FEB 26, 2026

    
For almost five years, I have been commuting through the 16th Street BART station. I exit at the northeast corner and cut down Capp to 17th towards the KQED building. About a month ago, they put up some scaffolding around the building where I exit. It was, primarily, an annoyance.

About a week ago, I got off the train and did my normal thing and walked across the Mission, hosted the show, had some meetings, and started the walk back. When I hit Capp, I felt something was off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. About halfway down the block, it hit me: the building was gone! Demolitions are so fast, and in the time between arriving in San Francisco and that afternoon, they’d taken the old place down.

Suddenly, I couldn’t really remember what the building looked like. I remembered the little Chinese restaurant (Mission Hunan) and the grocery. But had the building had a second story? I guess it had.

So much more sky was available. Maybe it was just the shock of it, but the whole area was transformed. It was as if my brain switched off autopilot and actually began to take in new information.

But I had to get home, and I padded down the stairs and promptly forgot about it.

A few days later, I was back on my commute, zipping up from the train and through the station. I hit the stairwell and began to walk up. Again, I had that strange uncanny sense. This time, I recognized it faster. The view, which I’d encountered hundreds of times coming up to the surface level, was totally different. Where there had been building, there was now light.

Because I am multiple types of nerd, it made me think about the Russian literary theory term, “defamiliarization,” as proposed by Victor Shklovsky in the early 20th century. For Shklovsky, the purpose of poetry was to “impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” In our daily lives, the world becomes rote. We’re subject to, in his terminology, “over-automatization.” And what better example than the commute? I’m always reading something, listening to something, thinking about something. It’s possible to move through the city by the prescriptions of habit alone.

I don’t think it’s just poetry that can lead to this new state of openness (though poetry also!). This demoIition acted as a chisel on my routine. And now, I’m looking up and around again, remembering to really perceive, not to simply know.

As for what happens next, in today’s Bay Area, I know that I’m supposed to feel bad about this building. Most urban change has a negative valence for people. This very corner had been subject to land-use battles for more than a decade. But sometime soon, it will be 136 units of permanent supportive housing. It’ll be called La Maravilla.

• Poetics and Plant Medicine? SAY NO MORE.

• These non-binary runners are gonna run from Los Angeles to … Las Vegas!

• Go see the new play at the Berkeley Rep, All My Sons.

• I’m really enjoying the new Michael Pollan book, A World Appears, but y’all know I’m a sucker for consciousness.

• Or go see some blues at Eli’s Mile High Club on Mondays.

• A perfect song: “Hey Lover,” by The Daughters of Eve, recorded by a bunch of teenagers 60 years ago.

FEB 19, 2025

Today, just a simple ode to my favorite bulb, the grape hyacinth.

Though I am not the kind of gardener who gets worked up about these differences, they are not a true hyacinth, but belong in the asparagus family. In my yard, they are some of the first flowers up in the spring. In the winter months, they look like thick clumps of grass, and then out of nowhere, their little inflorescences emerge.

What we call their flower is many flowers clustered together. Each tiny flower in the pyramid hangs down, its mouth ringed in white. Some of mine, after the rain last night, are filled with tiny droplets of water. All their flower parts are tucked inside. There’s not much for a human to see. They are not showy. They are not like the hellebores, which their wild anthers. Or like the roses with their big petals and extroverted scents.

There are some plants I think of as happy plants. I have no evidence or reason behind this statement. I can only say: they look happy, so they make me happy. And grape hyacinths are foremost among these. (Also in this category: pink-and-white crabapples, daffodils, carrot tops.) Maybe it’s because they come up so early. Maybe it is the tight little shape, or the way that they grow in what feel like miniature communities, like some mushrooms. Here is a collection of organisms, I think, not simply one plant trying to survive all on its own.

I got my grape hyacinths from my friend Sama. One day, she called me up out of the blue and was like: I have these grape hyacinths, want me to come over and plant them with you? So, we went out and dropped them in around some metal edging I have, nestling them into little crevices. We talked about Sama’s future and what it might look like, the perfect conversation to have over bulbs, which keep time.

When the flowers emerge each spring, I think of Sama, who now runs Reyhan Herb Farm and the Nowruz Market, which is coming up on March 7. (It celebrates Persian New Year.)

During the dry months, the grape hyacinths die back and I forget that they are there. When they do occur to me, I worry that they have disappeared altogether. But then, like clockwork, they start to grow in the fall, and by this past week or two, mine are fully out. My memory is refreshed and I know it is spring again here in my yard and in the northern hemisphere.

In any case, plant bulbs with your friends. Let time pass.

• Saw the Charli XCX movie, The Moment. And I liked it.

• Curious about how to build a public bank? These people are working on it.

• Go see All My Sons at the Berkeley Rep. We’re having Jimmy Smits on next week.

• Gonna try to up my Afro-Cuban jazz piano game with this Omar Sosa show.

FEB 12, 2025

I have never thought of myself as a jazzhead. My first love was West Coast hip hop, and I grew up around the grunge and indie rock of the Pacific Northwest, too. My parents had a decent record collection and so I’d pull a few things from there, namely Roberta Flack’s album, First Take, and Gato Barbieri’s incredible saxophone sessions. Later, I became obsessed with the deep southern soul of O.V. Wright and the countless other artists put out by the Numero Group from cities across the country.

But jazz? Especially *serious* jazz? Not really my thing.

Recently, though, I’ve found myself drifting towards the genre. Some of my favorite pieces of instrumental music are, specifically, jazz piano song by Thelonius Monk.

This past week, an old friend, Brock Winstead, posted about a jazz album on Bluesky: “Turns out Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert, which changed my life when I was 17, still packs a hell of a punch.” I had a dim recollection this record was in my dad’s collection, and who doesn’t want their life changed? I put on the album.

Wow. I don’t have the musicology chops to describe everything happening with the music. But what it *feels* like to me is that Jarrett builds a whole world. From the very first notes, through these hypnotic loops, we hear his hands finding all these little patterns and moments. If I just let myself listen, I can almost build scenes of raw emotion. He slides from classical bits into blues phrasings, and maybe I hear a little gospel in there, too. Gorgeous ornaments descend into dissonance and return more beautiful.

Something is happening on this record, something strange and sublime.

I found myself desperate to learn more about this concert. And well, the first thing you learn is that it is probably the best selling jazz piano album of all time. 4 million copies! The second thing you learn was that everything before the performance went wrong. The promoter was literally 18 years old; the piano sucked; Jarrett was tired from a drive and had an upset stomach; it was late when they got going.

Then Jarrett sat down to play and something spectacular came out. One human, one piano.

In my quest to understand the music better, I found a pianist, Henrik Kilhamn, who broke down the performance for his podcast, Sonata Secrets. I love the way he describes what’s happening inside the music. He details Jarrett’s movements through different chords, the little flips of energy that he injects into the left hand or right. To Kilhamn, this improvisation is a record of a musical mind seeking and usually finding new terrain. I couldn’t recommend the podcast episode more highly.

But, you know, my favorite moments fall outside the score. We’ll hear Jarrett as a human with a body. He moans and groans. He stomps his feet, playing a kind of drums on the floor just for a few bars at a time. I keep listening back to those moments and asking myself: why is he doing that at that exact moment? What is it about the musical space his hands were dancing through that led him to this particular reaction?

I don’t really need the answers to these questions. I like wondering about this one human in this one room on this one night in 1974.

Right now, our culture is being extruded through large language models, and they can output text in ways that are uncanny. Other models make music or images or videos. These productions require all of the data on the internet to work. Then, some prompt precipitates out a dollop of information stored in the weights of that model.

Human creativity is not about feeding all of the internet in and outputting quantity X of content. Jarrett cut a specific arc through all of human life on Earth, and somehow, it led him to Cologne, with an upset stomach, sitting at a crappy piano. All of him up to that point sat there at the keys in the moments before he began playing. And then for an hour, he gave of himself, pulling from everything he’d experienced and learned and practiced.

What he made is a landmark, and it is also so specifically Keith Jarrett.

Praise be to the human.

• I’m a sucker for a good event title: “Does Wine Have a Gender?”

• Keep an eye on the newly renovated Castro Theatre. Many things are coming up.

• Go see Sudan Archives next week. You won’t regret it!

FEB 5, 2025

I am, no surprise to any of you, a lover of books. I wouldn’t say that I’m a *collector* of books, but everyone else in my family would. And to be fair, there are piles of them all over the house (and in my car and in my closet). I love the smell of paper. I love the different bindings. I love the sense, on opening to a first page, that my very self could be different by the end of a paragraph or a chapter or a complete work.

In the book world, there are all these different levels. I won’t endeavor to explain the vagaries of New York publishing or what a regional book publisher is or how self-publishing is different. Because, really, I don’t care about those things. My favorite books can come from anywhere. Some are published by FSG and others are published by some weird person out of their garage.

I came to appreciate this deeply at the gatherings known as “art book fairs,” like San Francisco’s own, which occurs every summer. The first time I attended some years ago, I was stunned by the raw creativity on display. Some people printed gorgeous matte things. Others were cranking on risographs or whatever else they could find to reproduce their words and images.

I am a particular connoisseur of tiny books, texts that both have a small trim size and a smaller scope; I left the fair with a dozen. I bought Alex Arzt’s incredible tiny book about feral cabbages of the California coast. I bought a zine called My Favorite Microbes and Cortney Cassidy’s kind of haunting work Do Plants Feel? Few places have ever made me want to be a part of the world of letters more than the SF Art Book Fair.

(I also discovered the coolest design/art studio in the world, Mexico City’s Can Can Press, which is responsible for roughly one-quarter of my wardrobe now.)

Of course, there are many book fairs and each event has its own flavor. CODEX Book Art Fair, which opens this week in Oakland, focuses more on the “rich traditions and contemporary practices surrounding artists’ books and fine press publications.” It’s more the people who like to hand bind books or the absolute perfectionists at Arion Press in Fort Mason.

What all these events do, though, is show you the relentless promiscuity of books as a format. Books can paired with any interest, any topic, any format. They can be big or small, fancy or cheap, printed by the dozen or hundred thousand. Put two covers around some interior papers and you… have made a book. The contemporary publishing industry might be formulaic, but there are all these people pouring some sliver of consciousness into the space between two covers and sticking it on a table for you to see.

In a world where the most important media skill is staring into a camera and talking for one to three minutes about whatever algorithmically hot topic exists, these bookmakers are like a cryptic refugia for creativity, a wonderland of strange and wonderful creatures preserving a different, idiosyncratic culture that our world needs.

So: if you have a chance to get to CODEX this weekend, lemme know what you find. Really.

• Important! Community convening for San Francisco artists on Feb 13 at SOMArts.

• If you wanna cram Puerto Rican history through the music of Bad Bunny before the Super Bowl show, allow me to suggest the new book, P FKN R.

• The legendary Friends and Family Bar is open for a limited time (and hours). Get in there!

• My best friend and I went to Tucson last week. Big recommendation! Check out the spectacular Sabino Canyon. (Oh, and eat at Anello.)

• There’s a new La Doña song out: “La Mentira y La Verdad.”

JAN 29, 2025

The Transamerica Pyramid has become, rightly, an icon of San Francisco. Built in the early 1970s, it was initially controversial, but over time, the aesthetes prevailed. Looking down Columbus towards downtown, the elegant building opens up the city plan at the street level, too. It’s special.

Recently, my friend Robin Sloan and I wandered over there from a Ferry Building lunch (Lunette, of course) to grab a coffee and talk about a forthcoming project. We sat at the base of the tower and wandered around the redwood grove and peeked in on a new flowering art installation (Earthseed Dome) that is currently being 3D-printed (??) in one of the vacant retail spots on the plaza. So fun.

But what I really want to tell you about is the time capsule.

Yes, there was a time capsule buried 6 feet underground in 1974. During the recent renovation, it was exhumed and the artifacts are now on display in a small gallery on the north side of pyramid.

While there are many things to see, the highlight is the propaganda film that was made about the building.

First of all, it has the funkiest soundtrack you’ve ever heard in your life. Bongos, so many bongos, and a rhythm section that must have also done the soundtrack for Shaft.

Second, San Francisco had some filmmakers back then and they did the thing with this work. Big wide shots, cool tracking shots, time-lapses, zoom-ins. Every 70s cinematographer trick is pressed into service here.

Third, the shots of 1970s San Francisco people living their brown-suited, flared-panted, mustachioed lives are jaw dropping. We are a beautiful and silly people.

Fourth, the first words of this film declare a lasting truth. “If you want to see the shape of things to come,” the narrator says, probably between sips of cognac, “go to San Francisco.”

This is our enduring identity, somehow, through all the change. We’re a place that embodies the future, both socially and technologically. I don’t know where that sensibility inheres. There is no actual DNA of a city. So, how does this futurity keep reproducing through the decades?

And yet it does. And it is an important fact about this place.

I think the original Transamerica Pyramid logo might be the real logo of our city: Six simple lines that generate movement in time and space. What a gorgeously simple rendering of the ethos: we are here and we are trying to get somewhere better.

• I’ll be reading the new George Saunders novel, Vigil, over the weekend.

• Queer Run Club event on Saturday.

• Symbiosis and Cocktails! A lichen event for Valentine’s. (Not sure I get it, but I love it.)

• Remember that Zyzzyva literary party I wrote about? There’s another one.

JAN 22, 2025

There are some Bay Area figures who just seem to distill an essence of this place. Some are writers, a Maxine Hong Kingston, a Dave Eggers, an Ada Limon, a Tommy Orange. Some are politicians, Barbara Lee, say. Others are famous for a variety of reasons—Stewart Brand, Amy Tan, Marshawn Lynch, Samin Nosrat, Steve Jobs, Judith Butler. Just hella Bay Area people, you might say.

You don’t have to even like these folks to appreciate that they embody some dimension of the Bay Area. These are our people.

And I have personally added a new icon to this charm bracelet of place: Meklit Hadero.

I had heard tell of Meklit and ran into her at an afterparty a while back. I knew she was a powerful musician and a scene builder. For a Forum live music show tomorrow, I’ve been listening to a lot of her music, which is rooted in heritage and also constantly reaching for new musical territory. But her podcast, Movement with Merlot Hadero, is a real revelation.

In its third season, Meklit interviews artists about their experiences with music and migration, weaving together the personal and creative with an intense, gentle intelligence.

She’s interviewed some of my favorite artists from across the world: the Chilean-French rapper Ana Tijoux, Cuban musician Climafunk, Chhom Nimol of Dengue Fever, Adi Oasis, and Forum fave Sid Sriram.

It’s just an incredible roster of global music, framed around the way that the global movement of peoples has transformed music. Migration has created unprecedented configurations of people, and at those interfaces between cultures and traditions, people make the new.

Meklit, herself, is a brilliant example of how this works. Constantly on the move as a kid in a refugee family, she found her way to Yale for college. Alongside making music, she has been a National Geographic Explorer and a TED Senior Fellow, while splitting time between the Bay and Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

Her latest project is Movement, of which the podcast is a part. Movement also is the home for the Movement Immigrant Orchestra, which brings together 11 musicians from 10 countries “to share their cultural power and resilience with each other and the broader Bay Area community.”

What I’m trying to say is: Meklit is one of those people who is fusing together a new tradition out of the experiences that so many immigrants share as they come to know the United States. This orchestra does not exist outside this specific time and confluence of diasporas. Another way to put it: this thing she’s creating is so Bay Area that it almost hurts.

Some people may want the United States to go back to an imagined (white) past, but what a greater feat of imagination it is to remix the legacies of our world into a real future of mutuality and cooperation. And in that timeline, I will be bumping Meklit, I promise you that.

Oh, and if you want to hear Meklit’s music, listen to Forum tomorrow at 9am. We’ve got her live and it’s gonna be lit.

• Meklit and Forum fave August Lee Stevens live at the Freight!

• The Oakland library is celebrating its 75th anniversary. Go!

• You know I love my waterfront artists and writers. Tamarack is hosting a super cool event with them.

• Golden Sardine, the best bar in San Francisco, hosts its 2nd anniversary party on Sunday.

• Great looking event at Clio’s next week celebrating journalist Hillary Rosner’s book ROAM (w/friend of the pod Marissa Ortega-Welch).

JAN 15, 2025

It is one of my favorite moments in my garden: we’re greening into winter and the hellebore are blooming. These are the hardiest of plants. While many plants lie dormant, they are throwing off large, extravagant flowers over the top of thick, leathery leaves.

These are tough flowers, impervious to pests and the elements. They are a reminder of warmer, flowerier months to come. Next to my ferns, which are throwing off gargantuan, unfurling fronds, they give me a reason to go out and really look at the world.

I have three varietals in my backyard. Do I remember what they are called? Absolutely not. But let’s peer at them.

The first has five simple what appear to be petals, but those are actually sepals, which are like a specialized leaf. The sepals are edged and decorated with a soft pink. In the center, they sport five bright pink styles, surrounded by a tight arrangement of lime-green anthers. The real petals, in this flower, are small and folded, surrounding the anther cone.

The second varietal is white and ethereal. It is a “double” meaning that it has showy petals in addition to sepals, which give it a petticoated, almost Victorian air.

And the third is like a slapstick little sibling. These flowers are all green. Their reproductive parts sprout from the center like a sea creature or a verdant insect.

Beyond their beauty, I have an attachment to hellebore for a specific, mysterious reason. In my life, I have forgotten two words not just for a minute, but for a period of weeks. I have no idea why this happened or why these twords

The first word is a little silly, in that it is too on the nose. The word was what scientists use to describe the hypothesized physical trace of a memory, the stuff of a memory. Neuroscientists have made a lot of progress, and these traces must exist, but the specifics remain quite fuzzy for this fundamental brain process. I think about this a lot, more than I should.

In any case, after weeks, I gave in and googled: the word I was searching for was engram. For some reason, all I had been able to think of was the word memristor, which I read in an Hewlett Packard press release in 2009.

The other word that I, for some strange reason, could not recall for weeks was (you guessed it) hellebore.

This was a few years ago, and I struggled with it for weeks on end. All through their flowering season, the dark months, I’d get near the right neighborhood of my plant knowledge or the right letters of the alphabet and whatever wisp of memory I needed would disappear. All I had was the flowers themselves, these flowers made of tougher stuff than other flowers.

Finally, one day, in the garden, the word arrived: hellebore, and it’s stuck around since.

But it made me think: Why were my memories not made of hellebore, tough stuff? Why did evolution build memories like clouds rather than mountains?

My conclusion: We are made to change. We are not meant to be carved in stone, but to keep being new. As the novelist Octavia Butler put it in her fictional religion, Earthseed, “All that you touch / You Change. / All that you Change / Changes you. / The only lasting truth / Is Change.”

Every year, hellebore flower through winter and then those stalks disappear. And in fact, you can chop off the remaining leaves, too, in the fall, and they’ll come back the next year just the same. The only lasting truth is change.

• You can catch me reading poetry (alongside real poets!) next Friday at 5:30 at Golden Sardine, my favorite bar in the city.

• I’m loving this strange album from Dagmar Zuniga. Cassette-y!

• Have you heard a writer co-op bought Gourmet magazine after Condé Nast let the trademark lapse? Chef’s kiss.

• Attend the 2026 Public Domain Film Remix Contest Screening & Party at the Internet Archive on Jan 21!

• Go see the La Peña Community Chorus at Mission High this weekend.

• Finally, a paper for your pleasure… “That They May Vomit Out Their Folly”: The Gut-Mind Axis and Hellebore in Early Modern England.

JAN 8, 2025

What do you do over the holidays? Our family got into Ursula K. LeGuin. (Better late than never!) It started off with a wonderful compilation called A Larger Reality, filled with writing by and about LeGuin. Then I went on to Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home. My wife is reading The Dispossessed for a book club she’s leading. And I can’t help but read LeGuin’s little talks to help make sense of her work.

If you don’t know her, LeGuin was a legendary science fiction writer (and poet!) who graduated from Berkeley High in 1947. Her father was the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, whose work with and around California’s indigenous tribes is hotly contested.

For this moment, though, right after those intense rains, when the reality of *our* winter is really settling in, I wanted to send you all a gorgeous passage from Always Coming Home. The book takes the form of an anthropological treatise about a post-apocalyptic people called the Kesh, who live in the Napa Valley of the far future. LeGuin’s family had owned a farmstead in Napa while she was growing up. After years of failing to capture the significance of the place, this book was her northern California book. “I tried to write that hereness,” she said. “To use without exploiting; to move in the sacred land that is also the commonplace world; to dance the way they dance in the valley.”

OK, I have kept you waiting long enough. Here’s the passage from Always Coming Home:

"It was always an austere land, generous but not lush, not soft, not gentle. It always had two seasons: one wet, one dry. The rains and the heat can be fierce, frightening. Growing things go through their sweet slow steady order of flowering, ripening, resting as they do anywhere, but the turn from one season to the other is less transition than reversal. A few dark-grey, pouring days when the burnt and sodden brown hills brighten suddenly into the aching, piercing green of the new grass. . . . A few cloud-flurried, shining days when the orange poppies, the blue lupine, the vetch, clover, wild lilac, brodiaea, blue-eyed grass, daisies, lilies are all in bloom, whole hillsides white and purple and blue and gold, but at the same moment the grass is drying, turning pale, and the wild oats have already sown their seed. Those are the times of change: the greening into winter, the dying into summer."

That’s something to keep next to your heart over these coming months. Green into winter, die into summer. It’s our way.

I have to say that one way I am not a native Californian is that I do not sufficiently appreciate the rain. Raised in the wetness of the northwest, water has never felt like a gift, but a punishment. One day, I hope, I will say the incantation of our people and I will really mean it: "We really needed the rain."

I am making progress, though. I hope to make it out to Briones Regional Park during this drying-out week because I know that the hills there will be fluorescent. There’s a reason that philosophers use the perception of color as the defining experience of what it is like to be conscious (qualia!). So many ways to say green and none of them feel alive enough to capture the hillside glowing with photosynthesis.

• New poetry reading series in Oakland hosted by Ben Gucciardi: Sundial.

• BAMPFA is showing the films of Wong Kar Wai in January!

• Artist David Wilson has a gorgeous new show at Minnesota Street Project. Opening reception is Saturday.

• The 15th Annual Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits Powwow is coming up next month.

Dec 18, 2025

The Lawrence Hall of Science is an imposing building set in the Berkeley hills, right near the crest of the ridge. It was built in the mid-1960s and designed by the legendary Bay Area architecture firm Anshen and Allen. The Lawrence is known for its planetarium, and (speaking only for myself) it’s the kind of place I took my toddlers when I was exhausted and wanted to feel like I wasn’t just sticking them in front of a screen. It’s lively. The exhibits are fun. There is a perpetual din of kid stuff happening.

But, unlike the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, which has fantastic food, the Lawrence cafeteria was not a site of fine dining. It was more middle school than Michelin, you know? You really had to pack a lunch.

So, when I got an invite to a sneak preview of their new restaurant, I was intrigued. It’s called ‘ammatka, which means “the dining hall” in Chochenyo, the language that the Ohlone tribes around the East Bay spoke.

The cafe is a manifestation of the deepening relationship between indigenous restauranteurs Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino and UC Berkeley. They call this initiative ’ottoy, another Chochenyo word that describes “a philosophy and intention of repair and mending.”

This might not be surprising if you don’t know the history of University of California and the Muwkema Ohlone people, but it is dark. Albert Kroeber, a major Berkeley anthropologist, declared the Ohlone culturally “extinct,” which led to them being delisted from the Federal tribal register. (We did a whole show about this history.)

Long story short, repair is necessary, and this is one way that it is being brought into being.

Chochenyo signage is now going up at Lawrence Hall of Science and native gardens are being installed with the direction of Ohlone people. And it’s in this context that this new restaurant will open next month.

Now, about the food! It was delicious. In their previous restaurants, Medina and Trevino have played with more dogmatic constructions of Ohlone foods. They used only ingredients that could have been found before colonial contact, for example. Or they relied on recipes that might have been possible during the Mission-era of indigenous life in the East Bay.

For this cafe, which will be serving many kids and parents, they’ve become more playful with the use of native ingredients. So, yes, goose berries and native nuts and salads composed with local greens and herbs. But also tater tots, served alongside an aioli flavored with native herbs. And yes, smoked duck, but it will be served on regular bread and with Cowgirl Creamery cheese.

One standout from the preview meal (aside from the duck sandwich, which was a banger) was the chia pudding with rose jam. The floral notes of the rose added a sweet complexity to the simple chia pudding. I could eat that for breakfast every day.

People often wonder whether land acknowledgements and other symbolic recognitions of indigenous life and culture make a difference. I’m not sure, myself, but when I see indigenous perspectives integrated more deeply into organizations, I get excited. If all of us are ever going to naturalize to place here in the Bay Area, as many-generation residents of this place, we need and want those with the deepest roots involved in all of our core institutions, from the tater tots to very tops.

• Make a last minute plan for tonight!

  • Come to the Oakland Review of Books Holiday party at Local Economy.

  • Go see 4 Non Blondes, my first favorite band.

• Or get some last minute shopping in via Coyote Media’s Holiday Art Market map.
• Or plan ahead for this mushroom walk (!) at UC Berkeley Botanical Garden.

Dec 11, 2025

A city needs its magazines and little publishers. Their importance is not just what they publish, but the communities that show up for and around them.

Last Wednesday, I walked in from a frigid night into a small space in the Mission. The walls were steamed up. The crowd was loud. We all had to shout. It was a party for Zyzzyva, the long-time San Francisco literary magazine, which is now helmed by Oscar Villalon.

For many, the night had begun with a Zyzzyva Movie Night at the Roxie hosted by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and then progressed to the party, where there were pour-your-own cocktails, pizzas, and donuts. It was not fancy, but it was fun as hell and filled with interesting people talking about ideas and projects.

Our cities need organizations that create space for the culture. In the days of yore, this kind of infrastructure was assumed. Nowadays, the business of publishing anything has become terribly difficult, and the positive externalities that these little operations created have become noticeable in their absence.

So, it was with great pleasure that I took my trench coat off and plowed into the drift of bodies. I heard about movies and consciousness, about earrings, about the nature of journalism these days, about Marfa, about PhD programs, about how damn cold it is, about science funding, about the relative desirability of pizza, about muscles, about flying little planes, about herbaceousness. It was a swirl of people meeting to celebrate the work of making the culture at a time when our industry is, more or less, collapsing.

The magazine and its parties are now 40 years old. This particular one was a delightful reminder that there was a San Francisco before screens, and there will be a San Francisco that remains, even if it ends up wrapped under and around our new identity as an AI hub.

Meanwhile, there has been an explosion of new publications, each with its own spin on what words the Bay Area needs to read. Just to name a few: Coyote Media, the Oakland Review of Books, the Bay Area Current, Gazetteer SF. And they take their place alongside the more established entities like Zyzzyva, and our book publishers like Heyday, Transit Books, and City Lights.

The recently deceased founder of Heyday, Malcolm Margolin, said something I’ll never forget about his life and this area. “In New York… perhaps I might have been world famous… But I also thought about how shallow greatness is in New York — how it depends on reputation,” he said. “What this place, what Heyday has allowed me to do is to create a real community, to be really useful, to create a home for certain people and certain ideas.”

This place and what Heyday did being almost synonymous is not accidental. Neither is the idea of a “home” for ideas and people. These publishers can create a new kind of space, and then, if you’re lucky, you can walk into it with both your mind and on some Wednesday night, your body.

Want to go to a local literary(-ish) party, too? Here are three of them:

• Come to the Oakland Review of Books Holiday Party at Local Economy next Thursday.
• Or you can go to the Bathers Library Holiday Party that same night (why not do both?!).
• Or maybe go to the Bay Area Current Holiday Party on the 13th at Tamarack.

Dec 4, 2025

Over the Thanksgiving break, I saw an article about how recipe sites have been overrun by AI slop. Slop, the perfect term, is the description for the crap that generative systems can crank out. And as I was reading the article and the reactions to it, a new realization about the coming years crystallized for me.

It’s simple. The baseline reliability of things you see on a screen is going to decline over the coming years. The ability of anyone to detect whether an image, a video, or a conversation partner is actually real is declining, and will continue to. That’s not to say these AI creations will not be engaging or popular, but they are going to drive down trust in all online interactions, not just the ones involving AI slop.

Importantly, improving AI will actually make these trust dynamics worse, not better. So, I am almost sure that this will be our near-term future. While it’s scary to imagine, today’s good thing is the silver lining: the solidity of the real world.

While online life fractures under the pressures introduced by a flood of hyperrealistic AI creations, the real world will not change. All those weird dynamics go away the second you step outside. It will be as it has always been, the place we evolved to live in and love.

The real world is alive, the phone world is not. Other living beings have their own goals who you meet on terms you cannot entirely dictate. Bodies are real. Bodies are alive. Trees are real. Trees are alive. Mosquitoes are real. Mosquitoes are alive. Perhaps the right term is not IRL (“in real life”) but WRL (“with real life”).

Real life is built over time, place built over place. Place matters, and I would argue place matters because of the inescapable history of every spot on earth.

You cannot turn it off and turn it back on again. The apple rots, once a bite has been taken. Not everything has a just-so place on a rectangle of glass or in an economic system. In the real world, so much escapes our attempts at enclosure. So much diffuses into the place, whether we know it or not, and we breathe in these histories, for good or for ill.

Recently, there has been a bank of tule fog covering the Central Valley, and the result has been a misty, gauzy East Bay sky. The moon has been rising as the sun sets, so it has come in translucent in the pale pink sky. It’s been so gorgeous that you want to capture it with the device in your hand. But no matter how hard you fiddle with the settings, the scene cannot be slurped into your phone’s memory.

It is a sight for human eyes alone, human memories. If AI does destabilize social media and send more people offline in search of trusted reality, maybe more of us will look up together, not down alone.

• So many holiday markets! You can visit the Department of Invisible Labor at the Peralta Makers Market. And the Chez Panisse Holiday Market. And the Hella Positive one in West Oakland.
• Don’t forget East Bay Open Studios!
• You don’t have to shop, though. You can go to a Queer Surf SF party instead at El Rio.

Nov 20, 2025

Let me tell you about the Prelinger Library. To get there, you head down to the leather district in Soma in San Francisco, hit a buzzer on a nondescript building, and take the old freight elevator to the second floor. You walk down the hallway, shoes on hardwood, and then make a left through double doors.

Inside, you find magic. It’s a repository of rare books, ephemera collections, and two of the smartest observers of the Bay Area, Rick and Megan Prelinger. The library is a manifestation of their quirkiness and brilliance. There is nowhere like it. They know what the standard offerings on a topic are and they are committed to delivering surprise.

It’s the library as an art form itself. And I’m not the only one who loves the Prelinger Library. A TikToker’s visit to the library went viral over the summer, and the space now has a whole new generation of visitors.

There are different ways to do history. I am often looking for the texture of regular life. What would it have been to walk around San Francisco in 1938 or 1978? How did people talk? What did their shoes look like? How did they answer the telephone? What would they have watched on TV on a Thursday night?

Academic historians are often less interested in these kinds of details. But rogue archivists like Rick and Megan revel in such detailed knowledge of our city and our world. For example, they have a complete run of TV Guide, so if you really want to know what was on ABC on a particular day in 1984, there is a way for you to know.

I first visited the Prelinger Library 15 years ago, when I was working on a book about the history of renewable energy. They have wonderful collections on the past technological dreams of our society, in energy and beyond. Megan wrote a book using their collections called Another Science Fiction, which uses the advertisements in corporate trade journals to describe the dreams of mid-century space travel.

The Prelingers, of course, also have a massive archive of industrial films and home movies, which Rick produces into a massive performance he calls Lost Landscapes. Both shows of the latest edition are sold out, but you can see last year’s here.

My last visit to the Library was on Sunday with the St. Mary’s MFA program, courtesy of Ingrid Rojas Contreras, who is on the faculty there. We loosed the students upon the collections with the instruction to look for the unexpected. It is one of the joys of my life to bring people to the library and watch them find books and objects they never could have imagined.

As the first drafts of history are revised, more and more texture gets erased. Particular narratives come to dominate about what the past actually was like. And more than anything else, the Prelinger Library is a testament to the fullness of history, the realness of the humans who lived back then, and the possibilities that might just lurk in the less-traveled reaches of our cultural memory.

Go visit! Check the hours and head over on some Tuesday, Wednesday, or Sunday.

• I have a “lecture” this very evening at 5:30 at CCA. The public can come!
• Beautiful new show opening at Look West in San Rafael this weekend: “ALL THE THINGS I WAS THINKING WHILE I WATCHED THE LIGHT CHANGE ON MOUNT TAMALPAIS.” Inject it into my veins!
• Come hear Maggie Tokuda-Hall, president of Authors Against Book Bans, talk about the fight for reading freedom here in the Bay Area.
• Horsies and Ruby are throwing a natty wine party (!) celebrating the 55 bus line in San Francisco (!!) on December 7.

Nov 13, 2025

I’m teaching a writing class for the first time. Whew, it’s hard. Most of my own writing is intuitive. I just try to put the words in the right order. So, it’s excruciating (and fascinating) to back out the mechanisms undergirding it. This class asks the question: How can you write about a place in a way that gets at how it works not just how it looks?

So far, my favorite thing has been sitting down with writing that I love and figuring it out. Can I name the tactic?

So, I brought out Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones, a brilliant memoir about bodies, disability, lineage, and art. And I began leafing through it until I hit this little passage, just a connector paragraph that opens a chapter:

“Days pass, all the same. Trash in cans steam in August’s humid heat. Petals from rotting blossoms fall from branches and the wind sends them skittering like beetles across the avenues. September brings a sudden chill that strips the trees of their leaves. October’s easy skies turn orange with smoke from Canadian wildfires. The last of the leaves die, desiccate on the stem. New York City is loud, stays loud.”

Here is, essentially, a time-lapse. Hold the camera steady and watch what changes and what stays the same. This one is elegant and short, a month in a sentence. What a trick! Seasons may change, but New York stays loud. (True.) A city is, as a friend of mine would put it, a very long event.

If you want to—and no one has to!—you can try out writing a time-lapse passage, like we did in my class. Here’s how to do it: Pick a place on this earth, at any scale. Set a timer for 10 minutes. And then go: describe in some sentences a time-lapse of that spot from now until the new year.

You can send them to me here (just reply to the email), and maybe I’ll share some next week.

To get you started, here’s what I wrote in class. I chose my parents’ backyard in Washington State.

“The outdoor furniture has already been stored away. No more sitting under the umbrella and watching the big green wall of life shimmer in the wind. The grass stops growing, mower covered in a tarp. The leaves are almost gone already and the grass is revealed to be half something else: thick mats of moss emerge from between the blades in the unending wetness of week after week of rain. The creek, which had been a cute trickle, will turn into acres of marsh with a slightly deeper channel running towards the Lewis River. Soon, the only thing to do in the acres of trees behind my parents’ house will be to look through fat droplets hanging down from naked tree branches, and see the whole world turned upside down.”

Writing to know the places we live in and sometimes love, that’s your one good thing.

• Do you want to know more about a San Francisco sex cult from the investigative reporter (Ellen Huet) who wrote the book? Go to this event with friend of the letter, Tracy Clark Flory.
• Erin Rickenbaker of El Chato is teaching a sherry class on Saturday
• Check out the next edition of the Tritone poetry series at Tamarack in Oakland on Saturday night.
• Friend of the newsletter Liam O’Donoghue is DJing at the Eli’s Mile High Club on Saturday night.
• That new Rosalia album is shakes hand, shakes head, whistles a bit … Just go listen. With sherry.

Nov 6, 2025

On paper, I hate this time of the year.

I love long summer days. I love eating outside. I love running in warm sun. And right now, night is coming fast and hard. Soon, all dinners will be in the dark. My apple tree will finally lose its leaves, its bare branches the sign of winter at our house.

But this year, I have found myself marveling (even more than normal) at the slant of the light, the extension of shadows. We’ve had so many beautiful days completed by real sunsets.

What a wondrous thing to be reminded of sunlight, to not take it for granted overhead, but watch it have to work through trees. This light comes up behind us as we walk, lengthening us, or we face it, the orange-marker sun, as it lights up the windows in the hills.

Maybe I love this moment, balanced before winter. Maybe I love that coziness is coming, that the holidays will pounce and shake and then it will be a new year.

There is a row of elms near my house and they are turning colors, a single line of east coast autumn. There will be sprays of yellow and orange and red overhead and on the sidewalk and in the gutters. You’ll pick one leaf up and marvel anything could be so beautiful and then toss it back into the street because beauty is everywhere and there’s no need to be greedy.

What a time when you can just look around and every single thing is golden, or at least, golden-er. What a contrast with the broader political moment. What a contrast with the reality of suffering on this planet and in this life.

It must be something that the most beautiful light pours forth right before winter comes. A more daily promise than a rainbow. An invitation to keep living.

• The new Florence and the Machine album is out, and it is so dramatic and lovely.
• Behold the new anthology of Ursula K. LeGuin poems, stories, essays and talks: A Larger Reality.
• For my money, there is NO more Bay Area experience than going to a poetry reading at Golden Sardine in North Beach on a First Friday.

Oct 30, 2025

Lemme tell you a little story. We once got a jar of cayenne salt from the company Innajam. And it was my favorite salt that I’ve ever had. It was perfect, adding a bit of saltiness, a tiny bit of spice, and a bit of earthiness, too. We literally sprinkled it on everything for a whole year, probably.

But … Innajam did not always make cayenne salt, and we ran out and there was not a resupply to be had. I was sad and saltless.

Then, I ran into the founder of Innajam, Dafna, and her partner, Jesse. I told them how much my kids, in particular, loved their cayenne salt. And magically, to us, at least, jars of cayenne salt appeared on our porch some months later.

Little did I know that behind the scenes, they had gone to great lengths to make the salt, in part because processing huge amounts of cayenne aerosolizes the capsaicin in the chiles. I could not believe that they willingly endured that just to make some kids happy.

But that’s the kind of small business that Innajam has been. For 15 years, they’ve been making jams out of seasonal produce and you probably recognize the name from the specialty grocer near you. They’ve always charted their own path. My good friend Robin Sloan often reflected that a solid measure of local political measures might be the Innajam test: would a particular law aid this small business or would it make their life more difficult? Because Innajam employed people doing food manufacturing right in Emeryville. They supported local farms all around. And they sold in local markets, too.

Innajam is a kind of bellwether, that is to say, for a whole series of interwoven economic and cultural circuits.

So, it is with GREAT sadness that I report to you that Innajam is hanging up the jam pots. Dafna and Jesse decided to call it quits. They are selling the last last last of their supplies, and, from what I hear, they are gonna move somewhere warm and sunny and chill out for a while.

Get that jalapeño jam or the quince one or the black mission fig. Get the ginger shrub. Get a jar of the Bay Area: memories and botanicals both living in that fruit and the way Innajam made it taste.

The good news is that they were not forced out by collapsing finances. It is good that these jams and shrubs and salts have been a part of my life for 15 years. It is good that this little company existed. And it is good that these good people got to make the decision to do something new on their own terms.

Rather than being upset, I’ve decided that a good thing can also be a sad thing.

• Support this fantastic idea for an imprint from the feminist bookstore Womb House
• Remember Fig Leaf Gardens from a couple weeks ago? You can visit this weekend!
• This talk with poet Mai Der Vang and Tiffany Chung, hosted by Arion Press, looks great
• A list from Coyote Media of Bay Area restaurants offering food to SNAP recipients
• A playlist drawn from Nite Yun’s cookbook My Cambodia of total Khmer bangers

Oct 23, 2025

I sometimes joke that only two things unite the whole Bay: KQED and Steph Curry. At a time when of great polarization and strife, even here, the greatest player in Warriors history is one thing we can agree on.

And Steph did it again on Tuesday night in the Warriors home opener. After a pedestrian game by his standards, he hit an absurdly deep three-pointer that sealed a win over the Lakers.

It was the kind of shot that no one even attempted before the Steph era and that no one really makes except for Steph, even now. It was the kind of shot that makes Steph such a powerful force on the court that basketball pundits reference Steph’s superpower as “gravity” because he sucks the defense in his direction. Steph warps the geometry of the game, and maybe even reality itself.

I’ve watched Steph hit so many improbable, high-arcing, slow-motion, game-winning shots that I’m not sure he doesn’t access some slightly different dimension, playing the world at a different speed. The joy of a Warriors game this past decade has been to enter the arena a mere mortal, a puny human bound by the standard rules, and through some act of transmutation to access a realm where anything is possible. It is a collective delusion. A whole arena can hold its breath together, and then scream scream scream as the ball goes into the net because of course it does.

I have mostly lost my taste for sports, especially the pro sports that dominate the landscape. There’s something gross about our veneration of these particular billionaire-owned media companies. But even deep in my humbug bag, I cannot deny Steph Curry his greatness or my esteem for him.

Steph is like no other basketball player in the NBA. No one plays like him. No one has changed the game like him. And no superstar lives the grounded life that he does. In all my years running around and reporting on the Bay, I have never once heard a bad word about Steph. Not once! I’ve heard good things from the old GM of the Warriors Bob Myers, from beat reporters, and from a random guy who worked on a commercial that Steph was in. We’re so lucky to have this basketball player and person as the avatar of our place.

At a time when the world is souring on the tech world CEO, Steph Curry is more popular than ever. He is a different model of masculinity, one who has succeeded not through overpowering his opponents but through grace, skill, charm, and humility.

What a gift to us all that at a time when bullies present themselves as the apotheosis of masculinity, there is Steph, a living glorious rebuke.

Always, there is Steph, the one good thing we can all agree on.

• New rad looking book club launching at Gray Area: It’s called Cybersentics! “The outward perspective examines biofeedback, while the inward perspective focuses on cyborg art.”
• Check out Rosanna Xia’s film, Out of Plain Sight, about the secret dumping of toxic waste off the California coast at the Roxie, Nov 1
• Come see me chat with Carmen Maria Machado at City Arts and Lectures about the wild, rich, dark surprise bestseller from Transit Books, I Who Have Never Known Men
• Friend of the newsletter Thao Nguyen has new vinyl coming out from her collaboration with MacArthur-winner Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn

Oct 16, 2025

Let me tell you about Fig Leaf Gardens, the kind of perfectly rambling urban farm I’d forgotten could exist. And let me wrap it gently in a story about creative culinary collaboration.

Fig Leaf Gardens sits over on 39th in East Oakland. When my family arrived on Sunday, we were beat from a weekend of activities. We’d done a pop up with Good Luck Bakery, and their team, Blair Cardigan Smith and Kelci Moran, invited us out for a party.

We had no idea what we were walking into. A small sign pointed us past a little house into the back. As the hosts greeted us, we looked down an impossibly long lot filled with trees and flowers and plants. A slight haze of smoke from an outdoor pit lent the scene the gauziness of a dream. People lay about on blankets, tucked onto benches, and under a massive fig tree, chatting and eating. Face paint. An icy tub filled with bottles from local wineries Oest, Hammerling, and Broc. Cold brew and beautiful tea from Song Tea & Ceramics. Children holding chickens.

Utopia, basically.

The party celebrated the prototype-release of a new magazine edited by Corrina Hui, Cold Summers, which documents a year in the life of this crew of fascinating chefs doing pop-ups across the Bay Area. After a hard-charging first career trying to imagine a different educational system, Hui found herself catalyzing and weaving together this deepening collaboration of cooks.

We got to the food table. My god. Duck yakitori with fig. Beef shank with homemade tortillas. Salmon roasted in leaves. Tiny chimichurris stuffed with kimchi, corn, delicata, and lentils. By the time we left, I’m pretty sure my daughter had eaten five of the mini chimis, and that was the right choice. It was a sliding-scale, donation-based event, and we gave with joy (and to cover those mini chimis).

The concentration of culinary talent, incredibly good vibes, and generosity was overpowering. Chef Oscar Molinar had built the fire pit, which he was working with extra charisma in a cowboy hat and perfect white work shirt. Good Luck had made these passionfruit ice cream sandwiches that I will dream about for the rest of my life. My older kid loved the quince linzer cookies from Patty Lu of Year of the Snake. There was honeycomb! From the Fig Leaf Gardens hives!

And as we ate, we wandered the garden, which inspired key elements of the party menu. Beyond all the impressive vegetables, I was struck by these marigold-orange cosmos, which seemed to glow from within, and of course, the fig tree, which was just perfect for climbing kids.

Looking at the zine and the scene, Bay Area chefs have something figured out about how creative work should be. They work together. They support each other. I’m sure they have their conflicts, but they are building an incredible, resilient network in this economy, in these times. And with help from Corrina to organize and dream together, now there is this incredible document of film photographs and reflections by a slough of chefs and space-holders on building this ecosystem, partly hidden and wildly potent. These are their own words and thoughts on what they creating.

And what better place to celebrate such an effort than the unlikely, magical Fig Leaf Gardens, which is, itself, a collaboration between chef Britten, gardener/educator Manny, and designer Max. You can visit, too, I hear, when they do events and workshops.

We’re gonna get through all this by building beauty and deliciousness and friendships, appreciating the rhythms and bounty of the more-than-human world.

This party was many good things, and it was that one good thing.

Here’s a little cheat sheet of the chefs/pop-ups who you are going to want to follow immediately: The mini chimis were imagined by Michael de la Torre of Xulo. The duck yakitori was from Carlo Espinas of Linger Longer. So many others helped throw the party, too, or were featured in the magazine: the Good Luck Bakery folks, Patty from Year of the Snake, Song Tea and Ceramics, Claudia Bistrain and Nayelí Ramirez-Perez of Manitas, Okkon Pop Up, and Good Hot in Richmond.

• You missed this month, but it’s worth getting into the Zyzzyva movie nights hosted by Ingrid Rojas Contreras.
• My current fave restaurant is OKEN in Oakland. Hot tip: easier to get in Thursday and Sunday.

Oct 9, 2025

Welcome to this newsletter, a sort of spin off of a thing I do during the pledge drive. Each newsletter will feature a mini essay about the people, places, experiences who make the Bay what it is.

I just got back from a run into the Oakland foothills, popping in and out of the cones of streetlights as I waited for the moon to rise up and over the hills. You could see it was coming, this yellow premonition, and then suddenly there it was: round and pockmarked, perfect.

You all know Bay Area seasons are not like other places’ seasons. Our summers and winters come in shards embedded across the calendar. And so when we get one of those big Charlie Brown Halloween Special moons and it’s warm enough to run around in a t-shirt, I go crazy. I need to be outside.

Maybe it’s my friend Liam’s fault. In the early days of the pandemic, he invited me up on a night hike in Wildcat Canyon in Berkeley one evening when the moon was full and the sky was clear. We weren’t the only ones who had the idea. When we arrived, it was a small party. Dozens of people were there taking photographs of the moon and each other, giddy in the surreal brightness. Our bodies threw tall shadows.

Liam and I walked along the paved path up to an overlook that let us take in the Bay. The hills lay dark before us, outlining the bowl of the Bay, which glowed with light so soft you wanted to touch it, scoop it up with your hands, lay down on it. Beyond the water, the city beamed orange, trails of light from water to hill peaks.

We shared a tiny slug of whiskey, happy to see each other in those days of isolation, and made our way back down the trail. The world was a little larger under the moon. We were a little closer to the planet and to everyone else out there, people who sought the special light in the warm air.

A night hike with a friend under a full moon on a warm night.

That’s your one good thing.

• Come see me talk with the legend Alice Waters at the Heyday Harvest
• Some running friends are hosting a run in Oakland to celebrate Latino heritage month
• You should check out this residency at the ultra cool art spot in SF Chinatown, Now Place