SFRW Issue One is out! / Party February 28!

Dear readers,

It is so great to let you know that the first issue of San Francisco Review of Whatever is out, and making its way to early subscribers and pre-orderers. ← You can join them at those links! You can also pick up a copy at City Lights or Scenic Routes Community Bicycle Center in San Francisco, and at East Bay Booksellers (happily revived post-fire in a new location), Bathers Library, or Pegasus Books in the East Bay.

Importantly: we’re having a party! Come celebrate the release of Issue One on Friday, February 28, at Et al. in the Mission, San Francisco. There will be conversation: Beatrice Kilat and Megan Riley will talk about FASHION; Caitlyn Galloway and I will talk about HER PROCESS MAKING OUR BEAUTIFUL AND IMPRESSIVE LOGO; and Kelly Pendergrast and Kate Rhoades will talk about DONALD JUDD. Say hello to us and to each other. Buy SFRWs for your friends and enemies. Look at the art show that will still be up. Doors open at 6:00 p.m., and the program starts at 7:00 p.m. Conversation is the greatest pleasure!

WHAT’S IN ISSUE ONE? A CONSTELLATION OF ESSAYS AND TEXTS THAT LOOK INWARD AND OUTWARD FROM THE BAY AREA:

In “Exit Interview,” Claudia La Rocco takes stock of the Bay—its artists, skies, and everyday places—upon leaving it. What is on the surface and what's understated? How do we move with and around each other? Who and what are the points of reference? And isn't it very beautiful?

“Everybody in Blundstones” poses another enduring question: why does San Francisco dress like that? Beatrice Kilat knows why, and in this by turns sharp, gestural, historicizing, and fond work of observation that conjures a distinct image of the city, she explains.

In a sequence of images and texts that read like film frames drawn out, here dilated and there constricted, the ebb and flow of one tide on two shores, Sofía Córdova of Oakland and Puerto Rico provides the review with a dispatch: “Felt from the outer rim.”

In “Abject Permanence,” Misha Crafts reviews When Monsters Speak, a reader collecting Susan Stryker’s hugely influential writing, ranging from the 90s to the present. In Stryker’s work, Crafts recognizes a rallying cry for trans rights that is now more essential than ever before.  

Caitlyn Galloway, a dahlia farmer in the city, artist, and sign painter, and Johnny Ray Huston, a writer, artist, and peer counselor for San Franciscans experiencing homelessness, are in conversation, to compare lives and practices that are closely tied to our tenuous ground.

Kelly Pendergrast recalls her visit to Donald Judd’s concrete Marfa earthworks in order to consider another disturbing set of rectangles, the fortress of shipping containers walling the people out of Berkeley’s People’s Park. What might a healthier geometry look like? She gets to that too, in “Bad Shapes.”

We asked Jordan Stein to write about coming home to San Francisco, as a sort of sight-unseen response to Claudia La Rocco’s exit essay. He approached the assignment by giving himself an assignment: to walk up one of our many hills, take in the view, and record the extemporaneous observations along his path. “A Jack Spicer–type transmission” is the result in this warm and elevated text: “The Signal.”

While on the phone with a friend, Patrick Redford spotted a pair of tennis players at a city court and realized the parallel shapes of their match and his conversation. In “Game, Point” he draws out the volley, describing the creative, collaborative act in whatever its medium. 

Issue One also features a new comic by Kate Rhoades (you don’t want us to spoil it); a cloud interlude by Sean McFarland; reflections, omens, anecdotes, lists, and recommendations by Javier Arbona Homar, Liat Berdugo, Justin Carder, Wren Farrell, James Lee, Charlie Macquarie, Isabel Pabán Freed, Steuart Pittman, and Megan Riley; and last but absolutely not least, a classifieds section with many interesting items to peruse, consider, and reply to. 

Until next time, especially February 28,

Elisabeth Nicula
Editor
San Francisco Review of Whatever

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