Rightnowish

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Krea Gomez has seen tough love play out in many ways. As a young adult, she was kicked out of her home for “being bad,” now she’s practicing tough love in her own way. In her work with young adults – and her own children – she sets boundaries and goals while teaching independence with care. Krea is also the Director of Local Initiatives at the Young Women’s Freedom Center and has been a loud voice trying to close juvenile justice halls and get kids out of the system. 

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In the Bay Area, “showing love” is something we toss around all the time. One man who embodies this is the tie-dye wearing, weed smoking, big smiling man named Oopz. He and his crew are known for throwing fun-loving parties at the Shmop House where the air grows thick with cannabis smoke. In this episode, he tells us his journey to becoming an extrovert, and the time his community love was tested when someone was shot at the Shmop House.

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AB Banks, defines love as "doing the right thing with a passion." That means taking care of themselves and their folks, because self-love can be communal and revolutionary.

Day-to-day AB works with the People’s Programs in Oakland, supporting their unhoused neighbors through clinics and food donations. Outside of that, AB is deep in the practice of meditation. After setting out on a personal journey to learn the art of meditation, which included a trip abroad to study with renowned practitioners. AB has recently launched the Mad Chill series of short meditative videos with the aim of making this practice more accessible.

In our conversation, AB shares what they've learned and some of the tools they've acquired on this journey to understanding the various shapes self-love can take. 

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You don't have to look very long to find tributes to Frida Kahlo in San Francisco. Frida inspired murals cover walls throughout the Mission, street vendors near the Embarcadero sell clothes and earrings with her likeness, and there's a street named after her in the Ingleside neighborhood. This devotion to Frida makes perfect sense because Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived in San Francisco, not once, but twice.

During their last stay in TK YEAR, Diego Rivera painted a 74-foot long, 30-ton fresco in front of a live audience at the the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. The mural is rich with details depicting Ancient Mexico, the California Gold Rush, a bustling 1940s San Francisco, and historical figures from Latin America and the United States. You can stare at it for an hour and still miss details. Now this Pan American Unity mural is on display for free at the SFMOMA until the summer of 2023, you can visit it as often as you like to fully take in its message and power.

To learn more about the Pan American Unity mural's backstory and the controversy it sparked, we figured it'd be a good time to revisit a story that first ran on KQED's Bay Curious podcast. The episode also dives into Frida's artistic development and how a Santa Rosa horticulturalist influenced her art.

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As a cancer survivor, Caroline Chung tells me expressing herself through music has been healing. But it's not always smooth sailing. Chung says she's been overlooked for gigs simply because of her identity-- an Asian woman who plays the upright bass.

"Hey, I'm a female jazz bassist," says Chung. "It's like nobody really cares, because it's the ‘boys club’." 

Despite this, Chung has found collaborators in people poets and other jazz musicians.

After releasing two(FC) projects last year, Chung is gearing up for another push in 2022-- starting with this weekend's show at SF Jazz.

But before you see her in performance or check out her music, I invite you to get a little more of her story... Rightnowish.

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Erena Shimoda takes photos underwater. She creates majestic images of people in pools. Her subjects can be seen posing in wheelchairs, dancing with tulle, adorned in mermaid attire, or wrapped in Shibari ropes.

Some of her models are people who've lived through physical or mental trauma. Erena helps them slip into water, release their experiences, and hopefully reemerge anew. It's a nod to religious practices around water, like baptisms in Catholicism, the holy dips in India's Ganges River and the water meditations of Shintoism rooted in Erena's motherland, Japan. It's also a healing practice backed by science.

As we dive deeper into the new year, this episode we're talking to Erena about her journey photographing the healing power of water.

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This country is extremely divided, always has been.

When you combine the issues of racism, sexism and other isms that have plagued us for ages and mix in the division that's risen over this drawn out pandemic, you could see why some people might feel comfortable and complacent in their silos.

But let's do something about it.

I'm asking you to get out of that comfort zone, reach out and connect with another person or group. It's a simple ask: build a bridge.

This week, for the final Rightnowish episode of 2021, I'm encouraging you all to take a step toward building bridges by making some community connections. Take a listen and let's get into it.

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This past Independence Day, Oakland's Marty Aranaydo found himself a long way from the town.

Marty had joined up with the NDN Collective to scale a 100-foot grain silo in Rapid City, South Dakota. Atop it, the group unfurled a massive inverted American flag with the words, "LANDBACK" across it.

The direct action called for more than the transfer of territory back to indigenous tribes, on the bottom corner of the flag they also wrote "1505," to represent the growing number of indigenous children's unmarked graves that have been found at native boarding schools throughout the US and Canada.  

While Marty is a well-known DJ and aerosol writer, he isn't new to this kind of work. His family was involved in the original occupation of Alcatraz, direct action for social change is in his blood.

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