens, including how to combat the perception that impact investing doesn't lead to enough deal flow or returns. She also shares about a few of the investments she led (though all her companies are her favorites) and growing up in the Bay Area. Finally, Ulili discusses tips for founders raising venture capital, including how to make the right choice in investor partnerships. Mission Driven is a conversation about startup founders on a mission to address the world's biggest challenges and how they leverage their social mission for competitive advantage. If you liked this episode, please share and tag us on Twitter: @BetterVentures @unolil @kaporcapital

This week, we explore the esteemed lives and careers of Joanne Hayes-White and Greg Suhr, two San Francisco natives and long-time friends with a deep and impactful commitment to their communities. Joanne, the first female and longest-serving Chief of the San Francisco Fire Department, championed diversity and inclusion by notably increasing the representation of women and minorities in her department. She values motherhood as her greatest life accomplishment. Greg, a 4th generation San Franciscan and lifelong rugby player, served as the 42nd Chief of Police for the San Francisco Police Department, emphasizing youth empowerment through mentorship and education. Even in retirement, he remains dedicated to uplifting the city's youth. His rugby passion remains just as strong. We had the pleasure of interviewing Joanne and Greg on the SF Embarcadero this October. Tune in to hear about the lives and legacies of these exceptional San Franciscans. Meet Joanne Hayes-White and Greg Suhr!

The San Francisco Symphonic Orchestra will celebrate this Saturday, November 4th, the “Dia de los Muertos” concert in 2023. This special event will commemorate the Meso-American holiday, which honors the memory of loved ones who have passed away.  The orchestra will perform a range of pieces that reflect the theme of this important holiday, with a focus on MAYAN traditions this year, introducing new art and music and unique experiences with old traditions. There will be a mixture of music from traditional Mexican folk songs to classical compositions that explore the theme of life and death.  The Davis Hall lobby has been showcasing art installations and interactive experiences related to this event the whole month, and they will be there until Tuesday, November 7th.  Our conversation today is with the long-time curator of this annual event, Martha Rodríguez Salazar. She is a singer, a flute performer, a music educator, and a community organizer. She is a Mexican born artis, long-time San Franciscan who has been in charge of curating this event since 2008, bringing every year a unique experience and exploring different aspects of “Dia de los Muertos” traditions and history.  Miguel Harth-Bedoya conducts the San Francisco Symphony in the concert program, [...]

While the tides are changing for people of color in the corporate world, there's this awkward space where pillars of the old system still stand ominous while the framework of a new system begins to take shape.  So where does that leave women of color in 2023? Do we gear up for an all-out war on the old system or don an every-woman-for-herself demeanor as we toss our fear aside and climb the corporate ladders to achieve our personal goals?  Perhaps we do a little of both?  Today's guest is LaTresse Snead, author of When Black Women Rise, founder & CEO of Bonsai Leadership group, former ED, and fellow San Franciscan! LaTresse knows a thing or two about facing challenges and overcoming fear. LaTresse has worked for some of the biggest non-profit organizations in her 20-year career and helped raise more than two hundred million dollars in donations. These days, she pours her experience and knowledge into coaching leaders, upcoming leaders, and organizations in the non-profit space to become the best version of themselves. Join us as we talk about: The state of DEI efforts in corporate America in 2023 What it looks like to be a woman of color in leadership right now What corporations should or should not expect from people of color in regards to building their DEI strategy How to negotiate salary as a woman of color How to know if an organization is worth your time and energy The importance of surrounding yourself with a network of support And, of course, how to chase your dreams fearlessly “I started out very fearful in my leadership of speaking out. … And I noticed that once I started to just authentically speak up … it was so much more impactful. … [P]eople start to respect that more.” -LaTresse Snead Don't forget to drop a review and subscribe for more content like this!  Important Links:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/latressesnead/ https://www.bonsaileadershipgroup.com/ https://www.amazon.com/When-Black-Women-LaTresse-Snead/dp/B0C8RG5834 --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nonprofitlowdown/support

On this 22nd episode of Skaters on Baseball the boys welcome a very special guest: San Francisco Giants team photographer Andy Kuno! Andy is a native San Franciscan, a dyed in the wool skateboarder and a generational Giants photographer who cut his teeth at Candlestick park, learning the craft from his father while rubbing elbows with some of the most legendary players in baseball history. Tune in as they discuss the fight era of the ‘Stick, the eternal question of where Ohtani will land, and some Willie Mays stories! SUBSCRIBE! Follow Andy on the Gram: @punkpoint --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/skatesonbase/message

News Links for the Week:China's Great Wall damaged by workers looking for shortcut: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-66714547Man abandons wife at airport, boarding the flight without her: https://www.jpost.com/omg/article-757631Appearance of Pirates in San Francisco Bay Leaves Boaters and Marinas On Edge: https://www.boatblurb.com/post/appearance-of-pirates-in-san-francisco-bay-leaves-boaters-and-marinas-on-edgeLouisiana professor asked students to paint their faces to fulfil his ‘clown fetish': https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/louisiana-professor-clown-fetish-face-paint-b2403329.htmlViral country star Oliver Anthony among those ‘trapped' at Burning Man amid flooding chaos: https://news.yahoo.com/viral-country-star-oliver-anthony-173324623.htmlDelta flight returns after passenger has diarrhea ‘all the way through' plane: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/06/delta-diarrhea-flight-spainVisit our brand spanking new home on the web @ www.earthoddity.net!!!We would to thank Cajun Curl Original Spice for their support! For some spice that's extra nice that taste spicy but doesn't feel spicy, check them out over at www.cajuncurl.com. Be sure and use coupon code "EOP10" and get ten percent off your order.Special thanks to Silencyde for providing the music! Check out his music on Soundcloud here: https://soundcloud.com/silencyde or on his YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/Silencyde and on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/Silencyde/Like what you hear? Please consider joining our Patreon. Sign up at the $5 dollar level and get access to Earth Oddity Extended where you get an extended version of the show and an all exclusive show once a month! You can find that at www.patreon.com/earthoddity.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/3013930/advertisement

News Links for the Week:China's Great Wall damaged by workers looking for shortcut: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-66714547Man abandons wife at airport, boarding the flight without her: https://www.jpost.com/omg/article-757631Appearance of Pirates in San Francisco Bay Leaves Boaters and Marinas On Edge: https://www.boatblurb.com/post/appearance-of-pirates-in-san-francisco-bay-leaves-boaters-and-marinas-on-edgeLouisiana professor asked students to paint their faces to fulfil his ‘clown fetish': https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/louisiana-professor-clown-fetish-face-paint-b2403329.htmlViral country star Oliver Anthony among those ‘trapped' at Burning Man amid flooding chaos: https://news.yahoo.com/viral-country-star-oliver-anthony-173324623.htmlDelta flight returns after passenger has diarrhea ‘all the way through' plane: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/06/delta-diarrhea-flight-spainVisit our brand spanking new home on the web @ www.earthoddity.net!!!We would to thank Cajun Curl Original Spice for their support! For some spice that's extra nice that taste spicy but doesn't feel spicy, check them out over at www.cajuncurl.com. Be sure and use coupon code "EOP10" and get ten percent off your order.Special thanks to Silencyde for providing the music! Check out his music on Soundcloud here: https://soundcloud.com/silencyde or on his YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/Silencyde and on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/Silencyde/Like what you hear? Please consider joining our Patreon. Sign up at the $5 dollar level and get access to Earth Oddity Extended where you get an extended version of the show and an all exclusive show once a month! You can find that at www.patreon.com/earthoddity.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4656375/advertisement

Ali Wunderman is an award-winning freelance travel journalist with work in the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Forbes, Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, the Guardian, SF Gate, and many more.Ali is also a 4th-generation San Franciscan, and in this episode, she explains what's going on in this city - and what we can all learn from it.Visit Ali's websiteFollow Ali on LinkedInFollow Ali on TwitterFollow Ali on InstagramFollow Ali on TiktokWhat did you think about this episode? Join the Hospitality Daily community on LinkedIn and share your thoughts. If you care about hospitality, check out the Masters of Moments podcast where Jake Wurzak interviews top leaders in hospitality. His conversations with Bashar Wali and Matt Marquis are a great place to start, but also check out his solo episodes such as how he underwrites investment deals and a deep dive into GP fees you know about. Music by Clay Bassford of Bespoke Sound: Music Identity Design for Hospitality Brands

In Part 3, we meet Mini Bar's Operations Manager, Erin Kehoe. Erin is a sixth-generation San Franciscan. Her uncle researched family history, which was complicated by the fact that her grandma was orphaned. When you consider time in the state of California, her family history goes back here to when it was part of Mexico. Much like John, she was born at Kaiser on Geary. In fact, Erin says, John's mom could've delivered her and her twin sister. She comes from a lineage of twins, actually. Her mom was one of four sets of twins. Erin's dad was a firefighter with the SFFD, though the family lived down in South San Francisco when Erin was young. They did spend lots of time at her grandma's place in the Sunset, the same house her dad and his brothers grew up in and which the family sold only recently. Erin remembers trips into The City when she young to go to places like Ghirardelli Square, the Emporium, and I. Magnin department store. They went to some football games at Candlestick, but not so much Giants games. She says that she grew up somewhat sheltered until, as a teenager, she and her twin sister discovered goth and industrial music. She recalls stories of calling in to Live 105 for ticket giveaways and how her mom would drop her and sister off at places like Slim's. Around the time they turned 18, the sisters started going to clubs and places like the Trocadero. This got her into the SF nightlife scene, and she says she "never looked back." But her job at Mini Bar is her first bartending gig. Erin did work in the service industry for 20+ years, at joints like the Peppermill in Daly City, B44 and Café Bastille on Belden Lane, and then at both the original and the current location of Bar Crudo. That restaurant's 2009 move to Divisadero is how Erin started coming to Mini Bar. She met John quickly and right away, he wanted her to work at Mini Bar. Only problem was—she didn't bartend (yet). Fast-forward to 2021, when her friend Susan was bartending at Mini and asked Erin yet again to consider coming on, which she did. Four months later, they asked her to manage the bar. Erin takes her work seriously, and she thinks that she was someone Mini Bar could count on. She picked up the bartending side quickly, but didn't know where to start with curating art shows. And so, she went through archived Mini Bar emails and found people she recognized. From there, she put together a show, and then things started rolling. Erin soon met Anita Beshirs (curator of the current show at Mini Bar), and the two are good friends now. She says she's honored to be part of art and community. When the conversation shifts to our upcoming show, Hungry Ghosts, Erin mentions that she had wanted to branch out and try something different. Joining forces with a podcast feels for her like the beginning of something new at Mini Bar. We end Part 3 with a chat about the current show at the bar, which Erin says "is very SF."  "Around Town" features Jack Keating, Millie Kwong, Missstencil, Anne-Louise Petersson, and Danielle Bellantonio. "Anita crushed it," Erin says, congratulating her friend. We agree. We hope to see you all at Mini Bar on August 17 at 6 p.m. for the opening of Hungry Ghosts. Thanks for listening throughout our fifth season, and we'll see you soon!

Muni is San Francisco's deep end: immediate and immersive exposure to strangers, testing our tolerance for other people's music, aromas, food, volume, attitude, or public habits. Meymey Lee, a born-and-raised San Franciscan, was exposed to all of it since they were a baby. At Muni Diaries Live in April 2023, they shared how Muni not only spawned a best-friendship, but also an unwavering sense of civic pride and community.

This week, Chaos starts things off by talking about how Monster Fest went, and then Chaos and Carnage dive into the Hitchcock classic tale of avian terror, The Birds! With LOTS of trivia!! Melanie is a San Franciscan socialite who meets Mitch, a lawyer who spends his weekends on his mama's farm in Bodega Bay. She decides to prank him with birds for his younger sister Cathy's birthday, then gets roped into his world when gulls attack! They attack Melanie, then some more gulls attack Cathy's birthday party, then some sparrows invade the family house, and then the crows go ballistic on some schoolchildren! Is this an isolated incident in Bodega Bay, or the beginning of the birdpocalypse? We don't know! Join us for the ride! https://linktr.ee/podcastatnight https://theymostlypodcastatnight.com https://morbidlybeautiful.com/podcasts The origins of that 'charming' Risseldy Rosseldy song the schoolchildren sing: https://culturedarm.com/the-birds-1963-risseldy-rosseldy

In this episode, Sameer takes us back to the origins of Voyager Coffee, a concept born out of a desire to revitalize their city, San Jose. As natives of the area, Sameer and his partner Lauren noticed a trend of friends and acquaintances leaving for more exciting urban centers. Determined to inject vibrancy into their hometown, they envisioned Voyager Coffee as a catalyst for community-building and a hub of creativity. With a humble beginning as a coffee cart, Sameer and Lauren's dream gradually took shape. They poured their hearts and souls into their venture, starting with a meager three-kilo San Franciscan roaster in a garage. Despite the challenges they faced and the financial hurdles along the way, their dedication to quality and the farm-to-cup experience propelled them forward. Join Sameer as he discusses the pivotal moment when Voyager Coffee transitioned from a multi-roaster model to establishing their own roastery and chain of five coffee shops. Discover the motivation behind this bold move, driven by a desire to be closer to the source and have a direct impact on the coffee they served. Witness their journey of growth, from a small-scale operation to a multi-location coffee empire, with beautifully designed cafes that have become iconic in the South Bay area. Through this conversation, you'll gain insights into the intricacies of running both a cafe and a roastery under one umbrella. Sameer shares the challenges they faced, the complexities of managing hierarchical lines of communication, and the financial considerations that come with expanding their business. Learn from their experiences and discover valuable lessons for aspiring coffee entrepreneurs. If you're passionate about specialty coffee, community-building, or the entrepreneurial spirit, this podcast episode is a must-listen. Course: Sameer Shah will be sharing his extensive knowledge on "How to Start a Coffee Shop" as a course instructor at the esteemed Boot Coffee campus. Gain valuable insights and practical tips from Sameer, who has firsthand experience in building and growing Voyager Coffee. Don't miss the opportunity to learn from a true industry expert and take your coffee shop dreams to new heights. Ready to be captivated? Tune in to the podcast now and unlock the secrets to building a thriving coffee business with Sameer Shah of Voyager Coffee.

I did it my way; a young San Franciscan shares his thoughts on entrepreneurial success.

Hey everyone, The Specialty Coffee Expo is happening this weekend, April 21st-23rd and we will have several opportunities for you to catch some Cat & Cloud. First up, on Friday April 21st, we will be serving up coffee at two Barista PDX locations: Pearl and Nob Hill. You'll be able to find our coffee there all day, but from 9-12 we will be hiding out behind the bar at the Nob Hill location. Then later that day, on the show floor, we will be making coffee at the San Franciscan coffee roasters booth (Booth 253) Then on Saturday we have three different places you can catch us on bar: Artpresso Design (Booth 2454) from 10am-Noon The La Marzocco Artisan Cafe from 12:20-1:40 and lastly at GHGBS (Booth 2377) from Noon -2pm Finally on Sunday we will be hanging out at Artpresso once again having a great time. So come by and say hi if you're there. Thanks all and see you at SCA!

The Larry's sat down at Oracle Park and reflected on a decade's long partnership between Good Tidings and the SF Giants. Larry Baer shares his story of being a fourth generation San Franciscan who has forever been passionate about Giants baseball. As a kid, he dreamt of becoming a player or broadcaster, but ultimately found his passion in the Front Office. As an executive, Baer has always understood that the Giants are much more than a business. They are an entity that means so much to the fans and the greater community. Growth of community presence has been a fundamental part of the Giants' mission and something that has led to the teams' success on and off the field. Baer feels proud to personally be a part of unique ways the organization has been able to give back mainly through the Giants Community Fund. Having already created and built 26 Junior Giants Fields together, the Good Tidings Foundation and the Giants Community Fund are looking forward to many more projects to come. Stay tuned for two Junior Giants Fields to be built this year in Vallejo and Hollister, CA.

Quizmasters Lee and Marc meet for a semi-Holiday-themed trivia quiz with topics including Christmas Traditions, U.S. Holidays, Cartoon Characters, Vegetables, Star Wars, Medical, Etymology and more! Round One CARTOON CHARACTERS - Gumble is the last name of what Simpsons character? CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS - What Christmas tradition was first developed by German Lutherans in the 1700s as a celebration of the liturgical season? VEGETABLES - Alpha, Nevada and Snow Crown are types of which vegetable? U.S. HOLIDAYS - Which holiday originated in the U.S. in the wake of the L.A. Watts riots and whose seven principles include unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith? ETYMOLOGY - The word wiki, as in Wikipedia, means 'quick' in what language? STAR WARS - After meeting the Sith Lord for a photo in 1977, which singer introduced herself to Star Wars actor Mark Hamill as “Darth Vader's Wife”, but left her San Franciscan rock group before they famously performed “Light the Sky on Fire” during the cult-classic Star Wars Holiday Special? Round Two PARTIES - What kind of holiday party first took place in Vancouver, British Columbia in 2000, setting off an annual trend for decades to come? 2010'S TELEVISION - What TV show that premiered in 2017 has had episodes including "Cape Canaveral, Schrödinger's Cat, and Cyndi Lauper's Hair", "An 8-Bit Princess and a Flat Tire Genius" and "Graduation"? CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS - Mari Lwyd is a Southern Welsh Christmas Time tradition where townsfolk go from door to door requesting food and drink through song, while wearing the skeleton of what kind of animal SCIENCE - The Koppen-Geiger system, first developed in 1884, with modifications made by both scientists, is ud to classify what? MEDICAL - According to the American Association for Anatomy's Anatomical Science Education Journal, The Twelve Days of Christmas Song is "Ingrained in medical school folk law" as a mnemonic device to help remember which twelve parts of the brain? NFL - How many regular season games does each team play in the NFL? Rate My Question MOVIES - Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy consists of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End. Name the color that represents each film, per the director. Final Questions TECHNOLOGY - What were the first man-made objects to break the sound barrier? CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS - In Catalonia, it is a Christmas tradition to include a joke figurine called a caganer in their nativity scenes. What is the caganer doing in the nativity scene? Upcoming LIVE Know Nonsense Trivia Challenges *GENIUS WEEK* December 28th, 2022 - Know Nonsense Challenge - Point Ybel Brewing Co. - 7:30 pm EST December 29th, 2022 - Know Nonsense Trivia Challenge - Ollie's Pub Records and Beer - 7:30 pm EST You can find out more information about that and all of our live events online at KnowNonsenseTrivia.com All of the Know Nonsense events are free to play and you can win prizes after every round. Thank you Thanks to our supporters on Patreon. Thank you, Quizdaddies – Gil, Tim, Tommy, Adam, Brandon, Blake Thank you, Team Captains – Kristin & Fletcher, Aaron, Matthew, David Holbrook, Mo, Lydia, Rick G, Skyler Thank you, Proverbial Lightkeepers – Elyse, Kaitlynn, Frank, Trent, Nina, Justin, Katie, Ryan, Robb, Captain Nick, Grant, Ian, Tim Gomez, Rachael, Moo, Rikki, Nabeel, Jon Lewis, Adam, Lisa, Spencer, Hank, Justin P., Cooper, Sarah, Karly, Lucas, Mike K., Cole, Adam, Caitlyn H, Sam, Spencer, Stephen, Cameron Thank you, Rumplesnailtskins – Mike J., Mike C., Efren, Steven, Kenya, Dallas, Issa, Paige, Allison, Kevin & Sara, Alex, Loren, MJ, HBomb, Aaron, Laurel, FoxenV, Sarah, Edsicalz, Megan, brandon, Chris, Alec, Sai, Nathan, Tim, Andrea, Ian, Aunt Kiki, Clay, Littlestoflambs, Seth If you'd like to support the podcast and gain access to bonus content, please visit http://theknowno.com and click "Support."

Episode one hundred and fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “White Rabbit”, Jefferson Airplane, and the rise of the San Francisco sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three-minute bonus episode available, on "Omaha" by Moby Grape. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Erratum I refer to Back to Methuselah by Robert Heinlein. This is of course a play by George Bernard Shaw. What I meant to say was Methuselah's Children. Resources I hope to upload a Mixcloud tomorrow, and will edit it in, but have had some problems with the site today. Jefferson Airplane's first four studio albums, plus a 1968 live album, can be found in this box set. I've referred to three main books here. Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane by Jeff Tamarkin is written with the co-operation of the band members, but still finds room to criticise them. Jefferson Airplane On Track by Richard Molesworth is a song-by-song guide to the band's music. And Been So Long: My Life and Music by Jorma Kaukonen is Kaukonen's autobiography. Some information on Skip Spence and Matthew Katz also comes from What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story, by Cam Cobb, which I also used for this week's bonus. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I need to confess an important and hugely embarrassing error in this episode. I've only ever seen Marty Balin's name written down, never heard it spoken, and only after recording the episode, during the editing process, did I discover I mispronounce it throughout. It's usually an advantage for the podcast that I get my information from books rather than TV documentaries and the like, because they contain far more information, but occasionally it causes problems like that. My apologies. Also a brief note that this episode contains some mentions of racism, antisemitism, drug and alcohol abuse, and gun violence. One of the themes we've looked at in recent episodes is the way the centre of the musical world -- at least the musical world as it was regarded by the people who thought of themselves as hip in the mid-sixties -- was changing in 1967. Up to this point, for a few years there had been two clear centres of the rock and pop music worlds. In the UK, there was London, and any British band who meant anything had to base themselves there. And in the US, at some point around 1963, the centre of the music industry had moved West. Up to then it had largely been based in New York, and there was still a thriving industry there as of the mid sixties. But increasingly the records that mattered, that everyone in the country had been listening to, had come out of LA Soul music was, of course, still coming primarily from Detroit and from the Country-Soul triangle in Tennessee and Alabama, but when it came to the new brand of electric-guitar rock that was taking over the airwaves, LA was, up until the first few months of 1967, the only city that was competing with London, and was the place to be. But as we heard in the episode on "San Francisco", with the Monterey Pop Festival all that started to change. While the business part of the music business remained centred in LA, and would largely remain so, LA was no longer the hip place to be. Almost overnight, jangly guitars, harmonies, and Brian Jones hairstyles were out, and feedback, extended solos, and droopy moustaches were in. The place to be was no longer LA, but a few hundred miles North, in San Francisco -- something that the LA bands were not all entirely happy about: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Needs the Peace Corps?"] In truth, the San Francisco music scene, unlike many of the scenes we've looked at so far in this series, had rather a limited impact on the wider world of music. Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were all both massively commercially successful and highly regarded by critics, but unlike many of the other bands we've looked at before and will look at in future, they didn't have much of an influence on the bands that would come after them, musically at least. Possibly this is because the music from the San Francisco scene was always primarily that -- music created by and for a specific group of people, and inextricable from its context. The San Francisco musicians were defining themselves by their geographical location, their peers, and the situation they were in, and their music was so specifically of the place and time that to attempt to copy it outside of that context would appear ridiculous, so while many of those bands remain much loved to this day, and many made some great music, it's very hard to point to ways in which that music influenced later bands. But what they did influence was the whole of rock music culture. For at least the next thirty years, and arguably to this day, the parameters in which rock musicians worked if they wanted to be taken seriously – their aesthetic and political ideals, their methods of collaboration, the cultural norms around drug use and sexual promiscuity, ideas of artistic freedom and authenticity, the choice of acceptable instruments – in short, what it meant to be a rock musician rather than a pop, jazz, country, or soul artist – all those things were defined by the cultural and behavioural norms of the San Francisco scene between about 1966 and 68. Without the San Francisco scene there's no Woodstock, no Rolling Stone magazine, no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, no hippies, no groupies, no rock stars. So over the next few months we're going to take several trips to the Bay Area, and look at the bands which, for a brief time, defined the counterculture in America. The story of Jefferson Airplane -- and unlike other bands we've looked at recently, like The Pink Floyd and The Buffalo Springfield, they never had a definite article at the start of their name to wither away like a vestigial organ in subsequent years -- starts with Marty Balin. Balin was born in Ohio, but was a relatively sickly child -- he later talked about being autistic, and seems to have had the chronic illnesses that so often go with neurodivergence -- so in the hope that the dry air would be good for his chest his family moved to Arizona. Then when his father couldn't find work there, they moved further west to San Francisco, in the Haight-Ashbury area, long before that area became the byword for the hippie movement. But it was in LA that he started his music career, and got his surname. Balin had been named Marty Buchwald as a kid, but when he was nineteen he had accompanied a friend to LA to visit a music publisher, and had ended up singing backing vocals on her demos. While he was there, he had encountered the arranger Jimmy Haskell. Haskell was on his way to becoming one of the most prominent arrangers in the music industry, and in his long career he would go on to do arrangements for Bobby Gentry, Blondie, Steely Dan, Simon and Garfunkel, and many others. But at the time he was best known for his work on Ricky Nelson's hits: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Hello Mary Lou"] Haskell thought that Marty had the makings of a Ricky Nelson style star, as he was a good-looking young man with a decent voice, and he became a mentor for the young man. Making the kind of records that Haskell arranged was expensive, and so Haskell suggested a deal to him -- if Marty's father would pay for studio time and musicians, Haskell would make a record with him and find him a label to put it out. Marty's father did indeed pay for the studio time and the musicians -- some of the finest working in LA at the time. The record, released under the name Marty Balin, featured Jack Nitzsche on keyboards, Earl Palmer on drums, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Red Callender on bass, and Glen Campbell and Barney Kessell on guitars, and came out on Challenge Records, a label owned by Gene Autry: [Excerpt: Marty Balin, "Nobody But You"] Neither that, nor Balin's follow-up single, sold a noticeable amount of copies, and his career as a teen idol was over before it had begun. Instead, as many musicians of his age did, he decided to get into folk music, joining a vocal harmony group called the Town Criers, who patterned themselves after the Weavers, and performed the same kind of material that every other clean-cut folk vocal group was performing at the time -- the kind of songs that John Phillips and Steve Stills and Cass Elliot and Van Dyke Parks and the rest were all performing in their own groups at the same time. The Town Criers never made any records while they were together, but some archival recordings of them have been released over the decades: [Excerpt: The Town Criers, "900 Miles"] The Town Criers split up, and Balin started performing as a solo folkie again. But like all those other then-folk musicians, Balin realised that he had to adapt to the K/T-event level folk music extinction that happened when the Beatles hit America like a meteorite. He had to form a folk-rock group if he wanted to survive -- and given that there were no venues for such a group to play in San Francisco, he also had to start a nightclub for them to play in. He started hanging around the hootenannies in the area, looking for musicians who might form an electric band. The first person he decided on was a performer called Paul Kantner, mainly because he liked his attitude. Kantner had got on stage in front of a particularly drunk, loud, crowd, and performed precisely half a song before deciding he wasn't going to perform in front of people like that and walking off stage. Kantner was the only member of the new group to be a San Franciscan -- he'd been born and brought up in the city. He'd got into folk music at university, where he'd also met a guitar player named Jorma Kaukonen, who had turned him on to cannabis, and the two had started giving music lessons at a music shop in San Jose. There Kantner had also been responsible for booking acts at a local folk club, where he'd first encountered acts like Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a jug band which included Jerry Garcia, Pigpen McKernan, and Bob Weir, who would later go on to be the core members of the Grateful Dead: [Excerpt: Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, "In the Jailhouse Now"] Kantner had moved around a bit between Northern and Southern California, and had been friendly with two other musicians on the Californian folk scene, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn. When their new group, the Byrds, suddenly became huge, Kantner became aware of the possibility of doing something similar himself, and so when Marty Balin approached him to form a band, he agreed. On bass, they got in a musician called Bob Harvey, who actually played double bass rather than electric, and who stuck to that for the first few gigs the group played -- he had previously been in a band called the Slippery Rock String Band. On drums, they brought in Jerry Peloquin, who had formerly worked for the police, but now had a day job as an optician. And on vocals, they brought in Signe Toley -- who would soon marry and change her name to Signe Anderson, so that's how I'll talk about her to avoid confusion. The group also needed a lead guitarist though -- both Balin and Kantner were decent rhythm players and singers, but they needed someone who was a better instrumentalist. They decided to ask Kantner's old friend Jorma Kaukonen. Kaukonen was someone who was seriously into what would now be called Americana or roots music. He'd started playing the guitar as a teenager, not like most people of his generation inspired by Elvis or Buddy Holly, but rather after a friend of his had shown him how to play an old Carter Family song, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy": [Excerpt: The Carter Family, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy"] Kaukonen had had a far more interesting life than most of the rest of the group. His father had worked for the State Department -- and there's some suggestion he'd worked for the CIA -- and the family had travelled all over the world, staying in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Finland. For most of his childhood, he'd gone by the name Jerry, because other kids beat him up for having a foreign name and called him a Nazi, but by the time he turned twenty he was happy enough using his birth name. Kaukonen wasn't completely immune to the appeal of rock and roll -- he'd formed a rock band, The Triumphs, with his friend Jack Casady when he was a teenager, and he loved Ricky Nelson's records -- but his fate as a folkie had been pretty much sealed when he went to Antioch College. There he met up with a blues guitarist called Ian Buchanan. Buchanan never had much of a career as a professional, but he had supposedly spent nine years studying with the blues and ragtime guitar legend Rev. Gary Davis, and he was certainly a fine guitarist, as can be heard on his contribution to The Blues Project, the album Elektra put out of white Greenwich Village musicians like John Sebastian and Dave Van Ronk playing old blues songs: [Excerpt: Ian Buchanan, "The Winding Boy"] Kaukonen became something of a disciple of Buchanan -- he said later that Buchanan probably taught him how to play because he was such a terrible player and Buchanan couldn't stand to listen to it -- as did John Hammond Jr, another student at Antioch at the same time. After studying at Antioch, Kaukonen started to travel around, including spells in Greenwich Village and in the Philippines, before settling in Santa Clara, where he studied for a sociology degree and became part of a social circle that included Dino Valenti, Jerry Garcia, and Billy Roberts, the credited writer of "Hey Joe". He also started performing as a duo with a singer called Janis Joplin. Various of their recordings from this period circulate, mostly recorded at Kaukonen's home with the sound of his wife typing in the background while the duo rehearse, as on this performance of an old Bessie Smith song: [Excerpt: Jorma Kaukonen and Janis Joplin, "Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out"] By 1965 Kaukonen saw himself firmly as a folk-blues purist, who would not even think of playing rock and roll music, which he viewed with more than a little contempt. But he allowed himself to be brought along to audition for the new group, and Ken Kesey happened to be there. Kesey was a novelist who had written two best-selling books, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, and used the financial independence that gave him to organise a group of friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters, who drove from coast to coast and back again in a psychedelic-painted bus, before starting a series of events that became known as Acid Tests, parties at which everyone was on LSD, immortalised in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Nobody has ever said why Kesey was there, but he had brought along an Echoplex, a reverb unit one could put a guitar through -- and nobody has explained why Kesey, who wasn't a musician, had an Echoplex to hand. But Kaukonen loved the sound that he could get by putting his guitar through the device, and so for that reason more than any other he decided to become an electric player and join the band, going out and buying a Rickenbacker twelve-string and Vox Treble Booster because that was what Roger McGuinn used. He would later also get a Guild Thunderbird six-string guitar and a Standel Super Imperial amp, following the same principle of buying the equipment used by other guitarists he liked, as they were what Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin' Spoonful used. He would use them for all his six-string playing for the next couple of years, only later to discover that the Lovin' Spoonful despised them and only used them because they had an endorsement deal with the manufacturers. Kaukonen was also the one who came up with the new group's name. He and his friends had a running joke where they had "Bluesman names", things like "Blind Outrage" and "Little Sun Goldfarb". Kaukonen's bluesman name, given to him by his friend Steve Talbot, had been Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane, a reference to the 1920s blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Match Box Blues"] At the band meeting where they were trying to decide on a name, Kaukonen got frustrated at the ridiculous suggestions that were being made, and said "You want a stupid name? Howzabout this... Jefferson Airplane?" He said in his autobiography "It was one of those rare moments when everyone in the band agreed, and that was that. I think it was the only band meeting that ever allowed me to come away smiling." The newly-named Jefferson Airplane started to rehearse at the Matrix Club, the club that Balin had decided to open. This was run with three sound engineer friends, who put in the seed capital for the club. Balin had stock options in the club, which he got by trading a share of the band's future earnings to his partners, though as the group became bigger he eventually sold his stock in the club back to his business partners. Before their first public performance, they started working with a manager, Matthew Katz, mostly because Katz had access to a recording of a then-unreleased Bob Dylan song, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune"] The group knew that the best way for a folk-rock band to make a name for themselves was to perform a Dylan song nobody else had yet heard, and so they agreed to be managed by Katz. Katz started a pre-publicity blitz, giving out posters, badges, and bumper stickers saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You" all over San Francisco -- and insisting that none of the band members were allowed to say "Hello" when they answered the phone any more, they had to say "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" For their early rehearsals and gigs, they were performing almost entirely cover versions of blues and folk songs, things like Fred Neil's "The Other Side of This Life" and Dino Valenti's "Get Together" which were the common currency of the early folk-rock movement, and songs by their friends, like one called "Flower Bomb" by David Crosby, which Crosby now denies ever having written. They did start writing the odd song, but at this point they were more focused on performance than on writing. They also hired a press agent, their friend Bill Thompson. Thompson was friends with the two main music writers at the San Francisco Chronicle, Ralph Gleason, the famous jazz critic, who had recently started also reviewing rock music, and John Wasserman. Thompson got both men to come to the opening night of the Matrix, and both gave the group glowing reviews in the Chronicle. Record labels started sniffing around the group immediately as a result of this coverage, and according to Katz he managed to get a bidding war started by making sure that when A&R men came to the club there were always two of them from different labels, so they would see the other person and realise they weren't the only ones interested. But before signing a record deal they needed to make some personnel changes. The first member to go was Jerry Peloquin, for both musical and personal reasons. Peloquin was used to keeping strict time and the other musicians had a more free-flowing idea of what tempo they should be playing at, but also he had worked for the police while the other members were all taking tons of illegal drugs. The final break with Peloquin came when he did the rest of the group a favour -- Paul Kantner's glasses broke during a rehearsal, and as Peloquin was an optician he offered to take them back to his shop and fix them. When he got back, he found them auditioning replacements for him. He beat Kantner up, and that was the end of Jerry Peloquin in Jefferson Airplane. His replacement was Skip Spence, who the group had met when he had accompanied three friends to the Matrix, which they were using as a rehearsal room. Spence's friends went on to be the core members of Quicksilver Messenger Service along with Dino Valenti: [Excerpt: Quicksilver Messenger Service, "Dino's Song"] But Balin decided that Spence looked like a rock star, and told him that he was now Jefferson Airplane's drummer, despite Spence being a guitarist and singer, not a drummer. But Spence was game, and learned to play the drums. Next they needed to get rid of Bob Harvey. According to Harvey, the decision to sack him came after David Crosby saw the band rehearsing and said "Nice song, but get rid of the bass player" (along with an expletive before the word bass which I can't say without incurring the wrath of Apple). Crosby denies ever having said this. Harvey had started out in the group on double bass, but to show willing he'd switched in his last few gigs to playing an electric bass. When he was sacked by the group, he returned to double bass, and to the Slippery Rock String Band, who released one single in 1967: [Excerpt: The Slippery Rock String Band, "Tule Fog"] Harvey's replacement was Kaukonen's old friend Jack Casady, who Kaukonen knew was now playing bass, though he'd only ever heard him playing guitar when they'd played together. Casady was rather cautious about joining a rock band, but then Kaukonen told him that the band were getting fifty dollars a week salary each from Katz, and Casady flew over from Washington DC to San Francisco to join the band. For the first few gigs, he used Bob Harvey's bass, which Harvey was good enough to lend him despite having been sacked from the band. Unfortunately, right from the start Casady and Kantner didn't get on. When Casady flew in from Washington, he had a much more clean-cut appearance than the rest of the band -- one they've described as being nerdy, with short, slicked-back, side-parted hair and a handlebar moustache. Kantner insisted that Casady shave the moustache off, and he responded by shaving only one side, so in profile on one side he looked clean-shaven, while from the other side he looked like he had a full moustache. Kantner also didn't like Casady's general attitude, or his playing style, at all -- though most critics since this point have pointed to Casady's bass playing as being the most interesting and distinctive thing about Jefferson Airplane's style. This lineup seems to have been the one that travelled to LA to audition for various record companies -- a move that immediately brought the group a certain amount of criticism for selling out, both for auditioning for record companies and for going to LA at all, two things that were already anathema on the San Francisco scene. The only audition anyone remembers them having specifically is one for Phil Spector, who according to Kaukonen was waving a gun around during the audition, so he and Casady walked out. Around this time as well, the group performed at an event billed as "A Tribute to Dr. Strange", organised by the radical hippie collective Family Dog. Marvel Comics, rather than being the multi-billion-dollar Disney-owned corporate juggernaut it is now, was regarded as a hip, almost underground, company -- and around this time they briefly started billing their comics not as comics but as "Marvel Pop Art Productions". The magical adventures of Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, and in particular the art by far-right libertarian artist Steve Ditko, were regarded as clear parallels to both the occult dabblings and hallucinogen use popular among the hippies, though Ditko had no time for either, following as he did an extreme version of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It was at the Tribute to Dr. Strange that Jefferson Airplane performed for the first time with a band named The Great Society, whose lead singer, Grace Slick, would later become very important in Jefferson Airplane's story: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That gig was also the first one where the band and their friends noticed that large chunks of the audience were now dressing up in costumes that were reminiscent of the Old West. Up to this point, while Katz had been managing the group and paying them fifty dollars a week even on weeks when they didn't perform, he'd been doing so without a formal contract, in part because the group didn't trust him much. But now they were starting to get interest from record labels, and in particular RCA Records desperately wanted them. While RCA had been the label who had signed Elvis Presley, they had otherwise largely ignored rock and roll, considering that since they had the biggest rock star in the world they didn't need other ones, and concentrating largely on middle-of-the-road acts. But by the mid-sixties Elvis' star had faded somewhat, and they were desperate to get some of the action for the new music -- and unlike the other major American labels, they didn't have a reciprocal arrangement with a British label that allowed them to release anything by any of the new British stars. The group were introduced to RCA by Rod McKuen, a songwriter and poet who later became America's best-selling poet and wrote songs that sold over a hundred million copies. At this point McKuen was in his Jacques Brel phase, recording loose translations of the Belgian songwriter's songs with McKuen translating the lyrics: [Excerpt: Rod McKuen, "Seasons in the Sun"] McKuen thought that Jefferson Airplane might be a useful market for his own songs, and brought the group to RCA. RCA offered Jefferson Airplane twenty-five thousand dollars to sign with them, and Katz convinced the group that RCA wouldn't give them this money without them having signed a management contract with him. Kaukonen, Kantner, Spence, and Balin all signed without much hesitation, but Jack Casady didn't yet sign, as he was the new boy and nobody knew if he was going to be in the band for the long haul. The other person who refused to sign was Signe Anderson. In her case, she had a much better reason for refusing to sign, as unlike the rest of the band she had actually read the contract, and she found it to be extremely worrying. She did eventually back down on the day of the group's first recording session, but she later had the contract renegotiated. Jack Casady also signed the contract right at the start of the first session -- or at least, he thought he'd signed the contract then. He certainly signed *something*, without having read it. But much later, during a court case involving the band's longstanding legal disputes with Katz, it was revealed that the signature on the contract wasn't Casady's, and was badly forged. What he actually *did* sign that day has never been revealed, to him or to anyone else. Katz also signed all the group as songwriters to his own publishing company, telling them that they legally needed to sign with him if they wanted to make records, and also claimed to RCA that he had power of attorney for the band, which they say they never gave him -- though to be fair to Katz, given the band members' habit of signing things without reading or understanding them, it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that they did. The producer chosen for the group's first album was Tommy Oliver, a friend of Katz's who had previously been an arranger on some of Doris Day's records, and whose next major act after finishing the Jefferson Airplane album was Trombones Unlimited, who released records like "Holiday for Trombones": [Excerpt: Trombones Unlimited, "Holiday For Trombones"] The group weren't particularly thrilled with this choice, but were happier with their engineer, Dave Hassinger, who had worked on records like "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, and had a far better understanding of the kind of music the group were making. They spent about three months recording their first album, even while continually being attacked as sellouts. The album is not considered their best work, though it does contain "Blues From an Airplane", a collaboration between Spence and Balin: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Blues From an Airplane"] Even before the album came out, though, things were starting to change for the group. Firstly, they started playing bigger venues -- their home base went from being the Matrix club to the Fillmore, a large auditorium run by the promoter Bill Graham. They also started to get an international reputation. The British singer-songwriter Donovan released a track called "The Fat Angel" which namechecked the group: [Excerpt: Donovan, "The Fat Angel"] The group also needed a new drummer. Skip Spence decided to go on holiday to Mexico without telling the rest of the band. There had already been some friction with Spence, as he was very eager to become a guitarist and songwriter, and the band already had three songwriting guitarists and didn't really see why they needed a fourth. They sacked Spence, who went on to form Moby Grape, who were also managed by Katz: [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Omaha"] For his replacement they brought in Spencer Dryden, who was a Hollywood brat like their friend David Crosby -- in Dryden's case he was Charlie Chaplin's nephew, and his father worked as Chaplin's assistant. The story normally goes that the great session drummer Earl Palmer recommended Dryden to the group, but it's also the case that Dryden had been in a band, the Heartbeats, with Tommy Oliver and the great blues guitarist Roy Buchanan, so it may well be that Oliver had recommended him. Dryden had been primarily a jazz musician, playing with people like the West Coast jazz legend Charles Lloyd, though like most jazzers he would slum it on occasion by playing rock and roll music to pay the bills. But then he'd seen an early performance by the Mothers of Invention, and realised that rock music could have a serious artistic purpose too. He'd joined a band called The Ashes, who had released one single, the Jackie DeShannon song "Is There Anything I Can Do?" in December 1965: [Excerpt: The Ashes, "Is There Anything I Can Do?"] The Ashes split up once Dryden left the group to join Jefferson Airplane, but they soon reformed without him as The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, who hooked up with Gary Usher and released several albums of psychedelic sunshine pop. Dryden played his first gig with the group at a Republican Party event on June the sixth, 1966. But by the time Dryden had joined, other problems had become apparent. The group were already feeling like it had been a big mistake to accede to Katz's demands to sign a formal contract with him, and Balin in particular was getting annoyed that he wouldn't let the band see their finances. All the money was getting paid to Katz, who then doled out money to the band when they asked for it, and they had no idea if he was actually paying them what they were owed or not. The group's first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, finally came out in September, and it was a comparative flop. It sold well in San Francisco itself, selling around ten thousand copies in the area, but sold basically nothing anywhere else in the country -- the group's local reputation hadn't extended outside their own immediate scene. It didn't help that the album was pulled and reissued, as RCA censored the initial version of the album because of objections to the lyrics. The song "Runnin' Round This World" was pulled off the album altogether for containing the word "trips", while in "Let Me In" they had to rerecord two lines -- “I gotta get in, you know where" was altered to "You shut the door now it ain't fair" and "Don't tell me you want money" became "Don't tell me it's so funny". Similarly in "Run Around" the phrase "as you lay under me" became "as you stay here by me". Things were also becoming difficult for Anderson. She had had a baby in May and was not only unhappy with having to tour while she had a small child, she was also the band member who was most vocally opposed to Katz. Added to that, her husband did not get on well at all with the group, and she felt trapped between her marriage and her bandmates. Reports differ as to whether she quit the band or was fired, but after a disastrous appearance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, one way or another she was out of the band. Her replacement was already waiting in the wings. Grace Slick, the lead singer of the Great Society, had been inspired by going to one of the early Jefferson Airplane gigs. She later said "I went to see Jefferson Airplane at the Matrix, and they were making more money in a day than I made in a week. They only worked for two or three hours a night, and they got to hang out. I thought 'This looks a lot better than what I'm doing.' I knew I could more or less carry a tune, and I figured if they could do it I could." She was married at the time to a film student named Jerry Slick, and indeed she had done the music for his final project at film school, a film called "Everybody Hits Their Brother Once", which sadly I can't find online. She was also having an affair with Jerry's brother Darby, though as the Slicks were in an open marriage this wasn't particularly untoward. The three of them, with a couple of other musicians, had formed The Great Society, named as a joke about President Johnson's programme of the same name. The Great Society was the name Johnson had given to his whole programme of domestic reforms, including civil rights for Black people, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, and more. While those projects were broadly popular among the younger generation, Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam had made him so personally unpopular that even his progressive domestic programme was regarded with suspicion and contempt. The Great Society had set themselves up as local rivals to Jefferson Airplane -- where Jefferson Airplane had buttons saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" the Great Society put out buttons saying "The Great Society Really Doesn't Like You Much At All". They signed to Autumn Records, and recorded a song that Darby Slick had written, titled "Someone to Love" -- though the song would later be retitled "Somebody to Love": [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That track was produced by Sly Stone, who at the time was working as a producer for Autumn Records. The Great Society, though, didn't like working with Stone, because he insisted on them doing forty-five takes to try to sound professional, as none of them were particularly competent musicians. Grace Slick later said "Sly could play any instrument known to man. He could have just made the record himself, except for the singers. It was kind of degrading in a way" -- and on another occasion she said that he *did* end up playing all the instruments on the finished record. "Someone to Love" was put out as a promo record, but never released to the general public, and nor were any of the Great Society's other recordings for Autumn Records released. Their contract expired and they were let go, at which point they were about to sign to Mercury Records, but then Darby Slick and another member decided to go off to India for a while. Grace's marriage to Jerry was falling apart, though they would stay legally married for several years, and the Great Society looked like it was at an end, so when Grace got the offer to join Jefferson Airplane to replace Signe Anderson, she jumped at the chance. At first, she was purely a harmony singer -- she didn't take over any of the lead vocal parts that Anderson had previously sung, as she had a very different vocal style, and instead she just sang the harmony parts that Anderson had sung on songs with other lead vocalists. But two months after the album they were back in the studio again, recording their second album, and Slick sang lead on several songs there. As well as the new lineup, there was another important change in the studio. They were still working with Dave Hassinger, but they had a new producer, Rick Jarrard. Jarrard was at one point a member of the folk group The Wellingtons, who did the theme tune for "Gilligan's Island", though I can't find anything to say whether or not he was in the group when they recorded that track: [Excerpt: The Wellingtons, "The Ballad of Gilligan's Island"] Jarrard had also been in the similar folk group The Greenwood County Singers, where as we heard in the episode on "Heroes and Villains" he replaced Van Dyke Parks. He'd also released a few singles under his own name, including a version of Parks' "High Coin": [Excerpt: Rick Jarrard, "High Coin"] While Jarrard had similar musical roots to those of Jefferson Airplane's members, and would go on to produce records by people like Harry Nilsson and The Family Tree, he wasn't any more liked by the band than their previous producer had been. So much so, that a few of the band members have claimed that while Jarrard is the credited producer, much of the work that one would normally expect to be done by a producer was actually done by their friend Jerry Garcia, who according to the band members gave them a lot of arranging and structural advice, and was present in the studio and played guitar on several tracks. Jarrard, on the other hand, said categorically "I never met Jerry Garcia. I produced that album from start to finish, never heard from Jerry Garcia, never talked to Jerry Garcia. He was not involved creatively on that album at all." According to the band, though, it was Garcia who had the idea of almost doubling the speed of the retitled "Somebody to Love", turning it into an uptempo rocker: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] And one thing everyone is agreed on is that it was Garcia who came up with the album title, when after listening to some of the recordings he said "That's as surrealistic as a pillow!" It was while they were working on the album that was eventually titled Surrealistic Pillow that they finally broke with Katz as their manager, bringing Bill Thompson in as a temporary replacement. Or at least, it was then that they tried to break with Katz. Katz sued the group over their contract, and won. Then they appealed, and they won. Then Katz appealed the appeal, and the Superior Court insisted that if he wanted to appeal the ruling, he had to put up a bond for the fifty thousand dollars the group said he owed them. He didn't, so in 1970, four years after they sacked him as their manager, the appeal was dismissed. Katz appealed the dismissal, and won that appeal, and the case dragged on for another three years, at which point Katz dragged RCA Records into the lawsuit. As a result of being dragged into the mess, RCA decided to stop paying the group their songwriting royalties from record sales directly, and instead put the money into an escrow account. The claims and counterclaims and appeals *finally* ended in 1987, twenty years after the lawsuits had started and fourteen years after the band had stopped receiving their songwriting royalties. In the end, the group won on almost every point, and finally received one point three million dollars in back royalties and seven hundred thousand dollars in interest that had accrued, while Katz got a small token payment. Early in 1967, when the sessions for Surrealistic Pillow had finished, but before the album was released, Newsweek did a big story on the San Francisco scene, which drew national attention to the bands there, and the first big event of what would come to be called the hippie scene, the Human Be-In, happened in Golden Gate Park in January. As the group's audience was expanding rapidly, they asked Bill Graham to be their manager, as he was the most business-minded of the people around the group. The first single from the album, "My Best Friend", a song written by Skip Spence before he quit the band, came out in January 1967 and had no more success than their earlier recordings had, and didn't make the Hot 100. The album came out in February, and was still no higher than number 137 on the charts in March, when the second single, "Somebody to Love", was released: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] That entered the charts at the start of April, and by June it had made number five. The single's success also pushed its parent album up to number three by August, just behind the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Monkees' Headquarters. The success of the single also led to the group being asked to do commercials for Levis jeans: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Levis commercial"] That once again got them accused of selling out. Abbie Hoffman, the leader of the Yippies, wrote to the Village Voice about the commercials, saying "It summarized for me all the doubts I have about the hippie philosophy. I realise they are just doing their 'thing', but while the Jefferson Airplane grooves with its thing, over 100 workers in the Levi Strauss plant on the Tennessee-Georgia border are doing their thing, which consists of being on strike to protest deplorable working conditions." The third single from the album, "White Rabbit", came out on the twenty-fourth of June, the day before the Beatles recorded "All You Need is Love", nine days after the release of "See Emily Play", and a week after the group played the Monterey Pop Festival, to give you some idea of how compressed a time period we've been in recently. We talked in the last episode about how there's a big difference between American and British psychedelia at this point in time, because the political nature of the American counterculture was determined by the fact that so many people were being sent off to die in Vietnam. Of all the San Francisco bands, though, Jefferson Airplane were by far the least political -- they were into the culture part of the counterculture, but would often and repeatedly disavow any deeper political meaning in their songs. In early 1968, for example, in a press conference, they said “Don't ask us anything about politics. We don't know anything about it. And what we did know, we just forgot.” So it's perhaps not surprising that of all the American groups, they were the one that was most similar to the British psychedelic groups in their influences, and in particular their frequent references to children's fantasy literature. "White Rabbit" was a perfect example of this. It had started out as "White Rabbit Blues", a song that Slick had written influenced by Alice in Wonderland, and originally performed by the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "White Rabbit"] Slick explained the lyrics, and their association between childhood fantasy stories and drugs, later by saying "It's an interesting song but it didn't do what I wanted it to. What I was trying to say was that between the ages of zero and five the information and the input you get is almost indelible. In other words, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. And the parents read us these books, like Alice in Wonderland where she gets high, tall, and she takes mushrooms, a hookah, pills, alcohol. And then there's The Wizard of Oz, where they fall into a field of poppies and when they wake up they see Oz. And then there's Peter Pan, where if you sprinkle white dust on you, you could fly. And then you wonder why we do it? Well, what did you read to me?" While the lyrical inspiration for the track was from Alice in Wonderland, the musical inspiration is less obvious. Slick has on multiple occasions said that the idea for the music came from listening to Miles Davis' album "Sketches of Spain", and in particular to Davis' version of -- and I apologise for almost certainly mangling the Spanish pronunciation badly here -- "Concierto de Aranjuez", though I see little musical resemblance to it myself. [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Concierto de Aranjuez"] She has also, though, talked about how the song was influenced by Ravel's "Bolero", and in particular the way the piece keeps building in intensity, starting softly and slowly building up, rather than having the dynamic peaks and troughs of most music. And that is definitely a connection I can hear in the music: [Excerpt: Ravel, "Bolero"] Jefferson Airplane's version of "White Rabbit", like their version of "Somebody to Love", was far more professional, far -- and apologies for the pun -- slicker than The Great Society's version. It's also much shorter. The version by The Great Society has a four and a half minute instrumental intro before Slick's vocal enters. By contrast, the version on Surrealistic Pillow comes in at under two and a half minutes in total, and is a tight pop song: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] Jack Casady has more recently said that the group originally recorded the song more or less as a lark, because they assumed that all the drug references would mean that RCA would make them remove the song from the album -- after all, they'd cut a song from the earlier album because it had a reference to a trip, so how could they possibly allow a song like "White Rabbit" with its lyrics about pills and mushrooms? But it was left on the album, and ended up making the top ten on the pop charts, peaking at number eight: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] In an interview last year, Slick said she still largely lives off the royalties from writing that one song. It would be the last hit single Jefferson Airplane would ever have. Marty Balin later said "Fame changes your life. It's a bit like prison. It ruined the band. Everybody became rich and selfish and self-centred and couldn't care about the band. That was pretty much the end of it all. After that it was just working and living the high life and watching the band destroy itself, living on its laurels." They started work on their third album, After Bathing at Baxter's, in May 1967, while "Somebody to Love" was still climbing the charts. This time, the album was produced by Al Schmitt. Unlike the two previous producers, Schmitt was a fan of the band, and decided the best thing to do was to just let them do their own thing without interfering. The album took months to record, rather than the weeks that Surrealistic Pillow had taken, and cost almost ten times as much money to record. In part the time it took was because of the promotional work the band had to do. Bill Graham was sending them all over the country to perform, which they didn't appreciate. The group complained to Graham in business meetings, saying they wanted to only play in big cities where there were lots of hippies. Graham pointed out in turn that if they wanted to keep having any kind of success, they needed to play places other than San Francisco, LA, New York, and Chicago, because in fact most of the population of the US didn't live in those four cities. They grudgingly took his point. But there were other arguments all the time as well. They argued about whether Graham should be taking his cut from the net or the gross. They argued about Graham trying to push for the next single to be another Grace Slick lead vocal -- they felt like he was trying to make them into just Grace Slick's backing band, while he thought it made sense to follow up two big hits with more singles with the same vocalist. There was also a lawsuit from Balin's former partners in the Matrix, who remembered that bit in the contract about having a share in the group's income and sued for six hundred thousand dollars -- that was settled out of court three years later. And there were interpersonal squabbles too. Some of these were about the music -- Dryden didn't like the fact that Kaukonen's guitar solos were getting longer and longer, and Balin only contributed one song to the new album because all the other band members made fun of him for writing short, poppy, love songs rather than extended psychedelic jams -- but also the group had become basically two rival factions. On one side were Kaukonen and Casady, the old friends and virtuoso instrumentalists, who wanted to extend the instrumental sections of the songs more to show off their playing. On the other side were Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden, the two oldest members of the group by age, but the most recent people to join. They were also unusual in the San Francisco scene for having alcohol as their drug of choice -- drinking was thought of by most of the hippies as being a bit classless, but they were both alcoholics. They were also sleeping together, and generally on the side of shorter, less exploratory, songs. Kantner, who was attracted to Slick, usually ended up siding with her and Dryden, and this left Balin the odd man out in the middle. He later said "I got disgusted with all the ego trips, and the band was so stoned that I couldn't even talk to them. Everybody was in their little shell". While they were still working on the album, they released the first single from it, Kantner's "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil". The "Pooneil" in the song was a figure that combined two of Kantner's influences: the Greenwich Village singer-songwriter Fred Neil, the writer of "Everybody's Talkin'" and "Dolphins"; and Winnie the Pooh. The song contained several lines taken from A.A. Milne's children's stories: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"] That only made number forty-two on the charts. It was the last Jefferson Airplane single to make the top fifty. At a gig in Bakersfield they got arrested for inciting a riot, because they encouraged the crowd to dance, even though local by-laws said that nobody under sixteen was allowed to dance, and then they nearly got arrested again after Kantner's behaviour on the private plane they'd chartered to get them back to San Francisco that night. Kantner had been chain-smoking, and this annoyed the pilot, who asked Kantner to put his cigarette out, so Kantner opened the door of the plane mid-flight and threw the lit cigarette out. They'd chartered that plane because they wanted to make sure they got to see a new group, Cream, who were playing the Fillmore: [Excerpt: Cream, "Strange Brew"] After seeing that, the divisions in the band were even wider -- Kaukonen and Casady now *knew* that what the band needed was to do long, extended, instrumental jams. Cream were the future, two-minute pop songs were the past. Though they weren't completely averse to two-minute pop songs. The group were recording at RCA studios at the same time as the Monkees, and members of the two groups would often jam together. The idea of selling out might have been anathema to their *audience*, but the band members themselves didn't care about things like that. Indeed, at one point the group returned from a gig to the mansion they were renting and found squatters had moved in and were using their private pool -- so they shot at the water. The squatters quickly moved on. As Dryden put it "We all -- Paul, Jorma, Grace, and myself -- had guns. We weren't hippies. Hippies were the people that lived on the streets down in Haight-Ashbury. We were basically musicians and art school kids. We were into guns and machinery" After Bathing at Baxter's only went to number seventeen on the charts, not a bad position but a flop compared to their previous album, and Bill Graham in particular took this as more proof that he had been right when for the last few months he'd been attacking the group as self-indulgent. Eventually, Slick and Dryden decided that either Bill Graham was going as their manager, or they were going. Slick even went so far as to try to negotiate a solo deal with Elektra Records -- as the voice on the hits, everyone was telling her she was the only one who mattered anyway. David Anderle, who was working for the label, agreed a deal with her, but Jac Holzman refused to authorise the deal, saying "Judy Collins doesn't get that much money, why should Grace Slick?" The group did fire Graham, and went one further and tried to become his competitors. They teamed up with the Grateful Dead to open a new venue, the Carousel Ballroom, to compete with the Fillmore, but after a few months they realised they were no good at running a venue and sold it to Graham. Graham, who was apparently unhappy with the fact that the people living around the Fillmore were largely Black given that the bands he booked appealed to mostly white audiences, closed the original Fillmore, renamed the Carousel the Fillmore West, and opened up a second venue in New York, the Fillmore East. The divisions in the band were getting worse -- Kaukonen and Casady were taking more and more speed, which was making them play longer and faster instrumental solos whether or not the rest of the band wanted them to, and Dryden, whose hands often bled from trying to play along with them, definitely did not want them to. But the group soldiered on and recorded their fourth album, Crown of Creation. This album contained several songs that were influenced by science fiction novels. The most famous of these was inspired by the right-libertarian author Robert Heinlein, who was hugely influential on the counterculture. Jefferson Airplane's friends the Monkees had already recorded a song based on Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, an unintentionally disturbing novel about a thirty-year-old man who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, and who uses a combination of time travel and cryogenic freezing to make their ages closer together so he can marry her: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Door Into Summer"] Now Jefferson Airplane were recording a song based on Heinlein's most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Stranger in a Strange Land has dated badly, thanks to its casual homophobia and rape-apologia, but at the time it was hugely popular in hippie circles for its advocacy of free love and group marriages -- so popular that a religion, the Church of All Worlds, based itself on the book. David Crosby had taken inspiration from it and written "Triad", a song asking two women if they'll enter into a polygamous relationship with him, and recorded it with the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Triad"] But the other members of the Byrds disliked the song, and it was left unreleased for decades. As Crosby was friendly with Jefferson Airplane, and as members of the band were themselves advocates of open relationships, they recorded their own version with Slick singing lead: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Triad"] The other song on the album influenced by science fiction was the title track, Paul Kantner's "Crown of Creation". This song was inspired by The Chrysalids, a novel by the British writer John Wyndham. The Chrysalids is one of Wyndham's most influential novels, a post-apocalyptic story about young children who are born with mutant superpowers and have to hide them from their parents as they will be killed if they're discovered. The novel is often thought to have inspired Marvel Comics' X-Men, and while there's an unpleasant eugenic taste to its ending, with the idea that two species can't survive in the same ecological niche and the younger, "superior", species must outcompete the old, that idea also had a lot of influence in the counterculture, as well as being a popular one in science fiction. Kantner's song took whole lines from The Chrysalids, much as he had earlier done with A.A. Milne: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Crown of Creation"] The Crown of Creation album was in some ways a return to the more focused songwriting of Surrealistic Pillow, although the sessions weren't without their experiments. Slick and Dryden collaborated with Frank Zappa and members of the Mothers of Invention on an avant-garde track called "Would You Like a Snack?" (not the same song as the later Zappa song of the same name) which was intended for the album, though went unreleased until a CD box set decades later: [Excerpt: Grace Slick and Frank Zappa, "Would You Like a Snack?"] But the finished album was generally considered less self-indulgent than After Bathing at Baxter's, and did better on the charts as a result. It reached number six, becoming their second and last top ten album, helped by the group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1968, a month after it came out. That appearance was actually organised by Colonel Tom Parker, who suggested them to Sullivan as a favour to RCA Records. But another TV appearance at the time was less successful. They appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, one of the most popular TV shows among the young, hip, audience that the group needed to appeal to, but Slick appeared in blackface. She's later said that there was no political intent behind this, and that she was just trying the different makeup she found in the dressing room as a purely aesthetic thing, but that doesn't really explain the Black power salute she gives at one point. Slick was increasingly obnoxious on stage, as her drinking was getting worse and her relationship with Dryden was starting to break down. Just before the Smothers Brothers appearance she was accused at a benefit for the Whitney Museum of having called the audience "filthy Jews", though she has always said that what she actually said was "filthy jewels", and she was talking about the ostentatious jewellery some of the audience were wearing. The group struggled through a performance at Altamont -- an event we will talk about in a future episode, so I won't go into it here, except to say that it was a horrifying experience for everyone involved -- and performed at Woodstock, before releasing their fifth studio album, Volunteers, in 1969: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Volunteers"] That album made the top twenty, but was the last album by the classic lineup of the band. By this point Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick had broken up, with Slick starting to date Kantner, and Dryden was also disappointed at the group's musical direction, and left. Balin also left, feeling sidelined in the group. They released several more albums with varying lineups, including at various points their old friend David Frieberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service, the violinist Papa John Creach, and the former drummer of the Turtles, Johnny Barbata. But as of 1970 the group's members had already started working on two side projects -- an acoustic band called Hot Tuna, led by Kaukonen and Casady, which sometimes also featured Balin, and a project called Paul Kantner's Jefferson Starship, which also featured Slick and had recorded an album, Blows Against the Empire, the second side of which was based on the Robert Heinlein novel Back to Methuselah, and which became one of the first albums ever nominated for science fiction's Hugo Awards: [Excerpt: Jefferson Starship, "Have You Seen The Stars Tonite"] That album featured contributions from David Crosby and members of the Grateful Dead, as well as Casady on two tracks, but  in 1974 when Kaukonen and Casady quit Jefferson Airplane to make Hot Tuna their full-time band, Kantner, Slick, and Frieberg turned Jefferson Starship into a full band. Over the next decade, Jefferson Starship had a lot of moderate-sized hits, with a varying lineup that at one time or another saw several members, including Slick, go and return, and saw Marty Balin back with them for a while. In 1984, Kantner left the group, and sued them to stop them using the Jefferson Starship name. A settlement was reached in which none of Kantner, Slick, Kaukonen, or Casady could use the words "Jefferson" or "Airplane" in their band-names without the permission of all the others, and the remaining members of Jefferson Starship renamed their band just Starship -- and had three number one singles in the late eighties with Slick on lead, becoming far more commercially successful than their precursor bands had ever been: [Excerpt: Starship, "We Built This City on Rock & Roll"] Slick left Starship in 1989, and there was a brief Jefferson Airplane reunion tour, with all the classic members but Dryden, but then Slick decided that she was getting too old to perform rock and roll music, and decided to retire from music and become a painter, something she's stuck to for more than thirty years. Kantner and Balin formed a new Jefferson Starship, called Jefferson Starship: The Next Generation, but Kantner died in January 2016, coincidentally on the same day as Signe Anderson, who had occasionally guested with her old bandmates in the new version of the band. Balin, who had quit the reunited Jefferson Starship due to health reasons, died two years later. Dryden had died in 2005. Currently, there are three bands touring that descend directly from Jefferson Airplane. Hot Tuna still continue to perform, there's a version of Starship that tours featuring one original member, Mickey Thomas, and the reunited Jefferson Starship still tour, led by David Frieberg. Grace Slick has given the latter group her blessing, and even co-wrote one song on their most recent album, released in 2020, though she still doesn't perform any more. Jefferson Airplane's period in the commercial spotlight was brief -- they had charting singles for only a matter of months, and while they had top twenty albums for a few years after their peak, they really only mattered to the wider world during that brief period of the Summer of Love. But precisely because their period of success was so short, their music is indelibly associated with that time. To this day there's nothing as evocative of summer 1967 as "White Rabbit", even for those of us who weren't born then. And while Grace Slick had her problems, as I've made very clear in this episode, she inspired a whole generation of women who went on to be singers themselves, as one of the first prominent women to sing lead with an electric rock band. And when she got tired of doing that, she stopped, and got on with her other artistic pursuits, without feeling the need to go back and revisit the past for ever diminishing returns. One might only wish that some of her male peers had followed her example.

Emma hosts Alex Sammon, staff writer at the American Prospect, to discuss his recent article "The RNC's Ground Game of Inches." Then, Emma is joined by Joe Eskenazi, editor and columnist at Mission Local, to discuss San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin's recall last night. First, Emma covers the continued kabuki theater around gun control as Schumer now shifts to a smaller deal, Matthew McConaughey speaking on the Uvalde tragedy before staging a photo op with Henry Cuellar, and touch on the recall of Chesa Boudin. Then, she's joined by Alex Sammon as they dive into his coverage of the RNC's mass investment in community centers as they begin to gun for very specific impoverished communities, first discussing the complete runaround that Sammon saw as organizers and facilitators refused to return calls or discuss the centers, forcing him to attend in person. This gave him an intimate view of these centers, which have been cropping up across the US since the GOP's realization that they actually are not THAT far behind in polling with communities of color, and that just bringing around certain communities in certain states can have massive dividends, as they shift to a grassroots movement that is reminiscent of left-wing organizing that focuses on meeting community needs. Sammon then dives specifically into his experiences at the community center in Robeson, North Carolina, a historically blue district in a supposedly blue state, and how the GOP took advantage of growing racial tensions between Native and Black populations alongside an economic collapse in the wake of the NAFTA replacement, as he explores the complete swap between organizing tactics of the GOP and Democrats, as the former shifts to a ground game, with these community centers offering daily programming with a clear association to the right, whereas democrats have chosen to go after airplay in districts where myriad people have no internet access. They wrap up their discussion by touching on what this says about the complete failures of Democratic messaging under Biden. Next, Emma is joined by Joe Eskenazi in reaction to the successful recall of Chesa Boudin, San Francisco's reform-focused DA, and the complete lack of surprise around the result. Next, he looks to flesh out the dynamics that were working behind the scenes, with the wealthier enclaves of the city, alongside real estate investment and a big SF PAC, and why, no matter how important it is, following the money is not a tangible electoral tactic, just as confronting emotions with statistics (e.g. no, SF does NOT have a crime wave) is unsuccessful when the wealthy constituency believes to the heart in the antisocial behavior of the poorer communities. They wrap up the interview by diving deeper into Boudin's relationship (or lack thereof) with the SFPD, walking through the obvious refusal to work (whether a work stoppage, underperformance, or both) for his office, why this is so common in relationships between Police forces and their governing officials,  how Mayor London Breed took advantage of this and used Boudin as her scapegoat, and what the conversation around San Franciscan politics should look like moving forwards. And in the Fun Half: Emma takes a very quick call with Justin from Ohio on why in the world Democrats try to appeal to the need for strong opponents, the absurdity (and obvious homophobia) of going from “parents' rights” to making it illegal for a parent to bring a child to a drag show, and Steve Scalise discusses the total lack of regulation around planes (must've never flown in one). Chris Coons comes to Joe Biden's defense for bolstering his allyship with MBS, Charlie from NJ discusses the “what if it was YOUR [daughter, child, wife, sister, Black friend]” talking point making its way into the gun control debate, and Tulsi Gabbard takes on the most pressing issues in American politics: Hunter Biden's sex scandals and her social media following. 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