Crosscurrents

Ahead of the Jordan-Algeria World Cup match, KALW's Hana Baba headed over to a favorite community store—South Berkeley Meat and Produce. People visit from all over the state to shop for nostalgic items from Algeria. It’s got a large butcher counter with all kinds of halal meat cuts, including a staple Algerian sausage called Merguez.

How far would you go to get your hands on a cassette tape? Today, we meet two music archivers from Oakland. First an Afghan man’s odyssey to preserve his cultural music. Then, a young woman from Sudan is digitizing old music cassettes for a new diaspora generation.

The Taliban retook power in Afghanistan in 2021, after the hasty conclusion to a 20 year U.S. occupation. Since then, music has been officially banned in the country. Musicians are driven underground, instruments are destroyed, and recordings are contraband.

Here in the East Bay, one Afghan-American is working hard to preserve what he can. He’s digitizing tapes he’s sourced from back home and posting them in an online database he started calling the Afghan Cassette Archive. But getting those tapes out of Afghanistan is not as simple as an online order… It's an illegal, expensive, and dangerous odyssey.

Reporter Christopher Alam met up with Omid J, aka OMJVinyls, at his Oakland studio to check out his rare collection.

Today, how the political fight over college access is impacting Bay Area students. Then, we bring you readings on grief, intimacy and rest from Black Women writers.

With graduation season wrapping up, many teenagers around the Bay Area are celebrating the end of high school and are making plans to begin college. But in Washington DC, policymakers are fighting over college access.

In the past year, the Trump Administration has worked quickly to dismantle the Department of Education. And one of the major programs they want to eliminate is called TRIO, a federally-funded initiative that helps low-income students and those who would be the first in their families to go to college. Thousands of those students in the Bay Area get support from TRIO programs to get into college and graduate. 

KALW reporter Anna Casalme visited two programs in San Francisco to understand what this political fight means for students. 

“When We Exhale” is a new anthology collection of poetry, essays, and other writings, where Black women reflect on rest, grief, intimacy, cultural memory and healing. Jenee Darden, is the host of the KALW’s Sights and Sounds show recently welcomed the authors behind the anthology to our live event space in downtown SF. It was a night of poetry, fellowship, and connection.

In this excerpt from the event, we begin with Jenee’s conversation with one of the book’s co-editors, Alie Jones. Then, we hear “A recipe for Exhale Cake” by Adrienne Danyelle Oliver. And, writer Ayodele Nzinga brings us an excerpt of her piece “a breath in three movements.” 

One San Francisco band has been going strong for 144 seasons. Today, we’re hitting the high notes with the Golden Gate Park Band’s music director. Then, the Conservatory of Flowers’ corpse flower is about to bloom again. Plus, we stop by the San Francisco dragon boat festival!

If you go out to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on any given Sunday from April to September… and you wander over to the concourse between the California Academy of Sciences and the DeYoung museum of fine arts… you’ll hear the Golden Gate Park Band playing at the Spreckels Temple of Music. And, when I say any Sunday, I mean it. Because the band is now in their 144th season. That’s since 1882!

And though the concerts have been happening for nearly a century and half, the music is very eclectic. They’re a blend of all types of music from soul, to Disney songs, to Ukrainian music, and so much more. 

German Gonzalez is the current music director and conductor of the Band. He recently spoke with KALW’s Jenee Darden for the Sights and Sounds Show. In this excerpt from their conversation, German talks about his music journey and what he's looking forward to performing with his band.

Over the weekend, San Francisco’s Conservatory of Flowers announced that their corpse flower, named 'Scarlet,' would be blooming in the next 7 to 14 days. It’s an event that usually makes the news because these flowers can take up to ten years to reach their first bloom and they can smell like… death. 

But they’re also endangered. And one of the Conservatory’s neighbors, the California Academy of Sciences, has been working with a national effort to preserve this rare plant's DNA. KALW’s Wren Farrell took a look at the program in 2024 when the Academy’s corpse flower ‘Mirage’ had its own bloom. 

As the Bay Area summer heats up, more people are spending time by the water, and sometimes you might catch the rhythmic and competitive sounds of Dragon Boat Racing. The sport is over two thousand years old and originates in China. The boats are long, thin and often decorated with dragon heads and tails.

They are also very fast, powered by a team of either 10 or 20 people, these boats are propelled quickly with top tier teams hitting an average of 70-80 strokes per minute. And this Saturday the San Francisco Dragon Boat Festival is kicking off its first races at Lake Merced! 

Reporter Jacky Chiu, headed down to Lake Merced to bring us this story from 2016.