Rightnowish

Rightnowish is KQED’s grounded, conversational portrait of Bay Area arts and culture. It listens for the people who give a place its charge. Across its run, the series followed creators working in music, visual art, nightlife, food, performance, street interviews, sports entertainment, and community memory. Pendarvis Harshaw’s presence keeps the tone loose and intimate without losing journalistic shape. The show is at its best when a single person opens a wider map of the Bay. Timothy B. talks about Afro-futuristic surrealism, comic-book influence, gratitude, boundaries, and designing an image for the Warriors during Black History Month. An episode on queer nightlife uses Marcel Pardo A’s installation and the GLBT Historical Society archive to connect present-day Pride energy with San Francisco venues such as Finocchio’s. The pace can be celebratory. It can also slow down for grief, history, and the fragile work of preserving cultural memory. Lovemore’s Oakland interviews turn a simple question about love into a public practice of reflection, care, and self-understanding. Giulio Xavier Cetto’s episodes place jazz in bookstores, clubs, Tiny Desk sessions, and hybrid sets where Dilla, Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Kendrick Lamar can share musical space. D-Sharp’s story turns Warriors basketball into a study of sound, timing, crowd energy, and entertainment before and during the dynasty years. nic feliciano’s episode brings in migration, survival, humor, day jobs, and the stubborn freedom of not letting work for rent define the art. Rightnowish also makes space for borrowed microphones, including Immigrantly’s conversation with Meklit Hadero and its attention to immigrant experience and Ethio jazz vocals. The series’ Bay Area is not abstract. It is Lake Merritt, the Tenderloin, North Beach, Glen Park, KQED headquarters, arena timeouts, social feeds, archives, and small stages. Its register is friendly, local, and deeply curious. It respects craft without sanding off personality. It notices how language changes, how venues disappear, how scenes survive, and how artists keep making worlds anyway. For PlayNext, Rightnowish reads as a show for listeners who want culture reporting with warmth, rhythm, and actual neighborhood texture.