Emilia Rosales

Bay Area Blue's Festival in Downtown Martinez 2015

Dave Rapa, bass player for The Sam Chase and the Untraditional, performs live on the Arrow Stage at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Sunday October 5, 2014. (Emilia Rosales)

A lifetime dream finally blossomed for Dave Rapa, a former SF State history major, when he performed live alongside his band mates in The Sam Chase and the Untraditional, at the 14th annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.

Rapa, 39, attended SF State from 1996 – 1999 but Rapa was introduced to Sam Chase, the lead vocalist of The Sam Chase and the Untraditional, in 2011.

“We hit it off very well,” Rapa said. Over the past few years, Chase contacted Rapa to do some substitute gigs for the band and Rapa soon developed a strong passion for performing. Last June, Chase invited Rapa to join the eight-member band as the bass player.

“Dave is one of the most positive people I have ever met,” Chase said. “It also doesn’t hurt at all that he is one of the most incredible bassists I have ever come across. He is a powerhouse and was built to make music.”

Hardly Strictly annually hosts about 100 bands, performing across seven stages, for an audience of over 750,000 people coming from all around the world, according to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass website. The festival is a three-day event full of free music, good food and fun.

This was not only Rapa’s first time, but also the band’s first time performing on stage at the festival.

“To be able to join up with this band at this exciting period in their career, where a lot of the momentum and hard work that has been building up, it’s amazing to be a part of and I’m really glad to be able to perform the festival with this amazing group of musicians,” Rapa said.

The band brought the crowd to their feet Sunday morning at the Arrow Stage for its entire 40-minute set.

“There’s no better feeling than be with close friends where you can all sing and dance together to one of the best local bands,” said Madeline Edwards, a fan standing front row. “A beautiful time was had!”

The idea behind the festival sprouted in the spring of 2001 when founders Jonathan Nelson and Warren Hellman, accompanied by Dawn Holiday and Sherry Steinberg, two women heavily involved in Slim’s music club in San Francisco, met for lunch and imagined the free, community-invested music festival.

“A bunch of it was motivated by our love for music and a huge part of it was our want to share it and we have a real passion for San Francisco,” Nelson said. “As a result of it being free and having such great music I think everyone just relaxes a little bit more and its got a really special vibe. While (on) one hand the festival has gotten a lot bigger, I think it’s sorta amazing how much the festival has stayed the same.”

Sarah Woolford, a liberal studies major at SF State, believes this year was the best Hardly Strictly she has attended in the past four years of living in the city.

“Festivals like this remind me why I love San Francisco so much,” Woolford said. “Good vibes. Good music. Good people.”

Some of this year’s headliners included Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Built to Spill and Social Distortion, the latter of which Woolford enjoyed.

“I watched the happiest, most friendly mosh pit at Social Distortion this year,” Woolford said. “It was odd but really fun.”

Along with the variety of music offered at the festival, food options ranged from alligator to barbecued corn on the cob to some festival must-haves, such as corn-dogs, kettle corn and ice-cold lemonade. No alcohol was sold due to the festival being admission-free, however one attendee found a way around the rule.

“I was here last year selling beer and I made quite a bit of money there as well,” said Blake Friedman, a beer salesman from Davis. “Everyone is just super welcoming and ready to buy beer. I wouldn’t try to sell beer at any other event.”

In addition to hanging out and listening to bluegrass all weekend, the park was the perfect place to be for people-watching.

“I enjoy seeing all types of people who come out and enjoy the music,” said Lacy Reese, a health education student at SF State.

Although Reese believes Hardly Strictly to be a great festival, she said this year was overwhelming because of the heat and large crowds. Temperatures peaked in the high 80s for all  three days.

Now that the weekend has come to an end and all the bands have traveled home, Golden Gate Park will prepare for an even better festival next year.

As for The Sam Chase, the band now plans to travel to the Pacific Northwest for a 12-day tour scheduled for the beginning of early November. The band was overjoyed to see their non-traditional music was such a crowd-pleaser at this year’s festival.

Vegetables from SF State’s Sol Patch garden and farms’ within a 200-mile radius of campus, provided hundreds with a four-course, all-vegetarian lunch to enjoy Thursday, April 17.

The Sustainability Office partnered with the Environmentally Concerned Organization of Students (ECO Students) and Chartwells Dining Service to provide a locally-sourced meal offering vegetarian and vegan dishes for the SF State community at the 5th annual “Farm to Fork” lunch event. 

The quad was filled with tables and fresh cuisine ready to prepare for the three seating times scheduled throughout the afternoon.

“I think people here have a general appreciation for people who are trying to source their food more sustainably and more locally,” said Tyler Wescott, the president of ECO Students. “This had been a good event to raise awareness as well as have a good time and enjoy good food and good people.”

The Sol Patch harvest took place the afternoon before the event. Eight bins of vegetables were ready to be harvested, including: fava beans, bok choy and many different types of lettuce. The lettuce pulled from the community garden was used for the organic mixed greens salad.

The Sol Patch Garden was one of many local farms involved in sourcing food for the lunch. Hodo Soy, Gourmet Mushroom and Riverdog Farms, were among others who participated.

“If I were a food critic, this would be five stars on the president scale. That was delicious,” said SF State President Leslie E. Wong. “Eating locally is supporting the local people and yet the food is healthy and good for you.”

To warm the palate, organic shredded beets with crumbled goat cheese was served, along with creamy avocado and cilantro hummus. Long-stem carrots and celery were served for dipping in the hummus.

The second course was filled with spring vegetable risotto and tofu, with a light thai coconut curry sauce, accompanied with organic bok choy.

The dessert was set up on its own table: warm, strawberry rhubarb cobbler.

“A lot of people were excited about the coconut curry tofu, which sounds pretty exotic and also the potatoes had a really nice pesto sauce on them, so they looked really good,” said Caitlyn Scherer, a Sustainable Initiatives intern with Chartwells.

Look no farther for great local food in the Bay Area — homegrown, organic fruits and vegetables from local farmers within a 250-mile radius will be brought in for an all-vegetarian, zero-waste “Farm to Fork” at SF State.

The Environmentally Concerned Organization of Students (ECO Students), in conjunction with the Sustainability Office, will host the 5th annual “Farm to Fork” lunch event, where all the food provided for the lunch will be sourced from within 250 miles of campus — including SF State’s local community garden behind Mary Park Hall.

“Farm to Fork is our chance to highlight sustainable food production in our area and to educate people about where their food comes from. We want to show people that it is possible to find delicious locally sourced food,” said Nick Kordesch, the sustainability coordinator.

Farm to Fork is a four-course lunch that will be held in the Malcolm X Plaza April 17. This event will promote sustainable food production and local organic farms.

“It’s a way to connect the farmers and the food to the consumer and try to raise awareness about the importance of having locally sourced food, in terms of saving a lot on energy and transportation costs and also supporting local farmers and local economies and try to build a strong, local community movement,” said Tyler Wescott, the president of the ECO students.

Chartwell’s Dining Service on campus is responsible for arranging how the food will be transported to campus, preparing the food and setting up the event. The food will be bought from the local farmers, and either the farmers will bring the fresh food to campus or Chartwell’s will make arrangements to have a company go pick up the food for the farmer.

Sonoma, Central Valley and Sacramento are just a few of the areas the food will be sourced from. Kordesch and others in the Sustainability Office are still finalizing the list of farmers who they plan on working with this year.

“We like to participate and partner with the University when they do things that are near and dear to them that have to do with food. We’re all about food and if it’s local, the more the better,” said James Dame, the senior executive chef of Chartwell’s.

“Ninety percent of the labor we use is students on campus that we hire,” said John Penner, the associate director of Dining Services.

April 17 the lunch will be served at three separate sitting times: 11:15 a.m., 12 noon and 12:45 p.m. Two-hundred tickets will be sold; 50 of those tickets are designated for SF State students and the rest of the tickets are available for anyone else who wants to attend. The tickets will be $8.

Compared to the national average of 8-10 percent suicide attempts of adolescents, the LGBTQ community has over twice that number with a 30 percent attempted suicide rate amongst adolescents.

These facts brought professionals together for the Conference on LGBT Suicide Prevention Friday, March 22. The San Francisco American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), health care providers and other professionals joined at SF State to speak on suicide prevention within the LGBTQ community.

“Community support literally saved my life,” said Mayela Zuniga, a youth mentor at the Rainbow Community Center. “I almost feel I get as much out of the work as the clients that I serve. I don’t want them to go through any of the things that I went through and if they are going through it or anything worse, I want them to know they’re not alone and there is someone there to support them.”

Ann Haas, senior consultant of the AFSP, started the conference with an overview of suicide risk and prevention. During Haas’ lecture, she presented statistics showing the dramatic difference in attempted suicide between homosexuals and heterosexuals.

Founded by Michael King in 2008, the study showed that 10-20 percent of LGBTQ adults have attempted suicide compared to 4.6 percent of U.S. adults that have attempted suicide. Thirty percent of LGBTQ adolescents have attempted suicide compared to 8-10 percent of U.S. adolescents that have attempted suicide.

Some of the speakers included Caitlin Ryan, the director of the Acceptance Project at SF State, and Ilan Meyer, a psychiatric epidemiologist from Williams Institute of UCLA.

The group also dispersed into smaller “breakout sessions,” or discussions with a more focused topic, such as enhancing services to LGBTQ older adults, ages 40 and above, or working with faith communities to prevent suicide among LGBTQ populations.

The second half of the day was comprised entirely of these sessions, and gave attendees a chance to focus more on their topic of interest in a smaller setting.

“This is an important organization for me because people in my life have died from suicide,” said Maureen Sullivan, a volunteer at the conference and SF State alumna. “We’ve had too many students die from suicide in the past 12 years. The whole LGBT component is important because LGBT youth are at a much higher risk for suicide than other youth and they got plenty going on as it is being a teenager and then you add the whole societal component.”

The event ran all day, from 8 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. Immediately following was a reception, completing the 10-hour day with food and wine.

Picture this: California, the place we call home, ripped into six very distinctly different states. California is the only state that has everything anyone could ever want: amazing sunny weather, sandy beaches, the tallest Redwood trees in the world and of course, the movie stars.

On any given day, we could be relaxing on a sunny beach along the coast and within just a few hours, drive and be in the mountains playing in the snow catching snowflakes. We don’t have to travel far to be immersed in a completely different atmosphere and culture, but Republican Tim Draper wants to change this.

Splitting the state into six smaller states would be utter nonsense. If the outrageous idea were to transpire, the state and its inhabitants simply would not be the same.

Not only would it disrupt the lives of millions, it would put the state through an economic and political turmoil. So much work would have to be done to complete the split; not only would 10 new state senators be needed but it would have a major impact on the American voting system.

Tim Draper, the master-mind behind this idea, has suggested the California debt be split equally among the six proposed states. According to the U.S. Debt Clock, the population of California is more than 38 million; 1 million of those people are unemployed. California’s debt, which is rapidly increasing, is estimated to be $419 billion.

The population and income of each new state doesn’t add up, which means this proposal isn’t remotely fair. The split would push Californians further apart creating more separation and animosity. United we stand, divided we fall.

Since California became a state in 1850, there have beendozens of proposals to divide the state into two or more entities. According to the California Assembly Office of Research, 1859 and 1992 are the only two years the spilt was actually taken seriously. The many proposals were stopped dead in their tracks due to war, insufficient number of signatures obtained, or simply the fact that the proposal was too vague to be taken seriously.

In addition, the entire political landscape will change in America if California is split into six states.

According to a report released in December 2013 by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, 43 percent of registered voters in the state are Democrats while 28 percent are Republican. With the arrangement of political preferences in California, the 6-way split will inevitably give the Republican Party more pull on the West Coast.

Does it come as much of a surprise that Tim Draper is a Republican who undoubtedly wants to take advantage of California residents to benefit his political party and increase the wealth in his domain of Silicon Valley? No.

With six new states and 10 new senators, who knows what will happen to the political stance of the “Six Californias.”

AND I'M OUT!!!

Here is another audio interview with a classmate of mine, Patrick Thomas. Patrick and I are studying queer art history and have worked on many projects together.