The story of Saikat Chakrabarti begins in a time when his parents' and ancestors' country was being torn apart, almost literally.

In this episode, meet and get to know Saikat. These days, he's busy knocking on doors and otherwise hitting the ground in a bid to represent San Francisco in the US Congress. As I write this, just last week, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi announced that she would not run for a 20th term. Timing!

Let's go back to mid-Nineteenth Century India. Because his dad's family is Hindu, they were forced to relocate after Indian/Pakistani partition, fleeing their home country of Bangladesh for Kolkata (Calcutta) in India. Folks had warned Saikat's grandfather, a school teacher, to leave, and they did.

Once in Kolkata, his grandfather opened a school largely for the kids of other refugees living in the area. Owing to the school's success, he was able to secure a one-bedroom apartment for his family of 12—he, his wife (Saikat's grandmother), and 10 kids, including Saikat's father. Saikat has been back to that apartment. He says that, walking around that neighborhood all these years later, folks still recognize his dad, Samir, thanks to what his grandfather did for them and their family.

His mom, Sima, had it better than his dad. But still, she went to a school with dirt floors. Saikat looks to his ancestors' struggles—the communities they were part of, and how those communities came together to address issues the government neglected—for inspiration today.

When his dad was young, a friend took him to an office where he was pitched to come to the United States. There was a whole set-up. The sell was simply the so-called American Dream.

Saikat's parents met in India through an arrangement. Their respective parents knew someone who set it all up. They met and got married about a week later in a field. The visa his dad had applied for at that office came through after he'd been married, making it a bigger decision than it would've been if he were still single. He was also the primary earner in his own family, and they didn't want him to leave. He decided to take that leap regardless.

His dad showed up in the US with $8 in his pocket and no job yet secured. He slept on a friends' couch in Manhattan and hit the pavement, résumé in hand. And it worked. He got a job.

Saikat's dad had studied civil engineering in college. His first job in his new country was with a company that built skyscrapers … NYC skyscrapers. It was 1979. Saikat's mom came to join her husband soon after, and they had their first kid, Saikat's older sister, Urmi, while living in Queens. His dad and his mom also experienced their first cold-weather winter that year.

After a stint in New York, Samir moved his family to Pittsburgh. He had visited there in the summer, liked it, got a job offer, but relocated in the winter. Once again, the weather got the better of the young family.

Seeking a warmer climate, they moved to Texas, first to Houston, and then to Fort Worth.

At this point in the podcast, I decided to do something I've never done in the eight years since Storied: San Francisco began. And that's because I've never had any guests on the show who are from where I'm from. I chose to dork out with Saikat about my hometown. Thank you for indulging us (me, really).

The first question I had for Saikat is: What hospital were you born in? Harris Methodist. Holy shit, same! He asked me my age (52), what schools I went to (Bruce Shulkey Elementary, Wedgwood Middle School [Saikat went there for one year], and Southwest High School). What a fun turn on this podcast, me rattling off the schools I went to like born-and-raised San Franciscans do. Heh.

I digress into a sidebar about the race riot that happened at my high school during my junior year. You'll have to listen, or you can read a little more about it here.

Then we get to hear about Saikat's experience growing up in the same city. His family lived in a suburb (apparently not far from where my parents still live), and he describes his early life as fairly standard—hanging out with friends, going to the mall (the same mall I was a regular at a decade or so before). But, being an Indian-American, Saikat experienced racism I was privileged enough to avoid.

Saikat makes a distinction, though, between intentional, malicious racism and what I'd call accidental or unintentional racism. It's an important distinction, and he says most of what he experienced in Fort Worth was the less-harmful variety.

He summarizes his childhood thusly—family, school, the Bengali-American community in Fort Worth. One member of that community, Saikat's best friend from childhood, lives downstairs from him in San Francisco today.

His whole world in high school was, as Saikat puts it: hip-hop, basketball, and math. He got into Harvard, which he says he didn't expect. Many of his friends went to UT Austin (my alma mater), and he figured he'd go there, too. But he wasn't about to pass up the opportunity to attend one of the most highly regarded universities in the country.

But Harvard was a culture shock for Saikat. The Fort Worth community he'd known all his life was working- and middle-class. The student body at Harvard was largely kids who came from money and had wildly different interests than he did. Saikat went into his shell his freshman year. As he emerged from that shell, he found his people at Harvard.

In 2007, Saikat graduated from Harvard with a degree in computer science. He'd spent a summer in San Francisco between his junior and senior years, and loved it. All his life, The City had been presented as this place where "cool shit happened." Movies, music, TV shows, skateboarding, the LGBTQIA and civil rights movements … and of course, the fledgling internet. Tech and social justice—both existed in a cutting-edge environment here.

He lived in New York City for one year immediately after he graduated. We riff on life in NYC vs. life here, agreeing on most aspects. When it was time for Saikat to find a new place to live, San Francisco was the obvious choice. The woman he was dating (his wife and mother of his child today) went to school at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, where he visited often. But even her friends told Saikat that he was much more a NorCal-type.

Unable to find housing anywhere else in SF, Saikat first landed in Park Merced. He was happy to have a San Francisco address, but didn't feel like he was living in The City. A trip to The Mission changed that quickly.

Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Saikat.

We recorded this podcast at Duboce Park Cafe in October 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Listen in as I chat with SFFILM's Soph Schultz Rocha and Keith Zwolfer all about this year's Schools at Doc Stories program, which runs Nov. 6–10.

Learn more about this year's film festival at SFFILM's website.

We recorded this podcast at SFFILM's Filmhouse in South of Market in October 2025.

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Ian and I talk about how big baseball was in his life in his high school and early college years. He was a left-handed pitcher, which made him attractive to coaches. By the time he transferred to UC Berkeley, though, sports receded and academics took over. He played what's called club ball, which Ian explains is something between varsity high school-level and community college.

At Berkeley, Ian majored in renewable energy, a topic that shows up in the art he does today. He minored in education, something that shows up in his coaching of kids these days. He lived in Berkeley while going to school there, and speaks to that experience.

Ian moved back to The City after he graduated, in 2014. But, as he puts it, since then, he's "left and come back many times." First was Seattle for a summer. Then Portland for a year and a half. We go on a bit of a sidebar after I offer up my opinion that some folks in the Pacific Northwest can come across as friendly, but they can also be rather passive-aggressive.

After Portland was New York City, where Ian lived for half a year. Then Nashville for three months. And after that, he got into a teaching program in Madrid, Spain, which I express my jealousy of. (Barcelona is one of my favorite places on Earth.)

He was in Madrid right as the COVID pandemic hit, in fact. The teaching program he was in allowed him plenty of downtime—he worked essentially four days a week, four hours per day. And a lot of that time on his hands was filled with a rediscovery of doing art. His plan had been to leave at the end of a school year, and that happened to coincide with the onset of COVID.

His return to his hometown, and his time here since 2020, has been spent trying to do art full-time. And that's where Ian's and my life intersect. It happened one day in the very location where we recorded this podcast: 540 Bar.

Break Fake Rules was born when Ian lived in Spain. It started with stickers. He handed them out—to friends, to strangers. He came up with the phrase and liked it, among other reasons, for its openendedness. He feels "Break Fake Rules" requires participation, something he sees as going against the way technology is leading us. But BFR isn't the only artistic endeavor in Ian's life.

Ian does a lot of collage work. Lately, he's been cutting up vinyl from discarded billboard signs. He'd tried working with paper and glue to make murals, but the elements always got the better of his outdoor art. Old billboard vinyl is the solution he's been looking for.

Those of you who follow Storied:SF on Instagram might have recently noticed a few collaboration reels between us and Break Fake Rules. Ian approached me a couple months ago about being on a series he produces called "People Should Know," where someone—an artist, a small-business owner, a podcaster—comes on and speaks with a fencing-masked interviewer to talk about what they do and what folks should know about what they do. You can check out full-length videos of everyone who's been on People Should Know on the Break Fake Rules website. It was a lot of fun to do, so thanks, Ian!

In asking Ian to let people know how to find him, we decided to start off with our favorite platform—in real life! He's currently selling furniture at Stuff by Luxe. He's got Break Fake Rules stuff there, too, as well as some of his 2D and 3D art. His website is BreakFakeRules.com. Find @breakfakerules and his personal account, @ianglues, on Instagram.

Listen in as I chat with Tommy Leyva, who has been decorating the fuck out of his home on Divisadero for nearly 20 years.

Whether you're able to drop by, now or until a few days after Halloween, check out the video below the photos on this page.

Follow Tommy and the Divisadero Halloween House on Instagram @divisaderohalloweenhouse.

We recorded this podcast at the Divisadero Halloween House in October 2025.

Photos and video by Jeff Hunt

This one starts out a little differently. Ian Paratore was born and raised in San Francisco, but he's moving away. This week. To Oakland.

Ian's dad, Vince Paratore, moved into a Victorian in The Haight in the late-Seventies/early Eighties, and is still there. That's the house Ian grew up in starting roughly 10 years later. Both of his parents are artists and teachers. His dad came to San Francisco from Syracuse, New York, to study photography at SF State. And his mom, Valerie O'Riordan, is from Long Beach in Southern California. She moved to The City to work with ACT (American Conservatory Theater).

The house at Page and Clayton is the only place Ian's dad has lived in SF. I asked Ian whether he knows any stories from that house before he was born in the early Nineties. Both his parents being "natural hosts," there were many parties. Nowadays, when his dad is out of town, Ian will sometimes have parties of his own at his dad's place. When he does, he says his dad often offers up stories from back in the day. One involves a party with so many people already inside cramming a hallway, folks had to come and go via the first escape.

Back in the day, his dad was a general manager at restaurants like Stars, Donatello, Garibaldi's, and Beach Chalet, which he helped open. Both his parents were big in the San Francisco restaurant scene.

We turn to Ian's early life, which he experienced in the mid-Nineties to early 2000s. As a kid, and a kid without a backyard, he spent a lot of time in Golden Gate Park and The Panhandle. He hung out on playgrounds and basketball courts. He adds that "the craziness of Haight Street was just … normal." I ask Ian about Skates on Haight, which I knew from my Eighties/Nineties skateboarding days from ads in magazines like Thrasher. (Marcella, who took photos for this episode and was with us at the table, chimes in at this point.)

Ian rattles off some spots from his childhood in The Haight—places like Gus's before it was known as Gus's, an Ethiopian restaurant, and a musical instrument store.

In high school, Ian got into visual arts and playing sports—mainly baseball and basketball. By the time he got to college, he played baseball "at a high level," and art fell more or less by the wayside. More on that in Part 2. But during high school, though he took art classes, sports dominated his life.

We end Part 1 with Ian rattling off the San Francisco schools he went to. He did a stint at College of San Mateo (CSM) before getting into UC Berkeley, which was the first time he lived outside his childhood home. He had flirted with college on the East Coast before deciding to stay closer to home.

Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Ian. And join us tomorrow for a very special, timely bonus episode.

Follow Ian and Break Fake Rules on Instagram.

We recorded this podcast at 540 Bar in the Inner Richmond in October 2025.

Photography by Marcella Sanchez

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1.

It was 2010, and seeing that guy with the broken guitar on Risa's next visit to SF was the nail in the coffin, so to speak. She was moving here. One of her friends who already lived here found a spot in The Sunset for her. She packed up a car and drove north with her dad. She didn't necessarily have a plan back then, but Risa and I share how The City just got both of us and hasn't let go.

Risa tells the story of how her parents moved to Japan briefly when she was 18. She asked her mom, "So, why did you come back (to California)?" And her mom told her (paraphrasing), "Because you wouldn't be able to do what you're doing there, you wouldn't have the same opportunities." It further affirmed for Risa her decision to move to San Francisco and pursue art.

I ask Risa to catch us up on the last 15 years of her life. Generally speaking, she's been working to find her voice as an artist. She got into letterpress-printing, which she did for more than 10 years. She started a company with a friend and worked there for three years before branching out on her own. Doing so wasn't easy, but in hindsight, it made Risa stronger. She talks about a specific strain of misogyny that presented itself to women printmakers as well as how Risa handled that nonsense.

That solo venture started off as a stationery company. She reached back to childhood memories, of a time when she witnessed letters coming to her mom from Japan as well her mom's messages back to her homeland. Risa saw those as lifelines to her mom's people back home, and wanted to preserve those memories and emotions and help others to do the same. Papallama was born.

Before we talk about another fun thing Risa is up to, I need to express my newish-found love for 540 Bar on Clement. It's where Risa holds monthly "Drink and Draw" events, and it's quickly become one of my new favorite spots in The City. Risa started her monthly art events at the bar in 2022. The idea came from her letterpress days, when she'd do frequent "Letter-Writing Saturdays." She told her friend Leejay, one of 540's owners, about it, and they decided to bring that same idea to the bar.

Shortly after they hatched the plan, though, Risa's dad passed away. The first drink and draw was a month later, and so many of Risa's friends turned out for her. What started out as every second Thursday of the month now takes place at 540 Bar on the third Thursdays of every month.

Risa speaks in a little more detail of the care and intention she puts into her Drink and Draw events. For me, it's an extension of her art as well as her love of community. But it's also just her being a good host. The next Drink and Draw takes place the same day that this podcast drops—October 16, 2025. See ya there!

The conversation shifts to Risa talking about taking part in our Every Kinda People show at Mini Bar. And we end the podcast with Risa sharing all the ways to find her, both online and in real life. Follow her on Instagram @risa_iwasaki_culbertson. Her website is risaculbertson.com.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Risa Iwasaki Culbertson was born in Japan.

In this episode, meet and get to know Risa, one of the 12 artists in Every Kinda People, our group show at Mini Bar. Please join us this Sunday, Oct. 19, from 4–7 p.m. at Mini Bar for our Closing Party happy hour. Some of the artists will be on hand, as will friendly bartenders and me (Jeff).

Back to Risa, though. Her mom is Japanese and her dad is from Ventura County in Southern California. Risa spent her first five or six years in Japan before her parents moved to California. She has memories of life in Japan before they moved. And after the move, Risa often went back to visit her grandmother. Risa says that, as a kid, she loved going back and forth between two very different cultures

Her dad was in the military, which is what brought him to Japan, where he met his wife. Risa is their only child, something she and I go on a bit of a sidebar about. I'm not an only child, but I've met and befriended my fair share of well-adjusted only children. Hell, I married one.

Risa found creativity early, and ran with it. Her parents were older, and being half-American, half-Japanese, she didn't feel like she fully belonged in either culture. Risa might've gotten her creativity from her mom, who did pottery, quilting, and other artistic things. Her dad was "a mad scientist of sorts," she says. He was into taking things apart and repurposing found objects.

In Southern California, Risa spent time with other Hapa kids. Her mom was part of a large Japanese community, and there were plenty of mixed-race kids among that group.

She's very much a product of the Eighties and Nineties and Southern California. She remembers the beginning of grunge and flannels. Risa remembers vividly when Kurt Cobain died (1994). Middle school for her happened in Orange County.

Risa did hula dancing and tap dancing for many years, always while also painting and drawing. In high school, her art teacher was switched out and replaced with a nun who told the kids they couldn't use black inks. It felt to young Risa like too religious of a message, and it instilled in her an attitude of not wanting anyone to tell her what she can and cannot do with her art. She never took another art class.

She was also something of a social butterfly in her high school years. Risa had different friend groups and in hindsight, feels like they were constantly getting together and doing things.

Then we turn to what got Risa out of Southern California. One friend she met in college moved back to San Francisco, and another friend from down south wanted to move here. She visited The City and remembers sitting in a cafe talking to strangers. She felt then and there that the friendliness was right for her, and something she wasn't getting in Orange County.

I share a quick story of being in Orange County and getting phone directions to a bar. Unbeknownst to me and my friends that night, the map put us on a highway … on foot. Yep.

We rewind a little to chat about Risa's time in college. She always wanted to be at least art-adjacent, and so she took classes on manufacturing and even calculus. Thing is, she ended up liking calculus.

Earlier in life, she sold stuff she made through catalogs she also created. That early entrepreneurship informed some business classes she later took in college, including business law. It all lead to Risa's getting a business degree. Right away, she started recognizing a disconnect between art and business.

Back to her first impression of San Francisco, that day in that Haight Street cafe made The City feel like a place where she could get to know people. Risa shares a story that happened right before her move here. It involves a man boarding a BART train she and her friends were on. He had a broken guitar. They'd made googly eyes at each other, but she and her friends were too scared to talk with him. When he got off the train, he looked back and waved. Risa figured she'd never see this guy again.

Three months later, she was back to visit her friend who lived here. She'd thought about him, but figured there was no way to actually find him. Then, as you can guess, it happened. Risa says she's still friends with that guy to this day.

Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Risa, which includes the story of her move to San Francisco.

We recorded this podcast at Risa's studio in the Inner Richmond in August 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Listen in as I chat with Broke-Ass Stuart about, well, a lot of stuff. But we also talk about Stuart's new book, The Worst of Broke-Ass Stuart: 20 Years of Love, Death, and Dive Bars.

The book is available at your favorite local indie bookstore and also at Bookshop.org. And get very affordable tickets for next Friday's (Oct. 17, 2025) book-launch party at Kilowatt here.

We recorded this podcast at Emperor Norton's Boozeland in September 2025.

Photos of Stuart by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1.

To get us caught up to what Lisa is doing these days, we go back to her arrival in The Bay. Her work at the prop shop led to some other jobs, but competition was fierce and she sought a way to integrate art into the labor she undertook. She found it when the production of James and the Giant Peach hired her to do puppet fabrication. The work took place in a warehouse in South of Market and it wasn't quite as glamorous as people think. In fact, it was grueling, but rewarding.

Her boss on that job was a woman named Kat. That was 30 years ago, and the two are good friends today. In fact, Kat is shooting a documentary about Lisa's incredible life called Made of Iron. More on that below.

Lisa wanted to stick with animation, but was never able to get an art director job. She considered moving to LA, but shut that down pretty quickly. And so she decided to learn a trade—something her dad did back in the day. She went to a job fair and asked what the hardest trade represented there that day was. Lisa's trade became ironwork.

Her introduction to the folks who did ironwork was a little rough. She was required to visit job sites and get an ironworker to sponsor her. It took her six months to get hired. She met a guy named Danny Prince who helped her get work in The City making precasts (think parking garages). She'd work during the week and go to classes for ironworking on Saturdays.

Ironwork has, quite possibly since its inception, been very much a "man's" world. Lisa ran head-first into bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination from the get-go. But a combination of her own drive and the advice of a few mentors helped her get through it. There might have even been some "Go fuck yourself"s along the way, too.

That said, the highs were high and the lows were low. "I never cried on the job," Lisa told me. But the tears would come once she was home in the evenings. Still, she persevered, and things got better and better for her.

One of her early favorite jobs was on the then-new California Academy of Sciences. Besides it just being a really cool building, Lisa got to do many different jobs all around the place. She says it was incredible watching it all come together.

Another job highlight was Lisa's work on the arena that came to be known as Chase Center (and for Valkyries fans, "Ballhalla"). Photos of Lisa helping build Chase can be seen in the gallery to the left here. Another was Marin General Hospital. And then there was the Golden Gate Bridge.

After Chase Center and another, lesser job (and a divorce), Lisa got offered a job working on the Suicide Deterrent Net on my favorite bridge. But it wasn't just any job. She would be foreperson. She didn't think she could do it because she didn't know bridge work (despite working a little on the new Bay Bridge). After being told it was foreperson or nothing, she decided to take the job.

Of course the crew she would oversee comprised all bridge-work veterans. Her approach was to be respectful of that. And her crew respected her back for it. The job entails taking out old pieces and beefing up the infrastructure of the bridge, which was finished back in 1933.

Lisa talks at some length about a societal need for us all to have more respect for labor. I'm with her 100 percent. There's a lot that we take for granted every day, all over the place. Many people worked and still do work hard as hell so that we can have shit like roads and sidewalks, transit tunnels, housing, and so much more. We should recognize and respect that work.

We end the episode with Lisa's thoughts about life, her work, and what she loves about San Francisco and the Bay Area.

You can donate to help fund Kat's documentary at the Made of Iron website. And follow that adventure on Instagram @madeofirondocumentary.

Lisa Davidson is an ironworker with Local 377 San Francisco. Her team currently does ironwork on the Golden Gate Bridge. But we'll get to that.

In this episode, S8 E3, meet and get to know Lisa. I first did that back in May at our Keep It Local art show at Babylon Burning (thanks, Mike and Judy!). Someone at the party that night approached me to let me know that there was a person there who works on the best bridge in the world (fact) and that I should meet them. I love when people really get me. Right away, I was drawn in by Lisa's warmth, charm, and sense of humor.

And so we sat down outside in Fort Mason in early August and Lisa shared her life story.

She was raised feeling like she had complete freedom. It was something Lisa didn't realize at the time, but looking back, it became clear to her. She was raised in Framingham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, in a liberal household.

Her grandparents lived in Boston itself, and she loved visiting them when she was a kid. Her grandfather ran a tchotchke store in town called House of Hurwitz, and Lisa says that the place had a big influence on her outlook. It was located on the edge of what they call, to this day, the "Combat Zone" (think: red-light district). Her "wheelin' and dealin'" grandpa sold mylar balloons to the Boston Gardens for events held there. He told young Lisa that she could blow up balloons and that that could be her future.

Lisa has a brother four years younger than she is. Her dad was an electrician. One of his clients was a lithograph press in Boston. He'd sometimes get paged for a job and have to leave his family, although Lisa now wonders whether he just wanted to get away from time to time.

When she was a senior in high school, her parents divorced, despite being a very loving couple up to that point. She says her mom was "crazy in an I Love Lucy way. She was raised in the Fifties the way many young women at that time were, in a way that did its best to stifle any creativity. Suffice to say that her mom had fun decorating the house Lisa grew up in.

Despite her and her family's Jewishness, Lisa revolted and wanted to go to Catholic school or just become a preppy L.L. Bean-type kid. She of course regrets rejecting the norms of her family nowadays. It was what it was. The family was more culturally Jewish than religious, though, something Lisa says was a huge influence on who she's become as an adult.

She graduated high school and went to college at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It wasn't Ivy League, but it was (and is) something of a preppy school. Where Lisa grew up, there was an expectation that kids would go to college, and so she went. It wasn't super far from home, but it wasn't close either. Her parents did suggest that Lisa maybe go to art school. But in her family, it was the kid dismissing that idea. "That's a not real school," young Lisa told them.

She liked sports. At Amherst, she joined the crew team. She liked the competition and how good of shape it got you in. She liked it, but it was a lot of pressure. She graduated, took a year off working odd jobs, then dove into art school.

So next up was Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She was surprised she got in, and even navigated a bit of impostor syndrome. Surprised by the school's acceptance of her and feeling somewhat intimidated by other artist students, Lisa ended up doing printmaking. Rather than aiming for a master's degree, she sought a second bachelor's. Her studies had her spending a lot of time in the school's foundry, where she discovered welding. She loved it.

During her time back in Amherst, she'd heard of a guy who was going to Alaska. (Lisa and I go off-topic into our shared distaste for camping at this point in the conversation.) Back to the Alaska story, her mom was fully supportive and even took her shopping at an Army Navy store. She went there and worked in canneries through the summer between her junior and senior years at Amherst. While she was up north, doing jobs all over the state, she met folks from California. From the stories they told her, it became a place she wanted to go. But first, RISD.

In Rhode Island, she met a guy from Danville in the East Bay. When his family learned of her interest in our state, they invited Lisa to spend a summer with them, which she did. And she and her friend came to The City as often as they could.

After those few months, she knew that California—and specifically, The Bay—was for her. She needed to go back and finish that second round of college in Rhode Island, and she did. After that, Lisa "beelined it" back to Oakland. She found work in a prop shop making sculptures out of foam with a chainsaw.

Check back this Thursday for Part 2 with Lisa Davidson.

We recorded this podcast at Equator Coffee in Fort Mason in August 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt