Last Sunday I happened to be in San Francisco and watched KALW move into its new home at Warfield Common.
RIBBON CUTTING.
The red ribbon was cut with giant scissors. Dancers scaled the sides of the building, suspended on ropes, performing aerial feats of wonder while passerby on on those big double decker tourist buses gaped.
DANCE MUSIC
This is Sandip Roy in San Francisco.
Last week I also happened to be at the South Asian Literature and Arts festival in Menlo College. There was an opening gala under open skies. As people mingled with pinot noir and tandoori chicken sliders, Kiran Malhotra from the festival welcomed the guests
KIRAN1: Festival is a collection of events conversations and performances. It is coming together of people whose ideas we believe in, stories that deserve to be heard. Literature art and conversation have the power of getting us altogether.
Some of those included poets.
POET
Even a Nobel laureate. Talking about funding.
NOBEL: Funding in the US is a constant grind
Yet again an example of disparate voices coming together in conversation.
It made me think that the value of a festival is not just an opportunity to take a selfie with an author though that happens of course. Nor is it the autographed book. Or even listening to a favourite author on stage or discovering a new one.
It’s the coming together as Kiran TK said. Of voices that would not encounter each other otherwise. My own panel at the literary festival featured three of us who had written very different books.
MODERATOR: I am particularly delighted to be here with three different authors, because they also bring three different genres. Sandip has biography meeting fiction. Vandana has a novel. Sarita has a memoir. (IF WE INCLUDE THIS LAST BIT WE CAN REMOVE THE NEXT LINES IN RED )
I had a book of nonfiction a biography. Bay Area resident Sarita Sarvate had written a memoir .And Vandana Nair had a novel about marriage.. But somehow over the course of an hour we found common ground as writers.
And in some sense that was the story of Warfield Common as well where KALW public radio is making its new home. It is about common ground. It is about coming together.
The open house this Sunday at the building was not just about KALW. Other arts and media organizations had found a home in the building from San Francisco Public Press to a Vietnamese diasporan art organization to an online radio station. And of course as befits an open house for the arts there was plenty of pizza to go around.
But it made me realize all over again that the arts need ecosystems. They need homes. And in a home with other arts organizations it becomes an arts festival of sorts, a place for cross pollination and unexpected conversations.
Often we don't know where those conversations will lead. Which is the whole point really.
Arts at its best takes us to places we didn't imagine. Even in a city we thought we knew well
Over the years I have seen San Francisco like many cities change. Tech bubbles have come. Tech bubbles have burst.
I have seen bookstores shut shop. Chains swallowed up old bookstores. Then the chains themselves shuttered stores. But arts are weird. They thrive in the cracks. Like weeds.
SO this time I found myself in Adobe bookshop in the Mission watching writers sip wine and read from their work in a literary magazine that was a labour of love. But I noticed what I had not seen the last time I was here. Other bookshops had come up though we live in a world where we complain no one reads anymore. We just scroll through reels and TikTok videos.
But a friend took me to a new bookstore in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown with a carefully curated selection of Asian books and some Sichuan pork jerky as well. In Noe Valley I noticed a new bookstore whose focus seemed to be books about love. Meanwhile in the Mission a bookstore true to its neighbourhood highlighted Latino literature.
Would all these bookstores succeed? Who knows. But that they have sprouted up speaks to a certain kind of audacity of hope.
Its that audacity of hope that led so many arts organizations to make common home in a massive building in the heart of San Francisco next to the grand Warfield theatre. And the same audacity of hope which led to South Asians in Silicon Valley to put together not another startup company but a startup lit fest.
This is Sandip Roy in San Francisco for KALW.
Producers note:
The out music is "Diamonds and Pearls" from the album Thirsty Pilgrim Songs by local Bay Area bassist Josh Thurston-Milgrom. Please support him by purchasing his music on iTunes or here: https://joshthurstonmilgrom.bandcamp.com/album/thirsty-pilgrim-songs