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Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10)

Storied: San Francisco

Release Date: 03/25/2025

Lincoln Mitchell on His New Book About George Moscone (S7 bonus) show art Lincoln Mitchell on His New Book About George Moscone (S7 bonus)

Storied: San Francisco

Check out my conversation with previous guest as we chat about Lincoln’s new book, Three Years Our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco. Look for Lincoln at the following events for his new book: April 29: He will be in conversation with Bill Issel discussing the book and what it can teach us about San Francisco today. Hosted by the at the Roar Shack, 34 7th Street, from 6–8 p.m. May 1: He will be in conversation at the University Club with Corey Busch, who served on Moscone’s senate staff, was a senior member of Moscone’s mayoral campaign staff, press...

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In Part 2, Kundan tell us about her decision to move to San Diego for college, where she would join her older sister, who’d been there for several years. But before that move south, she joined her sister and her sister’s friends on a backpacking adventure in Europe. After some time there, Kundan and her sister went to India to visit family there. Then she came back to go to school. What began as the study of psychology gradually gave way for Kundan to take more and more art and film classes. Eventually, she re-declared as an art major. She graduated in five years, and among the friends she...

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Storied: San Francisco

Listen in as SFFILM Director of Programming Jessie Fairbanks and I discuss this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival. Topics include: SFFILM’s festival spotlight The film Please visit for more info, including where to RSVP for free events and where to get tickets for ticketed events. We recorded this episode over Zoom in April 2025.

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Storied: San Francisco

It’s not often that I feature someone for the first time who’s already been on the podcast … not once, but twice. Such is the case for my friend, artist/bartender/nonprofit arts organizer Kundan Baidwan. Before we dig into this one, please go back and check out Kundan’s previous appearances on the show: (2018) (2024) Those podcasts were about important things in Kundan’s life—the legendary SF bar where she’s bartended for more than a decade, and the Indian arts nonprofit she started with friends just within the last year or so. This episode is all about Kundan herself. We...

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Storied: San Francisco

The Tenderloin Museum turns 10 years old this summer, and I for one am here to celebrate that. We first visited early last year, when we talked with museum Executive Director Katie Conry. This bonus episode is all about the many, many programs going on as they approach a milestone anniversary. To start us off, we hear from Program Director Alex Spotto. Alex shares many (but not all) of the upcoming events Tenderloin Museum is either producing or affiliated with. They include: a new production of the (opens tomorrow, April 11!) an art show by (up through May) (film screening and...

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Storied: San Francisco

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Woody's brief time at UC Berkeley across The Bay. During that one year of college, he lived at his grandmother's house in the Outer Richmond. His parents had recently split up, and both his parents moved, separately, to Marin.   In fact, Woody says, his parents' moves north forced him to think about and start to consider that San Francisco was and would perhaps always be his home. Time has proven that to be true, of course. But to his young-adult mind, it just felt right for that moment. He'd spent a little time in Marin, and it...

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Storied: San Francisco

Ava Roy grew up in rural Western Massachusetts, in an area rich in literature and theater. Ava met Ann Podlozny back east before Ava came to California to attend Stanford, which is where she created a theater production group. Today, Ava is the founding artistic director of , a 25-year-old theater company based in San Francisco. Ann, who’ll play Lady Macbeth in an upcoming, all-woman production of Macbeth, is based in London and came back to be in the play and to support her friend Ava in whatever way she can. While at Stanford, Ava let her art play, in the sense of public displays such as...

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Storied: San Francisco

On his mom’s side, Woody LaBounty’s San Francisco roots go back to 1850. In Part 1, get to know Woody, who, today, is the president and CEO of . But he’s so, so much more than that. He begins by tracing his lineage back to the early days of the Gold Rush. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather arrived here mid-Nineteenth Century. Woody even knows what ship he was on and the exact day that it arrived in the recently christened city of San Francisco. On Woody’s dad’s side, the roots are about 100 years younger than that. His father grew up in Fort Worth, Texas (like I did). His...

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Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10) show art Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10)

Storied: San Francisco

In Part 2, we start off talking about the significance of opening a Latinx-owned bookstore in the heart of the Mission, on 24th Street.   The folks who run Medicine for Nightmares call the entire space at 3036 24th Street—the bookstore in front and gallery in back—"The Portal." Josiah talks about the intention to utilize that gallery space to highlight art and artists in the Mission. The gallery is also often home to community group meetings, further solidifying its importance. That's my kind of mixed-use. In the three years that MfN has been open, they've hosted more than 800 events...

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Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares, Part 1 (S7E10) show art Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares, Part 1 (S7E10)

Storied: San Francisco

This episode is a sequel podcast nearly five years in the making. We last talked with poet back in 2020, over Zoom, in the early COVID days. In this podcast, we pick up, more or less, with where we left off that summer. Back in those days, Josiah Luis still worked at in North Beach. He walks us through that store’s process of rearranging around social-distancing protocols that were new at the time. He says that the early days of the pandemic meant hunkering down at home and reading-reading-reading. But once it was deemed safe to reopen City Lights, Josiah was really happy to be back. One...

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In Part 2, we start off talking about the significance of opening a Latinx-owned bookstore in the heart of the Mission, on 24th Street.
 
The folks who run Medicine for Nightmares call the entire space at 3036 24th Street—the bookstore in front and gallery in back—"The Portal." Josiah talks about the intention to utilize that gallery space to highlight art and artists in the Mission. The gallery is also often home to community group meetings, further solidifying its importance. That's my kind of mixed-use. In the three years that MfN has been open, they've hosted more than 800 events in the gallery.
 
To couch our discussion of how they choose which books to sell at Medicine for Nightmares, Josiah points out that the last time he checked, something like 75 or 80 percent of bookstores in the US are white-owned. He shares stories of sneaking out of his home in Marin when he was a teenager, driving to The City, and going to City Lights, which was open until midnight in those days. It was there, though, that Josiah discovered Latinx poets, writers who spoke his language, literally.
 
For him and his business partner, Tân Khánh Cao, it was always about wanting to see themselves reflected on the shelves. Josiah mentions a long-held, racist belief by publishers that Black and brown folks don't read. That, of course, is nonsense, and the bookstore stands with others in direct defiance and opposition to that mindset.
 
On their first day of business, Josiah says that a young mom came in with her kid and went to the children's books section of the store. He and Tân noticed that she was crying, so they went over to see if everything was OK. "I've never been in a bookstore before and seen a kids' book that looks like my kid," she told them. That was the first day.
 
We then turn to the story of how they came up with the name of the store. Joshia and Tân were throwing out potential names to each other out front on the sidewalk one day before they opened. "Each one of us was coming up with a worse name than the other," he says, half-jokingly. One of them suggested looking at titles from Sun-Ra, a musician they both like. One of his songs is called "Medicine for a Nightmare." It clicked for them instantly.
 
Then we talk about the growing call to ban books in the US. In my opinion, simply opening for business and turning the lights on is an act of defiance for Josiah and Tân. He goes on to state that they're well aware that they could be shut down and/or arrested every day. He says they get harassing phone calls from time to time, in fact.
 
We end the episode with Josiah's thoughts about our theme on Storied: San Francisco this season—Keep It Local.
 
3036 24th Street
Sunday 12-9pm / Monday 12:30-9 pm
Tuesday–Thursday 12:30-10pm
Friday 12:30-11pm
Saturday 12-11pm
(415) 824-1761
 
Photography by Mason J.