San Francisco Review of Whatever

A photo of a cat relaxing in a window. Overlaid text states: Submit your classified for issue three

Classified ad submissions for Issue Three are due on December 20! Do you want to tell everyone a secret? To share a very short set of instructions? Do you have something or need something? Submit a classified 🌝 airtable.com/appEhjxTGPsR...

Thank you for reading!! <3

This month, we will be donating our profits from sales on Sundays to the Alameda County Community Food Bank.

This nation’s present leadership, which we already knew to be venal, are committed to yet more vile acts against our most vulnerable neighbors.

Margaret Tedesco, Artist and Curator, Was the ‘Spirit of San Francisco’ The widely loved curator and connector of people in the Bay Area art scene died on Oct. 18, 2025.

So many people have written wonderfully about Margaret and her incredible influence on the Bay Area art scene. She was a true connector and a generous supporter. As DL Alvarez says, it would take a small committee to fill her shoes.

www.kqed.org/arts/1398269...

image of issue 2 of SF Review of Whatever

late to the game but psyched to dig into @sfreviewofwhatever.bsky.social

not late!

To read SAN FRANCISCO REVIEW OF MILK, order Issue Two here: sfrw.square.site/product/issu...

Photograph of an artwork by Craig Calderwood: blue and lavender puffy paint overtop a fully-obscured Magic the Gathering card. The top half looks like a crystal, and the bottom half reads "Mommy Milky," "14," and features a drip of sparkly milk.

Tomato pink background with black outlined rectangles and black and blue text within: “For me, pumping is a fun, weird activity. I’m getting milked! With the milking contraption attached to my nipples, I am the scientist-farmer observing myself as experimental subject or dairy animal, operating a pump to extract one of the most fundamental foods on the planet, so elemental they call it liquid gold.” SOPHIA WANG, MAMA MAMMALIAN

Sophia Wang is a mother, a mammal, and a person who knows about bioengineering human breast milk. In “Mama Mammalian” she examines breastfeeding as work, as pleasure, and as a beautiful supply chain of two. Featuring Summoners Cards by Craig Calderwood (@craigcalderwood.bsky.social).

"Make money, they all say. But I like stuff money can't buy. Getting out of my head. Reading, writing, drawing. Imagining that this place is special and mine. I can leave at any time."

Rod Roland in @sfreviewofwhatever.bsky.social

Wow contacting you about product photography

To read THE REVIEW, order Issue Two here: sfrw.square.site/product/issu...

Photograph showing a car dashboard with a phone attached to it. On the phone screen is a playlist by Anne Walsh titled IAE. On the dash screen behind it is more information about the track that's playing.

Tomato pink background with black outlined rectangles and black and blue text within: “A reads IF AN ELSEWHERE (The Burrow) out loud to her phone. She doesn’t rehearse. J’s enjambment is its own inside-outside problem, an ontological straddle, she realizes. A word belonging to those preceding it doesn’t any more, it jumps context, it unbelongs itself, then togethers with the next.” ANNE WALSH, WE PORTRAIT TOGETHER

In “We Portrait Together,” Anne Walsh (A) reviews IF AN ELSEWHERE (The Burrow), a layered, allegorical collaboration between artist Cybele Lyle (C) and poet Jocelyn Saidenberg (J). Walsh’s idiosyncratic and loving tactics demonstrate that “there are so many ways to write and read.”

Photo of a cluster of white and magenta flowers. Their outer petals look like velvet and the inner ones look wet

Tomato pink background with black outlined rectangles and black and blue text within: “Soft Core is devotional in its attention to the Bay Area’s nooks and crannies, turning them over and over like beads on a rosary. In this process, San Francisco becomes a place for looking and never finding, because there was never an object to discover in the first place.” CHRISTINA SVENSON THE MAGIC IS HERE, I SAW IT

In “The Magic Is Here, I Saw It,” poet Christina Svenson delivers an efflorescent review of Soft Core, the novel by performer and local hero, Brittany Newell.

To read SAN FRANCISCO REVIEW OF THREE BOOKS SO FAR, order Issue Two here: sfrw.square.site/product/issu...

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"The energy of San Francisco is always directed outward, never to return. It would be too much for a city to keep."

❤️ Rod Roland's review (history, memoir) of skateboarding in the new @sfreviewofwhatever.bsky.social

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Might be nice to get a lobotomy and then go look

That's right

To read THRASHER JUNIOR, order Issue Two here: sfrw.square.site/product/issu...

Street scene: An empty sidewalk with a pink vertical bollard, a building with two doors behind it, and black and peach checkerboard tiling.

Tomato pink background with black outlined rectangles and black and blue text within: I don’t think skateboarding is a cure for anything. It’s more a do or don’t thing. I feel self-conscious writing about it instead of doing it. That’s just how it’s done. If you aren’t trying, then you’re not skating. I’m not so worried about being judged by other fifty-year-old skateboarders reading this. Fuck you. No, I’m kidding. But seriously, why don’t you try and write a review of San Francisco and skateboarding. Rod Roland, I Feel Safe in San Francisco

“I Feel Safe in San Francisco” is a delicate, ranging, topographic memoir by skateboarder-poet Rod Roland, featuring photography by Reggie Guerrero (@meadowy.bsky.social) and a new poem by Tenaya Nasser-Frederick and Rod Roland.

A part of a larger cartoon. There’s a bull in a suit holding a beverage and saying “Lars, the show is a hit! Why so grouchy?” And an unseen Lars replies “Nobody gets it, man!”

SFRW’s resident Ad Reinhardt (if he were more Ohioan), Kate Rhoades (@katerhoades.bsky.social) made another cartoon about the kinds of objects you might encounter in an art gallery.

To read SAN FRANCISCO REVIEW OF ART, order Issue Two here: sfrw.square.site/product/issu...

川 SFGATE CA MINI CROSSWORD A new San Francisco magazine about whatever Two weeks ago, 100 literary-minded San Franciscans gathered in a stark all-white room in the Mission to hear about ... whatever.

SFGATE has the Issue Two party report! www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/a...

Do you have a question to ask Bea, for possible inclusion in the next issue? Send it to whoever@sfreview.org.

Tomato pink background with black outlined rectangles and black and blue text within: Williams kept waiting to wake up feeling different and instead kept waking up as himself. In his wigged-out state, he drank and ate too much, behaved poorly, leaned into cynicism, withdrew from friends and the world at large. Taunted by the now frictionless experience of his success, he left his home and found friction out in the world. You know, the joys and bothers and ‘stuff’ that happens when we let other people into our lives. Which is what reminded me of you. Beatrice Kilat, Ask Bea

Do you need help? Ask Bea. Bea’s areas of expertise (ongoing): dogs money life, death closet space ceramics utensils kitchens time management having a drink putting it down want vs. need upkeep (general) Email: whoever@sfreview.org Subject line: Please Advise

By way of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Simpsons, Beatrice Kilat (@beatrick.bsky.social) weighs the risks and chances for love in her debut column: “Ask Bea.” She also considers the chihuahua.

To read SOME GOOD ADVICE, order Issue Two here: sfrw.square.site/product/issu...

Photograph of a yard: in the foreground is a cactus, behind that, a shed and a house, and behind that, a green shipping container with the letter S visible.

Tomato pink background with black outlined rectangles and black and blue text within: A sprawling and quiet vision of the American Dream is being built here. In other words, it’s the suburbs—a place built for single families, not communities. And yet, heading deeper into the neighborhood, up the street on the left, with no fence or barrier to obstruct one’s view, there is Escolar: a garden, a home, and a white-walled gallery inside an old green shipping container. Cole Hersey, Escolar: Creation of Space

In “Escolar: Creation of Space,” Cole Hersey visits an art gallery in a shipping container in the suburbs. Our penchant for shipping container topics carries on.

To read SAN FRANCISCO REVIEW OF LAND USE, order Issue Two here: sfrw.square.site/product/issu...

"Generally I find it easy to have an opinion than not. They come unbidden, like all the rest of the senses." Our comrades at @sfreviewofwhatever.bsky.social, we at ORB see you:

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And subscriptions and website orders are packed up to go out next week :) Order here to get in on that: sfrw.square.site