Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and welcome to the Bay. Local news to keep you rooted.
Pendarvis Harshaw: Mike. Check, check. One. Check two. Are we here? All right. We’re here RIghtnowIsh.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: For the past five years. Host Pendarvis Harshaw, along with producer Marisol Medina-Cadena, have been building an archive of artists and culture makers in the Bay area. The Right Now ish podcast spotlighted artists, creatives and culture keepers from all over the region, and they did it with a love and reverence for the culture that goes unmatched.
Pendarvis Harshaw: I tell people I had a front row seat to the culture of the Bay area, and it was just my job to take notes.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: We tried so hard to really expand our reach. Tattoo artists, graffiti artists, poets, MCs, libraries, farm workers. Like there’s not a hierarchy of what type of art is acceptable on this show.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Next month, the Right Now ish podcast will end its run. So today I sit down with Pen and Muddy Soul to talk about the rich archive of culture that they’ve built.
Pendarvis Harshaw: The origins of the show right now is come from a photo series that I was doing going around Oakland, taking photos of art that I saw that spoke to larger things happening in the world, and I would post it on Twitter and I’d add the tag right now ish, because I didn’t want people to know where I was when I was, you know.
Pendarvis Harshaw: So it’s kind of right now it’s lightweight. And when I got the opportunity to host a podcast with KQED and the question was, what was I going to name it? I went, the idea right now is, and that same concept of stumbling upon art and identifying how it speaks to a larger narrative, that’s what it was all about.
Pendarvis Harshaw: And so we go into the meeting room to pitch right now, ish. And I literally had an image of Mister Rogers from Mister Rogers Neighborhood and the cover of two shorts, Short Dogs on the House album, which is like an animated dog cover.
Pendarvis Harshaw: That inspired Snoop Dog eventually. Yeah. And so these are the images that I wanted. I wanted to bring the Mr. Rogers get to know your neighbor meets that Oakland funk.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And how are you, I guess at the time, defining arts and culture. Like who are the artists, the culture makers, culture keepers that you were thinking about when you were starting out the show?
Pendarvis Harshaw: Looking around my community, I saw artists in the backyard, parties. We would throw, biking events I would attend, really people in my community who I felt like needed to be highlighted because their work spoke to things that were universal. And so that was my goal.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah. Your neighbors quite literally.
Pendarvis Harshaw: Yeah. What’s up? Yeah. My name is Pendarvis Harshaw, the journalist and host behind right now. Ish. Man, I am excited to bring our entire world.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Can I remember your first ever episode of the Right Now in your podcast, which was with Oakland native and muralist Timothy B? Can you tell me a little bit more about Timothy B, and why you picked him as the subject of your very first official episode of the podcast?
Pendarvis Harshaw: Timothy B embodies a brilliant story that really shows Oakland’s change over the past 30 to 40 years. So my my name’s Timothy is the junior. Tom is money. Well, my friends call me Tim, but I’m locally known as Timothy B, the artist. He’s an awesome muralist. Internationally renowned. He has huge pieces all around the town and his work is brilliant, bright, vibrant.
Pendarvis Harshaw: We have, we have a queen with monkey skulls and palm trees in an urban setting taking place in the background. But that’s just one of many projects I’m working on. He depicts Afrocentric themes and images of gods, and he brings it all together in a real cool way. So Timothy is doing this awesome work on the streets and the work that Timothy’s father did on the streets back in the 80s and 90s.
Pendarvis Harshaw: It’s a little different. I never really was involved with the streets, never even wanted to be a part of it, simply because of my OGs who have learned from their mistakes. So Timothy story is important because it parallels not only my story, but so many other kids whose families were shaped by the war on drugs.
Pendarvis Harshaw: But Timothy B isn’t the average kid who grew up in Oakland in the 90s. He was one of the sons of Timothy Blues senior was part of the legendary six nine mob. You might be familiar with them.
Pendarvis Harshaw: Well, at least some of the. Since his release, he’s been back in the neighborhood doing great community work, and I was familiar with Timothy B, the artist. I was familiar with his father’s story. I wasn’t familiar with Dana Bluitt the mother.
Dana Bluitt: I did what I had to do to make sure that he constantly spoke to his dad. When Tim would get in trouble, I would tell this, dad. So I say, your dad may not physically be here, but he is very much alive. And he is very much a father.
Pendarvis Harshaw: And it was her comments about the family not being broken. It was unified in her work to hold the family together, raise this young man, and also make sure that the elder Timothy, as he reentered society, was stable. And so it was just a really beautiful story that showed a lot of different aspects of Oakland. And again, universal themes of family sticking together through thick and thin.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah, I mean, I think those are all the things you talk about in this first episode of Right Now ish, which is an arts and culture show at its core. But it’s also about everything else around that family life, kids growing up in Oakland, the stories behind the art. Marisol, you weren’t with the show yet, but what stands out to you from that episode?
Marisol Medina-Cadena: There’s an exchange in that first episode where he’s posing a question to Timothy’s b mother.
Pendarvis Harshaw: And I just keep thinking of like, how light this conversation is in spite of everything, in spite of oppressive systems and potentially broken families.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: And reflecting on like, what does it mean to have your family together and defy this broken family stereotype? And she corrects him and saying, we’re not broken.
Dana Bluitt: I never felt like we were broken. You know, I never I just felt like our reality was different than most, right? You know, nothing is going to break this family, Right.
Pendarvis Harshaw: I’m here.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: An early conversation Penn and I had. He made this very astute point, I think, where he was like, this is a show where I’m comfortable with black women correcting me on the mic. And I think having that moment kept in the tape really speaks to pens willingness to be corrected and to be informed.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: And there’s like this openness that he brings to each of the interviews, that they’re the experts of their lived experience. And Pen is just simply a mic for that story to be told louder.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Producers play a really big role in how a show sounds. So when you joined muddy Saw and brought this East Bay expertise, this Oakland expertise, but you kind of brought that Frisco sensibility. Can you talk a little bit more about what drew you to working on right now? Ish. And with Penn in particular?
Marisol Medina-Cadena: I very much hold San Francisco Frisco very deep to my heart. It’s where my grandfather, my cousin and my aunt grew up. And so as a child, it was very common for my family to drive up from LA County all the way up to the bay, like every two months. And so I really got to see Bernal Heights, Snowy Valley in the mission as just like this beautiful place for experimentation and community arts and activism.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: Having witnessed the changes from afar, you know, like I didn’t go to school here, but coming to visit the Bay from the 90s to the mid 2000 and seeing all these shifts from the outside, I wanted to push back on this narrative that all of San Francisco was just gentrified and there was like, no more soul of the city. And I was like, that’s not what I see when I come back here.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: And now that I live here, there are still working class artists being working class in the city and making art about that experience. And there are these institutions like La Galeria de la Raza and Mission Cultural Center and Soma Arts that have deep, deep roots here. And and I got to tell, those histories are.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: Yes, that’s the truth, and that’s my truth. We did an episode about how day of the dead started back in the 1970s. Here in the mission, my family goes hard for Los Muertos growing up every weekend, and October was basically dedicated to assembling our home altar or community altar.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: And for me to be able to tell that history was so deeply personal, because that’s how part of my parents, on exposure to day of the dead, back in the 70s, you know, they were here learning from other Chicano artists, putting those events on.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah. And I feel like that’s something you and Penn have in common is these deep roots in these two really big hubs of art and artistry in the Bay area, San Francisco and the East Bay and Oakland. And one thing I feel like I really loved about right now is, is the range of things that you all have done with the show. Penn did your definition of arts and culture expand or change over the years, especially with Marisol on deck?
Pendarvis Harshaw: Oh man. Yes. It broadened my perspective of Northern California arts and culture. I always looked at San Francisco as my cousins across the water. So yeah, I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with that.
Pendarvis Harshaw: But going to other parts of the Bay, going to the North Bay and learning about people who are former farmworkers and transitioning into doing land work to fight wildfires. That is culture. It’s an art. Doing that type of work really showed me that, okay, there are so many more stories here to tell.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: Yeah. Our range of culture that we had on the show was really expansive. I mean, we did a whole series on tattoo artist. We did a whole series on the meaning of Love. We did a whole series on filmmakers rooted in the Bay, musicians in the Bay, jazz in the Bay. We all culture in the Bay. And we also did a series on land stewardship.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah, it went and went so much beyond painting and and drawing and murals.
Pendarvis Harshaw: All right, back into the lava field. Let’s do it. Pretty much. All right. We did one episode in. We’re in Bayview doing some glassblowing. So I’m going to open this up and you’re going to feel it. I’m standing behind you.
Pendarvis Harshaw: And and so that all the orange that you see, that’s heat. Oh, God. That’s a heat glow, that the glass is not orange. We’re recording an episode while dealing with immense heat and being nervous that we’re going to drop either glass or burn ourselves.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That’s an art.
Pendarvis Harshaw: It’s an art. It was, but it was fun. Oh my God, Hades is turn turn turn turn turn. Keep going, keep going, turn fast first go fast. Rotate. There you go, Susie. Stay right there or up and out. And so being able to step into all of that, I tell people I had a front row seat to the culture of the Bay area, and it was just my job to take notes. We did the best we can. We have so much fun doing it.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: One example of that Marisol was you’re from the soil series. I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about that and what it was, and what y’all’s conversations were like about doing that kind of reporting for this show.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: Right. So we did a series called From the Soil. And really the idea was looking at land workers and their relationships to the land.
Valentine Lopez: It remains illegal for us to practice our ceremonies. And so, you know.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: We talked to Valentine Lopez, the tribal chairman of the band of the Amah Mutsun, about this effort to protect sacred land from being turned into a mining operation.
Valentine Lopez: When we see this mining permit come in, we say this is the continuation of that brutality, that erasure, that destruction of the Amazon.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: That was an instance where it took a lot of time to build trust with the tribal chairman and being like, please, we’ll give you as much time as you need to help tell this story. We’re not just trying to come in with a sound bite and out.
Valentine Lopez: Just to the east of here, there were four natural lakes. We had seven villages at those four lakes, and we had large populations at those lakes. But what, you know. But they drain those lakes for agriculture.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: There’s the culture of land stewardship and tending the land. And what are all the beliefs and practices behind building a relationship with land that we were really centering, like, yo, this is a form of culture.
Pendarvis Harshaw: That conversation sticks with me because we’re on the side of a just green pasture hillside, nondescript. It looks like just the rolling hills of Northern California. But this is indigenous land that’s been taken from them for over 100 years.
Pendarvis Harshaw: And now every time I pass it in Gilroy, I think about that. So when I talk about that expansion of the Bay area and culture and what it means, like now that’s etched in my memory forever.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: After five great years, right now ish is ending its run. I’ll start with you, Melissa. Like, how are you thinking about who you’re leaving this archive for?
Marisol Medina-Cadena: I’m thinking about, like the future generations of media makers and this archive that we’re leaving and thinking about the young people who are going to take up audio and filmmaking and chronicling that the next generation of storytellers. I just think audio is is just still there’s so much potential.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: We’re kind of made like a blueprint for some folks to say, like, we did it. There is interest, and people want to hear artists with what they have to say about their process, their identity, their ideas of belonging. And that’s important. And I think it just shows what kind of show is possible.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What about you, Penn? How are you thinking about who you’re leaving this archive for?
Pendarvis Harshaw: It’s fourfold. It’s the artists we highlighted and the fact that they have their names etched in stone. And they can. I got an email from somebody we interviewed a couple years ago, and they had it as their under their email signature. They had a link to the story.
Pendarvis Harshaw: Still, it’s like they still use it as a to show who they are. That’s sweet. It’s for the audience. Audience members for the community. People who want to go back and say, hey, this story is important. It’s for other journalists to say, hey, this. As Madison said, this is a blueprint for what can be done in journalism.
Pendarvis Harshaw: Most importantly for the stakeholders, people who fund this type of work and saying this community believes that this thing is important. Let’s try it again. Let’s try a new iteration, a different version of it. Those four tiers, I think, are really important to reach.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, Penn, I’m thinking about something you said back in 2019 when you were just starting off the show, which is that there are these very niche artists and culture makers who you believe deserve the spotlight. And that I think over the last five years, you both have done an amazing job at giving a platform to.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And these are people who I think, I think it’s fair to say would not have been on KQED, would not have been on any mainstream media platform, possibly for that matter. I guess I’m wondering for the both of you, like, did you feel an additional responsibility as journalists of color, as people who have deep ties to the Bay area when spotlighting these artists?
Marisol Medina-Cadena: I definitely felt there was a huge responsibility because essentially. We are gatekeepers in a way. Inviting people in into this institution and sharing that platform. And I think that’s why we tried so hard to really expand our reach. Time after time. I brought in an artist who grew up in the mission and they were like, yo, I’ve seen this building my whole childhood here and I’ve never stepped inside.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: And that felt like, this is why we do this, because this is the public we’re serving and they matter to. And and then being part of the media that we’re creating back for the public, it felt really good to be able to open those doors and platform artists who’ve been part of these communities for such a long time.
Pendarvis Harshaw: As a journalist, you already have a responsibility to the community. There’s an additional responsibility that comes with me being a black man from the community, for the black community to reach back to me and say, hey, this institution has wronged me in some way, or, hey, this institution has done something good.
Pendarvis Harshaw: I end up being a conduit in between the community and the institution. Oftentimes, it’s not even about the podcast or even my reporting. It’s really just about what the community feels and what’s going on with the institution. And so I had to learn to accept that and, communicate that to the community and to the institution.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I guess both of you. I’d love to know. Like, what have you both learned about the Bay area in your time making right now ish?
Pendarvis Harshaw: I’ll go first. The most important thing that I learned in trying to tell stories of the Bay area is that you’re never going to tell the story of the Bay area. There’s too much depth. There’s too much history. Some parts of the Bay or in 2050, some parts are in 1995. Like there’s too much going on right now. So you never want to tell every story, but the story that you do tell. Tell it as best you can.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: I mean, for me, I think reporting with lived experience has been such a strength that me and Penn have been able to play on. I would sit on story sometimes like, well, the fact that I know them is that like, is that newsworthy?
Marisol Medina-Cadena: And then I had to, like restructure my brain to be like, no, this is because I’m I’m embedded in this neighborhood, and I see the people who are constantly at different events and, and tirelessly working. And so I guess what I’m taking away is that your lived experience is so valuable. And to bring that wherever you go.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, I feel like that lived experience for both of you. And. And then Marisol, you could hear it in the sound of the show. I just want to say, as a as a listener, someone on the other side, I have just really appreciated what y’all have done. And thank you for your work and all that you’ve done to archive that. The scene and arts and culture in the Bay area.
Pendarvis Harshaw: Thank you.
Marisol Medina-Cadena: Thank you.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was right now ish host Pendarvis Harshaw and producer Marisol Medina-Cadena. Shout out as well to Rightnowish editor Chris Hambrick. You can find Rightnowish’s rich archive at KQED.org/Rightnowish or wherever you listen to podcasts. The last episode of Rightnowish drops on July 18th.
