Rightnowish

Dimming one's light in the face of haters is not something Lidia Rodriguez knows how to do. Whenever she gets comments from guys about her size or gender, the baritone player is quick to clap back with a joke and prove them wrong. "When I'm playing my bari sax, I feel huge. I feel powerful. I feel seven feet tall. I feel like no one could tell me s**t. Like I feel so good about myself. "

Lidia Rodriguez is a musical force performing and recording across genre. She gets down playing cumbia with La Misa Negra, rocks stages with electronic group Madame Gandhi, and even goes dumb while performing with the Golden State Warriors brass band, the Bay Blue Notes.

Growing up in Mudville a.k.a Stockton, and later attending San Jose State, Lidia says she is a product of public music education. Now, as an educator herself, teaching bilingual music lessons, Lidia is not only training the next generation of musicians but also nurturing students to be self compassionate and authentically themselves.

On this week's Rightnowish, Lidia Rodriguez talks about the power of showing up as her full self (a queer and Latina saxophonist) in music spaces and her mission to spread the power of "peace, love and sax."

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Welcome to the first episode of Liner Notes, the Rightnowish podcast series all about jazz in the Bay Area. We're starting this off with a conversation with someone who has a wealth of knowledge, especially when it comes to jazz, Greg Bridges.

As a journalist and longtime radio host at Bay Area radio stations KCSM and KPFA, Greg is steeped in Bay Area jazz history. As a reoccurring host of events like the San Jose Jazz Festival, he also has his finger on the current pulse of the culture.

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This episode originally aired on April 22, 2022 .

Terisa Siagatonu's poetry navigates climate change and its impact on marginalized communities from the lens of someone who was proudly raised in San Francisco, by a family with deep Samoan roots.

In our conversation, Terisa looks back at January 2022's underwater eruption that caused massive tsunamis in Samoa, Tonga, Fiji and other nations in Oceania. Initially, the disaster made headlines and relief efforts filled social media feeds, but Terisa questions what sustained care looks like for those impacted by a changing global climate.

This week on Rightnowish, Terisa Siagatonu discusses climate justice and how she "languages" her experience.

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This piece was originally a part of Rightnowish's 2021 series, Roll With Us, all about the Bay Area's community and culture on wheels.

Every Sunday San Francisco's Richard Humphrey teaches weekly roller dance classes in San Leandro; his students have the honor of learning from someone who has been on quad skates for five decades.

From 1979 to 1988, Richard was a part of the Golden Rollers, a trio of skaters who regularly performed in Golden Gate Park.

By now, Richard has taught thousands of people his signature skating style of "roller dance" (even Dr. Oz) through in-person classes and video tutorials.

After noticing the rise of skating's popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, Richard wanted to make sure folks knew that skating has a deep-seated culture with a history that pre-dates the internet, and moves that sparkled on the rink long before most viral stars were born.

This week on Rightnowish, we roll into Memorial Day weekend-- the unofficial start of summer-- with the legendary Richard Humphrey.

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Anwar Bey grew up in Southern California, but spent his formative, young adult years in San Francisco. He moved to the Bay Area to live out his dream of creating video games. Then in 2021, after spending a decade in Northern California, he moved to Johannesburg, South Africa. That's where he's found the clarity to write about the future.

Bey is the author of a series of sci-fi stories titled, The Book of Woldu. It's an exploration of love, family and intergalactic time travel from the perspective of an East African family. Bey says his time spent traveling the continent, talking to people and experiencing life from a new perspective, has allowed him to pen these stories and further develop his multimedia platform, PLASMAWorlds. 

When asked why it's important to tell stories about Black futures, he jokingly responds, "Because we're out here." He follows up by saying, "... we're going to exist in the future just as powerfully as we exist in the present and so that's why I'm creating this work to inspire."

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Inside of Mohammad Gorjestani's office, there's hella artwork. The filmmaker and co-founder of Even/Odd Studios, has painted collages of wrestlers from Iran mounted near photographed images of Bay Area sideshows. There's stories embroidered on skateboard decks, family heirlooms in the form of pottery and even a tiny replica IranAir airplane. Books written in Farsi line the walls, and Persian carpets on the floor, require you to change out of your footwear and into slippers, as is the custom in Iran.

Gorjestani was raised on the west side of San Jose and has lived in San Francisco for two decades, but his heart remains tied to the place he was born, Tehran, Iran.

He has childhood memories from his homeland, the last of which are from when he and his family left the country during the Iran-Iraq War. He hasn't visited home since moving to the United States, but he has never been severed from the culture. As he soaked up all of the game the Bay Area offers, he simultaneously held true to his roots. At the same time, he grew critical of the United States; now he uses his art to question the forces that cause oppression here and abroad.

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Imagine opening a letter from yourself as a high school student, addressed to the current version of you.

10, 15, or even 30 years ago, what did you care about? What were you curious about? Did you have fears about the world? goals of being a lawyer or a ball player? boy bands you wanted to see in concert? friendships that you hoped would last forever?

Do you even remember the high school version of you?

On this week's episode of Rightnowish, we combine forces with students from Oakland's Fremont High School, as they share letters to their future selves for KQED's annual Youth Takeover Week.

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Toby Brothers left the U.S. and fell in love with traveling the world. After working as an educator at The Athenian School in Danville, she initially left for Paris before moving to the United Kingdom. Once there, she became the founder and director of the London Literary Salon. The organization, in its simplest form, is a book club with a twist. They meet in-person or virtually, discuss classic works of literature and sometimes they take trips to locations mentioned in the stories. When asked what she’d share with people from her travels, Brothers advised: “Go not for the world to entertain you, but for you to understand how small your own experience is.”

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When photographer and filmmaker Aïdah Aaliyah Rasheed left her Northern California home in 2019, she knew that she had a job and housing awaiting her in the country of Kuwait.

Rasheed and her husband, Stephen Jamal Leeper, took contracts working at a school, and as a part of their employment, the married couple and their children were given complimentary housing.

“What’s nice about not having to think about that,” says Rasheed of living rent-free, “is that you can think about other things, you know." Her family invests their money in other experiences, like traveling.

Since moving, they've visited a number of countries in the region, and no longer have to consider the high cost of housing in the Bay Area. But living on the other side of the globe hasn't stopped Rasheed from keeping tabs on the U.S. through check-ins with extended family, conversations with community and her side gig-- a project that she's been working on for over a year.

When she's not making media or leading classroom projects about how society is designed, Rasheed is working as a curator for Sapelo Square, a publication focused on highlighting stories of Black Muslims in the U.S. and throughout the diaspora.

This week, Rasheed shares with us the importance of using media to tell real stories of the Black muslim diaspora, the beauty of the daily calls to prayer in Kuwait, and what she misses about home-- evidently, there's no shea butter like the kind you find at the Berkeley Flea Market.

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Richmond-raised photographer Christopher Nechodom retraced his family's roots to a small town in Mexico. In doing so, he left behind the pricey Bay Area -- a place that he loves dearly but was costing him more than money; peace of mind was at stake.

After experiencing a series of traumatic events: a victim of armed robbery as a kid, losing a close friend to homicide as a young adult, and then narrowly escaping the tragic Ghostship Fire, that took the lives of 36 people in 2018, Nechodom says he's now on the path toward healing . “I think the fire just opened the floodgates,” Nechodom tells me. “And it also forced me to finally get in touch with my own vulnerability and really address that trauma.”

Now a resident of Mexico City, Nechodom spends his time between the capital city and the state of Michoacán, where his mother's side of the family is from. The time spent in the state where he has roots allows for reflection and connection, while in Mexico City he has access to business opportunities and artist circles.

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