Image courtesy SFFILM

​Around this time last year, I covered my first film festival, SFFILM's Doc Stories. The screenings and other events all took place at The Vogue Theater, which is just a short walk from where I live. Long story short, I was hooked. Since then, I've covered SFFILM's International Film Festival, CAAM, and Frameline this year.

And so I wasn't going to pass up a chance to speak again with Director of Programming at SFFILM Jessie Fairbanks.

In this bonus episode, Jessie talks about this year's Doc Stories, the 10th such festival that SFFILM has put on to celebrate documentary filmmaking. Learn all about this year's programming, which includes many films and talks I'm hoping to attend.

Event Details
Thursday, Oct. 17–Sunday, Oct. 20
All screenings held at The Vogue Theater
Go to SFFILM's website to learn more and buy tickets

We recorded this bonus episode over Zoom in October 2024.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Aaron Peskin is incredibly easy to talk with. And his life story is one you have to hear to believe.

In this podcast, Episode 1 of Season 7 of Storied: San Francisco, the multi-term D3 supervisor-slash-president of the Board of Supervisors-slash-current candidate for mayor of San Francisco shares his story, beginning with the tales of his parents and their families' migration to the United States.

Look at that gorgeous updated logo! Many thanks to my friend Lisa Wong Jackson for enhancing Jim Murphy's design from 2017.

In this special episode, Jeff talks about what to expect in Season 7 of the podcast—what's changing and what's staying the same.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Michael "Spike" Krouse's arrival on this planet was something of a miracle for his parents.

In this episode, get to know the founder of Madrone Art Bar (currently one of my favorite places in San Francisco). Spike's dad, a fighter pilot who flew missions in World War II, was much older than his mom. He flew for the Navy when the U.S. went to war with Korea as well. He ended up stationed in Alameda. When he retired from the Navy, in 1967, he took a job in Las Vegas, where the pay was good and the housing was affordable.

Patrick Costello used to work at Anchor Brewing, where he was the production lead for the bottling and keg lines. He was also a member of the Anchor Brewing Union, where he served as a shop steward—essentially the union rep on the floor. Anchor's union was part of Local 6 of the ILWU. But Patrick wasn't exactly born into all of this.

​His mom and dad met at a house party in the Mission in the 1980s. Patrick's dad was stationed in the Presidio and his mom came here from Nicaragua. His dad wouldn't leave his mom alone at this party, or so the story goes. They were married at a church in the Presidio soon after that. (Patrick and his wife recently got married nearby, at Tunnel Tops park.)

Welcome to this bonus episode with Kundan Baidwan and Sameer Gupta. Kundan and Sameer talk all about the Rootstock Arts' event Color Your Mind Festival, which is happening at the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival this Saturday, July 27, 2024 from noon to 5 p.m.

(This episode was created in collaboration with Erin and Ange from Bitch Talk Podcast.)

We start with Kundan. Long-time listeners will recognize or remember Kundan from ... Season 1, Episode 40, Two Storied Nights, and Hungry Ghosts. She's been a friend of the show since that fateful day in 2018 when I waltzed into Zam Zam with Bitch Talk on their Bourdain Crawl. But, podcast-wise, it's never been about Kundan.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

From a young age, Azikiwee Anderson left his heart in San Francisco.

In this episode, Azikiwee (everyone calls him "Z"), the founder of Rize Up Sourdough, shares the story of how he got here. His dad was a famous drummer who got hooked on heroin while touring. When he returned home from the tour, the problems at home began. He started physically assaulting Z's mom.

And so she packed up her three kids, all five and younger, and her things and split. The battered wives' shelter helped get them out of New Orleans and to San Francisco. Z has some memories of New Orleans, but they're coupled with trauma.

When they landed here, they didn't really have people. His mom and her kids stayed at the bus station for weeks, and Z remembers a man giving them his lunch more than once. There's a poignant story of the brown paper bags that those meals came in and how Z has used similar bags for Rize Up breads as an homage.

In 2022, the Presidio Trust asked Favianna Rodriguez to be an activator, as the trust was preparing to open its Tunnel Tops park. Favianna recommended that the folks building the park employ color and visual art to transform the space. They were supportive of her ideas. And with that, Ancestral Futurism was born.

Favianna grew up in Oakland next to the 880 freeway, where she still lives today. The area around that major thoroughfare is one of the most polluted corridors in the state. Because she comes from an area subject to what she refers to as "environmental racism," she sought to make a statement in the northwest corner of The City. "Ancestral Futurism" was a phrase that perfectly summed up her goal: "We cannot repair the present until we acknowledge the harm of the past."

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Reem Assil has created a restaurant in the Mission that serves some of the most beautiful, delicious, and activist food of any new spot in San Francisco in a long, long time.

Reem was born and raised in her early years in a Boston suburb. Her dad is from Damascus, Syria, and her mom is from Gaza, Palestine. Both were refugees in 1967. They met in Beirut and emigrated to the East Coast of the US.

The suburb where they moved was predominantly white, but Reem's household was vibrant in Arab culture. Her parents didn't want the family to forget their roots. They were in Massachusetts because that's where the jobs were. But Reem's mom's family all came to California, which ended up having quite an effect on her.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

I'm super-stoked to do a podcast all about The Stud and folks from the collective who run the place!

In Part 1, we start with Marke B. Many longtime listeners will remember Marke from his Season 3 Storied episode. In this go-round, we get a condensed version of his life story and how he made his way to San Francisco.

In his hometown of Detroit, Marke threw raves and made enough money on that to put himself through college. Sometime in those four years of school, he realized that his dream of writing for a local newspaper or weekly was damn near impossible. Also, it was the height of AIDS and Detroit didn't have much of an infrastructure around that.

Image courtesy Frameline

In this bonus episode, meet and get to know Frameline Film Festival's Executive Director Allegra Madsen. Allegra was born and grew up in southern Virginia. As she says, "It was hot, it was humid, it was Southern." From a young age, she fell in love with movies because it was so hot outside. She'd escape to theaters, where she could bask in the AC and watch movies all day long.
 
She left that area as soon as she could. That meant Chicago for college. She wanted to be a writer. Columbia College in Chicago was known as more of a film school, which meant she was on the periphery of movies in her time there.
 
After college, it was on to Los Angeles, "as everybody does." Allegra worked in some art galleries and museums, with the goal of trying to get to San Francisco always in the back of her mind. As a kid growing up, she read a lot of Beat Generation writers (where were the women of the Beat era?). CCA was the draw that got Allegra up to The Bay. She studied contemporary art curation, focusing on how you can use art to build community.
 
That was 20 years ago, and she's been here ever since.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Brett Cline is, as he puts it, from the "Deep South." But he's such a California kid that by that he means Southern California.

In Part 1, get to know Brett, who for the past decade or so has run The Lost Church performing arts theater. His life began in Orange County, where his parents ended up after meeting at UCLA and traveling around the world when his dad was a pilot in the Navy.

Brett was heavily into the punk rock scene in SoCal in the Eighties (think bands like Social Distortion and Suicidal Tendencies, among others). But his love of music started in fourth grade when he snuck into the bedroom of an older neighbor kid and found the first record from Oingo Boingo, a band that changed his life. They were his first brush with alternative art, and soon became a defining point of his early personality.

Photography by Paolo Asuncion

​Hear the conversation I had in January with my favorite young Bay Area band, Peaboo and the Catz.

Follow them on Instagram @Peabooandthecatz

Subscribe to their YouTube channel: Peabooandthecatz

​We recorded this podcast at Sky Cafe in South San Francisco in January 2024.

In this episode, we meet the humans behind the artistic and cultural project that is the TNT Traysikel.

We start, in random order, with Mike Arceaga. Mike was born in the Philippines and moved to LA with his family when he was 10. He says that the transition from his homeland to LA was difficult. The family first landed in Highland Park, which Mike points out wasn't hip then. That's where he got started doing graffiti art.

In the mid-to-late-Eighties, they moved, first to the Eagle Rock neighborhood in LA, then to Pomona, where, by the time he moved there, he'd become a full-fledged graffiti artist. He says it's what got him into art.

In high school, Mike learned technical drawing. He went to junior college, but had art school on his mind. He was in a hip-hop crew, tagged ramps, and was friends with skaters, but never skated himself. He also breakdanced, but says it never took.

The 42nd annual CAAMFest kicks off tomorrow, May 9, in The City.
 
In this bonus episode, meet CAAM's Festival and Exhibitions Director, Thuy Tran. Hear about how Thuy ended up in San Francisco and working at CAAM, the history of this Asian-American media organization, and this year's film, food, and music festival, which runs through May 19.
 
Visit the CAAMFest website for more details.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

In this episode, meet and get to know Danny Montoya, who owns and operates Butterfly Joint and Café in the Outer Richmond.

Danny starts his story by letting us know that, growing up, he had family in The City and visited a lot from his various homes in Southern California. He was born in Burbank and grew up in Santa Clarita Valley, where some of his friends still live. He was immersed in punk and skate cultures from a young age, and once he had friends who were old enough to do so, they drove "everywhere" to skate.

His parents, both of whom are from Colombia and met in LA, divorced when Danny was 5. He and his older brother went to live most of the time with their mom in a trailer park. This was Danny's primary residence from age 5 to the beginning of ninth grade, and he says it shaped him deeply.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

In Part 1, meet and get to know Nathan, who today owns and operates New Skool Clothing and Accessories.
 
Nathan's parents are both from Myanmar, but fled their home country during years of political upheaval. They landed in England, where his mom's mom already lived and where Nathan was born in the early Seventies. He, his older sister, and their parents then moved to the Bay Area, where their dad had family, when Nathan was three.
 
He attended preschool in The City, but then his parents moved their young family to Daly City, where they could afford to buy a house. His dad started his own business, and his mom worked at a bank, and that was enough to enable them to buy a famed Doelger home just south of San Francisco.
 
Nathan went first to Peabody Elementary for one or two years, then to Westlake for second through sixth grades. After this, his parents enrolled him in a Catholic school to finish his junior high years. Around 1983, he started high school at St. Ignatius in The City and that ended up changing his life forever.

He soon met Eustinove Smith, who was already a graffiti and hip-hop legend in SF. Nathan was just getting into hip-hop himself. He shares some insights on the genre's evolutions, from the East Coast to out West. Some kids were graffiti writers and DJs at his new school, and Nate (as he was starting to be known) started breakdancing and listening to the hip-hop.
 
Nate had dabbled in art as a young kid, but his art matured when he hit his teen years, especially after he met his new best friend, E (Eustinove). Nate imparts some wisdom about the evolution of graffiti-writing styles at this point. His buddy E got a crew together and they hit the streets.
 
The new crew called itself Master Piece Creators (MPC). Nathan became Nate1, E was Omen2, and their buddy Rodney was Orco. Spots around SF they hit up include several "hall of fames," which are spaces where people paint both legally and illegally. MPC ended up doing many "productions" all over town.
 
He says when he graduated high school, it was never a question of leaving The Bay. Nate got into SF State, where he majored in business at first. But it took a counselor's advice to get him to switch over to art.

In this bonus episode, meet SFFILM Executive Director Anne Lai. Learn all about Anne's upbringing, what drew her to California, her stint with the Sundance Institute, and her arrival in 2020 in San Francisco at the famed San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM).

Anne will walk listeners through the history of this 67-year-old festival, the oldest such event in North America. Then she touches on some highlights of this year's festival (April 24–28), including the Opening Night screening of Didi, the feature-length debut of Bay Area filmmaker Sean Wang.

Please visit sffilm.org for more info, including showtimes and tickets.

We recorded this podcast on Zoom in April 2024.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

This oh-so-San Francisco story begins with two brothers and a dairy farm at Noe and 29th Street.

Larry Mitchell and his older brother Jack opened Mitchell's Ice Cream in 1953. Five years earlier, the building that now houses the well-known ice cream shop was going to be torn down for the widening of San Jose Avenue. The Mitchell family fought those efforts and a compromise was reached—The City would turn and move the building. The old liquor store that had been on San Jose was no more.

That space sat empty for a couple years until Larry Mitchell decided that he wanted to do something with it. His parents had a small dairy farm on Noe and 29th Street. There was a parlor called Garrett's Ice Cream out on Ocean Avenue that was doing well. Larry and his brothers saw an opportunity.

A salesman from Foremost Dairy taught them how to make ice cream, which they sourced from Foremost. Larry, his brothers, their dad, and some friends built the store out and it opened on June 6, 1953.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Chloe Sherman's eyes are intense, but not the way you might think.

Chloe, who's been taking photographs since she was young, was born in New York City. Her mom and her mom's mom were both New Yorkers, and her dad was from Chicago, with his family going back generations there. When she was in grade school, the family moved to Chicago, where Chloe was raised by aunts and grandparents as well as her parents, just like she had been in NYC.

It was the Seventies and her parents were hippies. They soon headed west, taking their family to Portland, Oregon, where Chloe spent the rest of her grade school days.

​Chloe says the move was fine, but that she felt like more of a city kid, and so it took some adjusting. She and her brother visited back east a lot. He ended up going to college there, and Chloe started school in Connecticut and then Boston before realizing that she'd become a West Coaster.

We talk about life in Portland, how it's easier to be collective-minded and communal because it's more affordable than bigger cities. This of course has an effect on who's drawn to cities like Portland. With an abundance of young people, folks tend to band together.

Chloe ended up going to Portland State. One weekend, she took a trip to San Francisco after reading about our city in a zine she got at Powell's Books in her hometown. We take a conversational detour at this point to talk about zine culture back in the late-Eighties and early Nineties.

In high school, she had dabbled in dance and music, but knew she didn't want to pursue either performing art. She says she loved art and did some photography, but got more serious about that after high school.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Mark DeVito, co-owner and COO of Standard Deviant Brewing, wouldn't last a day in a police lineup. But it might not be his curly handlebar mustache that gave him away. Mark has an outsize personality, to put it mildly. And back in December, I sat down with him and one of the SDB dogs, Beans, at the Mission brewery for what turned out to be quite the wild ride of a recording.
 
In Part 1, we learn about Mark's upbringing in smalltown New Hampshire—Hopkinton, to be specific. It's still a town-with-no-stoplights small. The summers were hot and the winters cold and snowy.
 
After hearing about two rather unfortunate stories from Mark's elementary school days, we move on to his teen years. He learned to play drums from a neighbor who taught music at his school. His parents placed him in a preparatory boarding school for high school, where he found an entire room full of instruments where he and his friends could play. And play they did. They formed a band that started playing around the area.
 
We go back a little so Mark can share his Italian grandparents' story of migrating to the United States and landing in Boston, where his dad grew up and where Mark soon found himself after high school. The gigs, mostly Grateful Dead covers but eventually more like jazz improv with a Miles Davis influence, were stacking up for Great American (named after a grocery store chain and having nothing to do with 9/11).
 
After his college years, some band members went their separate ways. But Mark and one of his buds decided to take a chance on San Francisco. Mark had visited and was blown away by the natural scenery and human creative energy here. Which, duh.
 
And so, in 2004, he moved here. From 2005 to 2010, Mark would spend around five months a year touring the country from his new hometown. The story of how he found a place to live—where he's still at today with his wife—is remarkable only in the sense that it doesn't really happen that way anymore. He was walking around the Mission taking down phone numbers written on "for rent" signs in windows when someone leaned their head out one of those windows and asked Mark if he wanted to see the place.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Huckleberry Youth, the non-profit providing care and housing for underserved youth, celebrated 50 years back in 2017. in Part 1 of this episode, we meet Huckleberry consultant/advisor Denise Coleman and the organization's CEO/executive director, Doug Styles.
 
Denise was born at what is now Kaiser's French Campus on Geary. Denise, who is Black, shares the story of the hospital making her dad pay cash for their labor and delivery services, while it was obvious that white folks were allowed to make installment payments.
 
Born and raised in the 1950s and Sixties, Denise and her family lived in the Haight/Ashbury neighborhood, as it was known then (now we call it Cole Valley) on Belvedere Street. She has three sisters and a brother, her dad worked two jobs usually, and her mom stayed home. She describes a childhood that was fun, filled with activities like roller skating, skateboarding, and homemade roller coasters.
 
Denise was a teenager during the Vietnam War and took part in protests. She describes a history of friction with her mom. When Denise was 16, one of her sisters OD'd on drugs. Still, despite the trauma that came with that, she graduated high school from St. Mary's in 1973. At this point in the podcast, Denise rattles off the San Francisco schools she went to.
 
After high school, she joined some of her cousins and attended the College of San Mateo. Denise never thought about or wanted to leave the Bay Area, she says. In an apartment on the Peninsula, she and her cousins had "the best time." After obtaining a two-year associate's degree, Denise says she wanted to go to SF State, but didn't connect with it, and so she started working instead. For two years, she flew as a flight attendant for the now-defunct Western Airlines. After that, she collected debt for a jewelry store, then worked as a credit authorizer for Levitz Furniture in South San Francisco.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Anita Beshirs was born in Batesville, Mississippi, because the small Southern town her family lived in didn't have a hospital.
 
Welcome to our Valentine's 2024 episode all about Anita and her husband, Lester Raww. In Part 1, we'll get to know Lester and Anita through the stories of their childhood and early adult years.
 
Anita's dad was a Church of Christ minister who, along with her mom, never drank or even took medicinal drugs. Anita is the third child in her family (she has two older brothers) and when she just two years old, their parents moved them to the Cameroon jungle on missionary work.
 
The family lived in Africa in a house made of concrete blocks and with a tin roof. Anita spent the first six years of her life with no TV or radio and so she was forced to make her own fun. She was home schooled by her mom because her dad was busy doing his church work.
 
After four years, the family returned to Mississippi, now in the college town of Oxford, where Anita started grade school. She says she didn't want to go to college right away because she didn't know what she wanted to do with her life. But her parents insisted that she go to Christian college, which meant a school called Harding University in Arkansas. This is where Lester and Anita met, but more on that after we hear the story of Lester's early life.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Something awesome happened near the Embarcadero.

In Season 4 of this show, back in 2022, we featured SF born-and-raised vegan donut maker Vandor Hill. His pop-up (at the time), Whack Donuts, was gaining some new fans and new spots for him to sell his delicious sweet treats.

But now ...

Now Whack Donuts occupies a corner spot of EMB 4, just across the walkway from Osha Thai and near the padel courts and water fountain of recently renamed Embarcadero Plaza. How did this happen?

Well, Vandor got himself into two city programs: Vacant to Vibrant and Ujamaa Kitchen. And it was his acceptance to Vacant to Vibrant that helped him to get and keep his nook in EMB 4.

Vandor and I hung out one day in January to catch up on life since April 2022. This bonus episode comprises our conversation that day.

Whack Donuts is open 8 a.m. - 2 p.m., Tues.-Sat. Vandor often does special drops and monthly flavors. But if you're looking for sweetness for your sweetie (or yourself, let's be real), he'll have a red velvet cake vegan donut for Valentine's as well as a special "Love in a Box" 3-pack or half-dozen.

Follow Whack Donuts on Instagram.

We recorded this podcast at Whack Donuts in the Embarcadero in January 2024.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

​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.