• Storied: San Francisco

  • By: Jeff Hunt
  • Podcast

Storied: San Francisco

By: Jeff Hunt
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  • Summary

  • A weekly podcast about the artists, activists, and small businesses that make San Francisco so special.
    Copyright 2024 Storied: San Francisco
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Biographies & Memoirs Social Sciences
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Episodes
  • Jacob Rosenberg and the Bay Area Hip-Hop + Skateboarding Scenes of the Nineties (S7 bonus)

    Jacob Rosenberg and the Bay Area Hip-Hop + Skateboarding Scenes of the Nineties (S7 bonus)
    Nov 21 2024

    Jacob Rosenberg had a front-row seat to some rad SF/Bay Area history.

    In this bonus episode, the filmmaker/storyteller shares some of that history, especially as it relates to his upcoming book, Right Before My Eyes. Jacob was born and raised in Palo Alto. He grew up in the Seventies and Eighties. His parents moved there from the East Coast and Midwest to raise kids in an environment that matched their liberal values more.

    He started skating in the Eighties and would visit Justin Herman Plaza/EMB in The City with his skateboard but also his camera. He was one of the first to capture the skateboarding going on at EMB who was a peer of the skaters he was documenting. He soon found enough success with photography that he dropped out of high school and moved to San Diego to do that work full-time.

    Two years or so later, he went to film school at Emerson College in Boston, where he met his mentor. That mentor passed away while Jacob was still in school, but he finished a movie that guy had been working on at the time of his death. After college, Jacob moved to Los Angeles, where he's lived ever since.

    At this point in the episode, I share with Jacob the draw that SF had on me from about age 12, thanks to skateboarding, Bones Brigade, and especially, Tommy Guerrero. I never got to visit The City when I skated, but it was always fresh in my imagination. Jacob then goes on a sidebar about Tommy.

    Jacob goes on to talk about the time frame covered in his book—1988 to 1998. His life changed at skate camp in the summer of 1988 (if my math is correct, this would be Jacob's last summer before high school). He met pro skateboarders that summer. Suddenly, unrelatedly, he was in Hawaii making a video for Hieroglypics. He cites 1988 as a pinnacle year for hip-hop. And he says that '91–'93 were the same for street skating. 1993 was also important for hip-hop.

    The conversation then shifts to what the two cultures—hip-hop and skateboarding—had in common. He cites his childhood hero, Chuck D. (who wrote the afterword for his book) who noted that members of both subcultures were disenfranchised youth who found a way to express themselves. Well-put.

    In the early Nineties, the dominance of ramp skating waned and gave way to street skating. With easier and more affordable access to video cameras, the scene got documented and documented well. Similarly, sampling and other recording equipment was getting cheaper and cheaper, and DIY hip-hop songs and videos flourished. And in a very specific way, a video that Jacob created and put Hieroglyphics' music in helped to unite the two groups in the Bay Area.

    Jacob says that his self-published book, Right Before My Eyes, is meant to be a coffee table book. He intends for people to see the world he was documenting all those years ago through his eyes. There are photos, of course, but the book also contains screengrabs from videos he made as well as ephemera from that time—stuff like photos of photos, the cameras he used to shoot, and more.

    Follow Jacob Rosenberg on Instagram to see his work. And visit Jacob's website to buy Right Before My Eyes, available now.

    Photo by Stephen Vanaso

    We recorded this episode over Zoom in November 2024.
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    25 mins
  • Nicole Salaver, Part 2 (S7E3)

    Nicole Salaver, Part 2 (S7E3)
    Nov 19 2024
    In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Nicole's move to New York. She didn't necessarily have a plan for this cross-country relocation, but she dove in head-first nonetheless. Nicole of course turned to Craigslist to help her find a roommate. But she also hopped on FB Marketplace, which is where she eventually found someone. She moved in with an old friend from theater to an apartment in East Harlem on 125th Street. She considers her time in NYC "epic." She learned a lot, she grew up, she did laundry in the snow ... character-building, all of it. She came to hate winter, being a California girl and all. But she auditioned, worked as a waitress and bartender, and had a few other jobs. She made it onto New Amsterdam and Law and Order. At this point in the recording, thanks to my dorking about Nicole being the first guest of this podcast to have also appeared on Law and Order, we talk about that long-running TV show. There was also an "industrial sitcom" where Nicole played a lead character. Today, it is used to teach people around the world to speak English. Thanks to this and her own world travels, she gets recognized abroad. After nearly 10 years, she returned to The Bay, around the time of the pandemic. Part of it was COVID, but also, she feels that the Hollywood myth had been demystified. Nicole arrived at a new perspective on the industry, one that felt exploitative. And so she came home. Because Nicole and I recorded before Election Day, we go on a sidebar about what we thought might happen if you-know-who won. It's interesting to hear our chat about that from here. But I left it in for posterity, if for no other reason. Nicole's husband got COVID while they were still in New York. It was early in the pandemic, and NYC got hit hard. He wasn't able to go to the hospital, and so Nicole masked the fuck up and took care of her partner. She avoided contracting the new disease. He recovered, but it made her think of what could happen if one of their parents got it. That informed their decision to return to California. They were able to get on one of the last flights out of New York in April 2020. Once she got back home, she regrouped. It was still early during the shutdown and no one was shooting anything. She meditated, hiked, and cleaned her mom's house. In doing so, Nicole found a file cabinet full of her grandma's letters, including those from her time spent living in a San Francisco brothel. Her grandmother, Estrella Chavez, wrote about that time as well as her own ancestors, and Nicole was blown away. She discovered that the California State Assembly had named her grandma the first Filipina-American to do activism and cultural work in San Francisco. She was also recognized by Willie Brown when he was mayor. Around this time, she was also learning more about the uncle who gave her that camera—Patrick Salaver—and his work in the Civil Rights movement. Patrick was involved with the Third World Liberation Front that brought together many different ethnic student groups at SF State, including Filipinos. Discovering all this family heritage made Nicole focus on her own legacy. She had gotten into producing events for the Filipino community in South of Market. She was rolling. But then, she got pregnant. With a kid on the way, Nicole realized she needed a job. And that's how she got work as program manager at Balay Kreative. One idea she brought to her new job was starting a podcast to help amplify the stories of her community. Cultural Kultivators podcast serves to share Southeast Asian voices and stories and push the culture forward. Find it on Instagram and on all the podcast platforms. Also, please follow Kindred Kapwa, Nicole's production company. Learn more about her "Patrick Salaver Project," the life story of her uncle. We end the podcast with Nicole's take on this season's theme: Keep It Local. Photography by Mason J.
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    31 mins
  • Nicole Salaver, Part 1 (S7E3)

    Nicole Salaver, Part 1 (S7E3)
    Nov 12 2024
    ​Nicole Salaver is the kind of person I wish I had met long before that happened. In this episode, meet Nicole. She's the program manager at Balay Kreative these days. But her San Francisco roots go way, way back. Her maternal grandfather came to the US in the 1920s. He was one of the first Filipinos to own a restaurant and pool hall in Manilatown (please see our episode on Manilatown Heritage Foundation). He was a manong who lived at the International Hotel. Stories that Nicole's mom has told her were that he was more or less a mobster, paying off cops to keep his place safe. Nicole's maternal grandmother came to the states in the Fifties with her first husband. But he was an abusive alcoholic, and so her grandmother divorced him. She turned to the government for help for her and her four kids. They sent the single mother and her family to live at what turned out to be a brothel. But she wasn't aware of that at the time. The two met at the I-Hotel, where Nicole's grandmother helped the manongs with anything involving English—paperwork for green cards, lawyers, visas, etc. It was just a side hustle to her job at the US Postal Service. She knew all the manongs, but fell in love with Nicole's grandfather. They married and had three kids, including Nicole's mom. Her mom was born in the Sixities and grew up in the Seventies in San Francisco. Her dad's parents arrived in the US in the Fifties, after World War II. Her paternal grandfather was a merchant marine who cooked on a Navy ship. He met Nicole's grandmother on one of his voyages back to the Philippines and brought her back to the US. They had two boys—Nicole's dad and her uncle. Nicole says that her dad grew up a hippie in Sixties San Francisco, and retained that sensibility throughout his life. He worked for SF Recreation and Parks, smoked weed, and made art. He met Nicole's mother at a collage party while playing guitar in his brother's band. More on Patrick Salaver, Nicole's uncle, later. Nicole, an only child, was born at St. Luke's hospital in 1980. Her mom and dad lived in the Excelsior, where Nicole grew up. She went to Guadalupe Elementary. Her parents were agnostic, but her Catholic grandmother enrolled her in a Catholic school without telling them. Nicole's mom pulled her out on Day 1 and got her into public schools. She was supposed to go to Balboa High School, but it was the Nineties and that school was going through a rough time (see our episode with Rudy Corpuz from United Playas for more on that story). And so the family moved down to South San Francisco. From here, we sidebar to talk about The City of Nicole's youth, in the late-Eighties and early Nineties. She laments the massive loss of art and community that tech money wiped out. And she reminisces about taking Muni all over town. They went to film festivals, galleries, museums, restaurants. In her high school years, Nicole and her friends came to the Haight a lot. She'd also attend as many Filipino events as she could—Pistahan, Barrio Fiesta, and more. Her mom was a dancer and her dad a musician. They pushed her to do one of those two things or visual art. Of them, she gravitated toward art, but as she got to her teen years, she decided that acting and writing were more her jam. That all started when her uncle, Patrick Salaver, gave her a video camera when Nicole was 12. Nicole was and is a fan of "Weird" Al Yankovic. She says she digs quirky humor. She watched lots of SNL, In Living Color, Golden Girls. Using the camera her uncle gave her, she and her cousin created soap operas, commercials, talk shows, SNL-type sketches, and more. But despite loving creating that stuff, she saw that her parents' art was just a hobby. It didn't seem possible that it could be a career. It wasn't until her dad passed away suddenly that Nicole decided to pursue her art. She shares that story with us. She'd been performing a one-woman show about her grandmother, who had Alzheimer's, at Bindlestiff. She was taking classes from W. Kamau Bell and doing stand-up comedy, opening for big names like Jo Koy, Ali Wong, and Hassan Minaj. Then she got a call: "Your dad is in the ER. You should go." During a botched tracheotomy, his heart stopped. By the time doctors got his heart beating again, he was brain dead. Prior to that, not knowing that it would be the last time she saw her dad, she recorded him. He told her that she should move to New York, follow her dreams, and never work for "the man." One of the last things Nicole's dad said to her was, "If you stop doing art, you will die." Three months after her dad's funeral, Nicole quit her job and moved to NYC. Check back next for Part 2 with Nicole Salaver. Photography by Mason J. We recorded this episode at Balay Kreative in October 2024.
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    28 mins

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