Storied: San Francisco Jeff Hunt

Welcome to this bonus episode with Kundan Baidwan and Sameer Gupta. Kundan and Sameer talk all about the Rootstock Arts' event Color Your Mind Festival, which is happening at the Yerba Buena Garden Festival this Saturday, July 27, 2024 from noon to 5 p.m.
 
(This episode was created in collaboration with Erin and Ange from Bitch Talk Podcast.)
 
We start with Kundan. Long-time listeners will recognize or remember Kundan from ... Season 1, Episode 40, Two Storied Nights, and Hungry Ghosts. She's been a friend of the show since that fateful day in 2018 when I waltzed into Zam Zam with Bitch Talk on their Bourdain Crawl. But, podcast-wise, it's never been about Kundan.
 
We learn that she was born in San Jose and raised in Fremont. She went to college in San Diego, and after she graduated, was off to Paris and then New York. She returned to The Bay around 2004. She says that SF was always close to her Bay Area roots. She's an artist (an amazing artist, I must say) who pays the bills by bartending at Zam Zam.
 
Sameer Gupta was also born in San Jose. When he was around one year old, his family began moving roughly every couple of years. His dad was in tech and took jobs all over the world. While his family was in Japan, Sameer picked up playing music. He says he "caught the bug" there and started playing drums.
 
When his family came back to the US, he stuck with drumming. It wasn't what his parents expected of him, but they encouraged him nonetheless. He went to college for music, where he was immersed in Western and Classical styles. He was gravitating more toward jazz, though. He played jazz through his time in and after college, and then he found Indian Classical music.
 
Sameer moved to New York City and stayed for about 15 years, long enough to form a music collective. A little more than a year ago, he returned to the Bay Area.
 
Then we hear how Kundan and Sameer met. It's a story that goes back to their respective childhoods. Their dads worked together before either of them was born. Their families lived in the same neighborhood and knew each other well. The two ended up in high school together. Beyond their families' histories, Sameer and Kundan both ran in creative circles around this time, and naturally gravitated toward each other.
 
Both Kundan and Sameer are the only creative people in their families, and we get to hear how that informs the art that each of them creates. They recognize the abundance of creativity in their culture, but distinguish themselves as individuals who set out to make art their life's mission. And Sameer speaks to the example that folks like him and Kundan can set for the next generations, who see more possibilities than they might otherwise.
 
Having grown up the entire time in the Bay Area, Kundan says she more or less always felt the influence of Indian culture. And Sameer talks more about what it can mean for their families to see them making a life out of art.
 
Then the conversation shifts to this weekend's inaugural Color Your Mind Festival. Sameer and Kundan intentionally invited young artists to be part of the event. There will be art, music, crafts, books, and more. Sameer says their intention is for the festival to be "adventurous," not what people might think of as a traditional Indian event. They want it to be approachable for as many folks as possible.
 
The festival's music will include North Indian Classical (think Ravi Shankar), South Indian Classical, and Sameer's group, the Jupiter Project. There will also be dancing between music sets.
 
Follow Rootstock Arts on Instagram.
 
We recorded this episode in collaboration with Bitch Talk Podcast at Medicine for Nightmares in the Mission in June 2024.

From a young age, Azikiwee Anderson left his heart in San Francisco.
 
In this episode, Azikiwee (everyone calls him "Z"), the founder of Rize Up Sourdough, shares the story of how he got here. His dad was a famous drummer who got hooked on heroin while touring. When he returned home from the tour, the problems at home began. He started physically assaulting Z's mom.
 
And so she packed up her three kids, all five and younger, and her things and split. The battered wives' shelter helped get them out of New Orleans and to San Francisco. Z has some memories of New Orleans, but they're coupled with trauma.
 
When they landed here, they didn't really have people. His mom and her kids stayed at the bus station for weeks, and Z remembers a man giving them his lunch more than once. There's a poignant story of the brown paper bags that those meals came in and how Z has used similar bags for Rize Up breads as an homage.
 
The family ended up at a shelter and his mom started to imagine what her new life could be. Z's mom got jobs and took classes. They lived in The City for six years and then moved to Chico.
 
Z spent the rest of junior high and high school in that northern Valley town. The day after he graduated, he left for Santa Rosa to go to junior college. It was close enough to San Francisco that he could come here easily and often, which he did. In addition to school, he taught gymnastics, something he'd begun in high school. But because of his height (he's 6' 3") and relative inexperience, he decided that teaching was a better route for him than competing.
 
He also rollerbladed. Like, a lot. He says kids would come into his gymnastics classes asking Z to teach them how to do flips on rollerblades. Never mind that he didn't know how to do that ... yet. One of these kids brought in a video of what he had in mind, and it was the first time Z saw people doing all these incredible things on rollerblades. Eventually, this led to Z getting sponsored to skate.
 
It took him on a journey he never could've imagined. He started traveling, around the US, around the world. It became his life. He built skate parks, for roller blades, bikes, skateboards, whatever.
 
Looking back on his time as a pro rollerblader, Z says that he owes the hardship of his young years to the fact that it doesn't take a lot to make him happy. When he started seeing the world, he didn't take it for granted. He was grateful for the opportunities it afforded him.
 
Time spent traveling gave way to more time running businesses. And with a little more income came the opportunity to cash in on a life's dream—Z moved to San Francisco. He found a place on Bush between Van Ness and Polk. And he brought a small distribution company for rollerblading products with him. But when the 2008 recession hit, the business started to feel some serious pains.
 
Check back next week for Part 2 with Azikiwee Anderson.
 
We recorded this podcast at Rize Up Bakery in the South of Market in June 2024.
 
Photography by Jeff Hunt

Part 2 picks up right where we left off in Part 1, with Reem describing finding the anti-imperialist women's soccer team. Through that, she met her partner, who's now her co-parent.
 
Reem worked in the nonprofit sector until around 2010, when she burned out. She'd moved to Oakland upon her return to the Bay Area, though she was still connected to The City through her work with AROC. She found herself wanting to take care of her community in other ways than what nonprofits were offering.
 
She and her father had been estranged, but after leaving work, she joined him on a trip to the Middle East. The two were joined by Reem's youngest sister on a visit she calls "transformative." Besides gaining insight into who her dad was as a person, she truly discovered and fell in love with the food of her people. She knew right away that she wanted to create that feeling for others. Her Syrian family took note of her interest, and took her to bakeries in that country to get a glimpse of the kitchens after-hours.
 
She returned to the Bay Area wanting to do two things: To combat tropes and negative stereotypes about Arab culture and people, and to do that by creating a sense of hospitality. Those two ideas would eventually form the foundation of what Reem's California does today.
 
But she had to begin somewhere, and so she enrolled in a baking class at Laney College. Out of that class, she got a job with Arizmendi in Emeryville, where she got experience in a co-op and a kitchen. She started forming the idea of what her place would be, and while that came together, she settled on basing it around man’oushe, the street food of her people.
 
Over a number of years and various kitchen and bartending jobs, Reem took as many entrepreneur classes as she could. The last of these was with La Cocina. The program helped steer her toward more practical, lower-cost methods of doing business. And that's where the saj comes into play. It's what Reem uses to make her man'oushe. "It's like an inverted tandoor," she says.
 
An uncle in Lebanon was able to have two custom-made sajes for Reem. They arrived and that's what set it all in motion. They were approved for the 22nd and Bartlett market and the farmer's market at the Ferry Building around the same time. At both locations, they served Arabic tea and played Arabic music, creating that vibe Reem had been seeking. Within 16 months, they had grown from one market to five.
 
Then La Cocina told Reem that it was time to take the operation brick-and-mortar. The first location was in Fruitvale in Oakland in 2017 and lasted a couple of years. Then, after a brief foray into fine-dining, the women owners of Mission Pie asked Reem if she wanted to take over their spot at Mission and 25th. She said yes and started doing the work to get open.
 
And then the pandemic hit.
 
Once the Mission location was able to open, Reem's California did better than a lot of nearby restaurants, partly because the food lends itself to take-out so easily. But for Reem, not being able to share space and that hospitality that was at least as important as the food itself was hard. Still, they found ways to connect with the community.
 
In 2023, they opened a second location in the Ferry Building. They started appearing at Outside Lands a few years ago (and will be there again this year). Reem decided to start transitioning the business to a worker-owned model.
 
Visit Reem's Mission location, 2901 Mission Street, Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and again for dinner from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. The Ferry Building location is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Follow them on social media at @ReemsCalifornia and follow Reem herself @reem.assil. Her cookbook, Arabiyya, is available on her website.
 
We end the podcast with Reem's interpretation of this year's theme on Storied: San Francisco—We're all in it.
 
Photography by Jeff Hunt

In 2022, the Presidio Trust asked Favianna Rodriguez to be an activator, as the trust was preparing to open its Tunnel Tops park. Favianna recommended that the folks building the park employ color and visual art to transform the space. They were supportive of her ideas. And with that, Ancestral Futurism was born.
 
Favianna grew up in Oakland next to the 880 freeway, where she still lives today. The area around that major thoroughfare is one of the most polluted corridors in the state. Because she comes from an area subject to what she refers to as "environmental racism," she sought to make a statement in the northwest corner of The City. "Ancestral Futurism" was a phrase that perfectly summed up her goal: "We cannot repair the present until we acknowledge the harm of the past."
 
The land where Spanish colonizers established the Presidio was already inhabited by Native people, of course. Those people lost their land to the Europeans. They were murdered, pushed out, disenfranchised. For Favianna, the space is now one where we can talk about that.
 
Tosha Stimage was born in rural Mississippi. College got her out of The South and to Ohio, where she studied art and design. After graduation, she spent a bit of time in Colorado, where she worked with kids doing art therapy. Then grad school brought her to the Bay Area: She started at CCA in 2012.
 
She's been an artist since she was a kid, and that didn't change after grad school. One of the ways that art manifests for Tosha is in flower arranging. She had a shop in Oakland, but was forced out by gentrification. Now, she's got her shop, Saint Flora, back open for business in The City as part of SF's Vacant to Vibrant program.
 
After the unveiling of Ancestral Futurism, Favianna and others realized that they needed to make it an annual event and bring in other artists. They also decided that it was important to honor native plants and animals along with the native humans of the area. For this year's iteration, Favianna invited Tosha to add her own interpretation to the ongoing project.
 
After she was selected, Tosha started visiting the park, meeting people, and doing her homework. She began to notice the intention and care that went into plant programs already going in the Presidio. Right away, she felt it was something she wanted to be part of.
 
Tosha gave her contribution the name "Superblooms" in part to honor that natural phenomenon. It also speaks to the resilience of the plants she chose to include in her art—checker bloom, Chilean strawberry, and California poppy. All are beautiful, of course, but they all have histories in the Bay Area.
 
This Sunday, July 14, from 12 to 3 p.m., Tunnel Tops will host a launch party for Tosha's Superblooms. Activities that day include: an art unveiling with Tosha, hands-on art activities for all ages, a living floral Installation, free plant starters, DJ sets, and a show and tell with the Presidio Nursery. Attendance is free. For more info, visit the Presidio Trust site.
 
We recorded this podcast at Tunnel Tops park in June 2024.
 
Photography by Felipe Romero

Reem Assil has created a restaurant in the Mission that serves some of the most beautiful, delicious, and activist food of any new spot in San Francisco in a long, long time.
 
Reem was born and raised in her early years in a Boston suburb. Her dad is from Damascus, Syria, and her mom is from Gaza, Palestine. Both were refugees in 1967. They met in Beirut and emigrated to the East Coast of the US.
 
The suburb where they moved was predominantly white, but Reem's household was vibrant in Arab culture. Her parents didn't want the family to forget their roots. They were in Massachusetts because that's where the jobs were. But Reem's mom's family all came to California, which ended up having quite an effect on her.
 
Her grandparents went to Northridge just before the 1994 earthquake that devastated that area. Reem says that, every summer, relatives from all over the world, including her and her family from out east, converged on her grandparents' home in the San Fernando Valley.
 
She talks about the strength of that Arab culture in her home and among her relatives in California, but also, of reconciling that with the fact that she was a latch-key kid, especially when her mom went back to work. Reem was immersed in US culture, but felt those strong roots of her ancestors.
 
In the late-Eighties and early Nineties, Reem was into Ska and "alternative" music, but also hip-hop. "Growing up Palestinian, you're aware of the world in a different way," she says. She's always had an affinity for justice. She talks about a history teacher she had in high school who had a big influence on her.
 
In that class, she learned much more about the Civil Rights movement than anyone can get from a textbook. She went on several trips with that class, including to the Deep South. Being embedded like that, talking with people who lived the movement, had an enormous effect on Reem. In 1994, she joined her family on a trip to Gaza. She was 11 and the experience "wrecked" her. The stories she heard in the South resonated and reminded her of what she knew about her mom's homeland.
 
Reem is the oldest of three sisters and says that hers was a very feminine household. As a kid and teenager, she had an affinity for cooking and baking. But as she navigated her more formative later teen years, she rejected the idea of women in the kitchen. Food would come back much later in her journey.
 
She had just begun college at Tufts University in 2001 when her parents got divorced and 9/11 happened. She and other Arab folks had always dealt with Islamophobia, but that ramped way, way up after Sept. 11. That and her being the first to leave her house put a strain on her parents' relationship as well as her own life. She rejected the US-centric foreign policy ideas she was hearing and being taught at Tufts.
 
She visited Lebanon and Syria in 2002, and when she returned to the US, she developed what she thought was a parasite. She couldn't eat. That affected her studies and her social life. It all coalesced and devolved into depression, and this further negatively affected her relationship with food. Reem quit college and made her way to California.
 
At first, she considered her grandparents' place in Southern California. But she figured that LA would depress her further. An aunt, a white hippie from Humboldt, and an uncle who was an activist lived in Daly City, though, and felt more her speed. She didn't know much about the Bay Area other than an impression she got earlier in life when she came out for their wedding. They were the main attraction.
 
She arrived in 2002, just as organizing around the then-proposed invasion of Iraq was taking place. Her aunt and uncle worked during the days and went to anti-war meetings at night. Reem went with them, and she cites these experiences as helping raise her out of that funk she'd been in—it lit a fire in the activist part of her life.
 
While all this was going on, she'd also visit

In Part 2, we dive into the story of how The Stud Collective pulled out the seemingly impossible—they found a new home in South of Market.
 
After a quick history of the space at 1123 Folsom (a leather bar in the Seventies called The Stables, Julie's Supper Club, a sports bar, a restaurant called Radius, and a vegetarian restaurant called Wellspring Commune that was a front for a cult called The Tribal Thumb, who were affiliated with the Symbionese Liberation Army ... and that space is rumored to have been one of the places that the SLA kept Patty Hearst—oh, San Francisco), Rachel guides us on a tour of the original location of The Stud, which was opened by Alexis Muir (a trans woman) in 1966.
 
Muir ran the OG Stud, also on Folsom west of the current location, for several years. Originally, it was a kinky/leather/cowboy/Western bar. It was the same year, just months before, that the Compton's Cafeteria Riots took place. Just a few years after it opened, The Stud shifted themes to more of a queer hippie bar. But one thing that helped it stand out from the get-go was its inclusivity.
 
The Stud remained in that original spot on Folsom until 1987. After Muir, a group of Milwaukee hippies who were also affiliated with Hamburger Mary's took over ownership. After this group, toward the end of the Seventies, another group took over. In 1987, following a dispute with the landlord, The Stud had to move. They found a spot on Harrison at Ninth that had previously been a nightclub.
 
We fast-forward a bit to revisit Marke, Rachel, and Honey's introductions to The Stud, which all took place at the Harrison location. Keeping with that spirit of inclusivity that had been a hallmark of the place since its opening, they all feel that it was the one place at the time where any segment of the queer population could feel at home.
 
In 2016, over Fourth of July weekend, The Stud's then-owner, Michael McElheney (who'd owned the place since the late-Nineties), announced that he was selling the business. The building it was in had been sold, the new landlords tripled the rent, and McElheney was ready to retire. But, as mentioned in Part 1, Nate Albee already had a plan in place.
 
Within the first week of McElheney's announcement, the fledgling collective presented the plan and it was accepted immediately. The group was already around 20 members strong. Honey and Rachel talk about other SF collectives and worker-owned businesses that they turned to for guidance and inspiration—Rainbow Grocery, Arizmendi, and the now-closed Lusty Lady. Marke says that, from its origin, the collective also wanted to serve as a beacon for how to do this elsewhere in the queer nightlife space.
 
On New Year's Eve 2016, The Stud Collective threw its Grand Opening party. The place never shut down between the previous owner and the collective taking over, but it felt right to celebrate the takeover.
 
Then, a little more than three years later, COVID hit. The rent was already exorbitant and they had decided to try to find another place. Once it became obvious that the shutdown was going to last longer than we all thought, they got out of the lease at the spot on Harrison, and even threw a funeral online. It wasn't an easy decision, but it turned out to be a unanimous one for the collective.
 
The Grand Opening Night at the new location took place this year on April 20 (haha?) and was themed "Stud Timeline." The first hour, which began at 6 p.m., was Sixties, the second hour was the Seventies, and so on. The Cockettes were there. Queer elders showed up. There were also first-timers.
 
It was a big deal, and the night was emotional for them all.
 
I asked them to plug events at The Stud during Pride, and Rachel obliged on behalf of the group:
Friday, June 28, "Forever" with (co-op member) Vivian Forevermore Saturday, June 29, "Les Femmes," a celebration of dolls, twinks, and bimbos Sunday, June 30, a "marathon party" with a dr