By Greg Zeman
The Guardsman

It’s practically impossible to walk through San Francisco on any given day without hearing the diverse rhythms of its streets ringing from the crowded corners and echoing off of the painted walls.

Any style of music imaginable—and some which even bend the limits of imagination­—can be heard in this city, if one knows where to look and listen.

There is a unique cultural character to each of the city’s many neighborhoods, and each one has its own musical tradition and history.

The Filmore was once the creative center of jazz in the city, and a recent musical renaissance happening there could return it to its historical prominence. But the true soul of San Francisco’s timeless love affair with jazz — and all forms and movements in music which are raw and spontaneous ­— can be heard on the streets.

From instrumentalists weaving melodies with saxophones, guitars, violins and all sorts of instruments you may have never heard of to percussionists banging out intricate rhythms on buckets, boxes, trash can lids and anything else that makes a tasty noise when hit, the variety of street musicians in the city is practically unrivaled.

By Fleur Bailey and Alex Emslie
The Guardsman

Cesar Chavez Elementary School students paint their ceramic creations during an afterschool session of the Mission Science Workshop on Jan. 19. Hands-on classes at the workshop expose Mission district students to a level of learning unavailable in most classrooms. RAMSEY EL-QARE / THE GUARDSMAN

What began nearly 20 years ago as a City College engineering technician tinkering in his garage to try and understand some of the basic science behind his job has evolved into a workshop of wonder for students of Mission district schools.

“It’s not about me lecturing. They don’t want that,” said Dan Sudran, founder of The Mission Science Workshop. “They want to do stuff and learn by doing stuff.”

The workshop has a focus on hands-on experimentation. Aside from bringing physics, biology, earth science and chemistry to life, the workshop teaches students mechanical skills, such as how to build a table.

“For kids in the Mission, the Exploratorium might as well be on Mars,” said Will Maynez, City College’s physics department lab manager, who helped Sudran collect equipment for the workshop.

Elementary school student Kimberly Hernandez has been attending the Mission Science Workshop for two years. She said she likes biology the best.

“One cool thing is that sometimes you can touch the snakes and parts of the body, like on the skeletons of animals,” she said.

The workshop boasts an elastic curriculum to accommodate teachers from all the schools it serves.

“It’s a little bit like a restaurant,” Sudran said. “They say, ‘I wanna order some of this for my class,’ except it’s a curriculum.”

He then negotiates with teachers to try to give them what they want, keeping in mind what the workshop has to offer.

“The main objective of the science workshop is to get kids excited about science, to see their curiosity, to give them a chance to explore new things and experiment,” Sudran said.

The workshop primarily serves schools in the Mission district, but Sudran said they try to accommodate schools from other parts of the city. It has grown from a modest beginning to teaching 3,000 students per year. It also teaches teachers through professional development courses run by Sudran.

“It’s so awesome, so amazing, so rewarding,” said Michelle Evans, a City College student employed at the workshop through the child development department. “For me, it’s not a job. It makes me feel good to help the community.”

Wendy Kaufman has been an instructor at City College since 1983, when her passion for activism began. RAMSEY EL-QARE / THE GUARDSMAN

By Greg Zeman
Staff Writer

City College engineering instructor Wendy Kaufmyn is a voice for non-violence.

“Non-violence is the only way to get sustainable change,” Kaufmyn said. “If you use violence you might win, but you aren’t changing the paradigm.”

While Kaufmyn has been active in many causes, all of her activism was motivated by her beliefs about non-violence. Kaufmyn was born Jewish, but she does not see Judaism as her religion. “If someone asks what my religion is, I say non-violence,” she said.

Kaufmyn’s activism began years ago when she first arrived at City College in 1983 and attended an on-campus meeting of a then newly-founded group called Witness for Peace. WFP was opposed to president Ronald Reagan’s financial support of the Contras in Nicaragua.
“I went down to Nicaragua with Witness for Peace in opposition to our government’s policy of supporting the Contras,” Kaufmyn said. “We were accompanying villagers there so they wouldn’t be attacked by the Contras because they were funded by the U.S., and it would be very embarrassing if you had U.S. citizens being killed.”

Her experience with WFP shaped the philosophy and strategies she would later bring to the cause of Palestinian solidarity.

“The very first semester I was here, I started getting involved in Central American solidarity,” Kaufmyn said. “It was all about leveraging your privilege. I am privileged and I do have privilege on a lot of levels by just being white and middle class.”

In her work for WFP, Kaufmyn became involved in the cause of anti-nuclear proliferation. One particular group she worked with was the Nevada Desert Experience.

“The Palestinian issue came up, and I really felt more passionate about it than any other issues I had worked on,” she said. “I think a lot of it is because of my Jewish background.” Kaufmyn struggles with the meaning of that background even as she uses it as leverage in her efforts to aid in the liberation of Palestine.

“The idea of using my privilege as a Jew to go there and work for Palestine makes sense,” she said. “The Israeli soldiers that I meet are like my cousins or brothers. So many of them just remind me of people in my family, and I talk to them so comfortably. They do care about my opinion in a way that they’re not going to care about the opinion of the Palestinian whose house I’m standing in front of.”

Kaufmyn says she feels like she has to be careful not to give the wrong impression to the people she is trying to help. “You can’t be sitting there laughing and joking with the soldiers and then have the Palestinians in the village trust you, so I have to be kind of careful on that level,” she said.

Kaufmyn says she feels a strong connection to Palestine and is dedicated to seeing it become “one democratic state for all of its citizens.” She feels like the idea of a Jewish state is discriminatory.

“It is racist to just have Israel be for Jews, and there’s no other country in the world like that,” Kaufmyn said, adding that she saw strong parallels between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and that of American Indians by the U.S. government. “It’s Western European colonizers eradicating an indigenous population,” she said.

On her first trip to Palestine, Kaufmyn met several other activists from California. “We met in Palestine, but we’re all from the Bay Area.” Then she met Deeb Kamal, a Palestinian man who had an idea for the children of the village Deir Ibzi’a, and once again she had the opportunity to leverage her privilege in the service of her cause.

“Deeb looked around and saw that the children were depressed and organized a summer camp,” Kaufmyn said. “He asked ISM for some internationals to use as protection. It ended up being six of us from the Bay Area at this summer camp.”

Kaufmyn said Kamal was a huge influence on the group of Bay Area activists.

“He was really inspiring,” she said. “He told us, ‘These demonstrations you’re doing, this is not the way to fight for the future of Palestine.’ He basically encouraged us to start a group to raise money for scholarships.”

That’s exactly what they did. “We started that summer in 2002,” Kaufmyn said. “In some ways it’s not political at all. We’re raising money for scholarships for people that are under hard economic conditions.”

One of the main sources of funding for the scholarships, outside of donations, is the Friends of Deir Ibzi’a project, which purchases embroidery from Palestinian women and sells them in the states.

“We give them a better price than they get in Ramalla, and we use them to fund the scholarships and as an educational tool,” Kaufmyn said.

She says she is done seeking out new causes to fight. “Either Palestine will become free or I will retire as an activist, whatever comes first,” Kaufmyn said. “But I don’t see myself moving on to a different cause after that.”

“They are a group that protests the Nevada test site,” she said. “The idea is that if we can stop the testing of these weapons, that ends the first stage of their production.”

It is that realm of engineering, defense research and development that Kaufmyn says once gave her pause about her career as an engineering professor.

“That was actually part of the conflict I felt for many years, and I still feel it, but it doesn’t bother me as much anymore,” Kaufmyn said. “I figure it’s a student’s choice to do what they will with the education that they get. I talk about what it can be used for and I don’t hide my political views.”

Kaufmyn’s activism has also touched on an issue deeply woven into the social fabric of the Bay Area — homelessness.

“Back in the early nineties there was a mayor called Frank Jordan and he had something that he instituted called the Matrix Program and it was very anti-homeless,” she said. “Aspects of daily living, like sleeping, were made illegal and the police gave thousands of tickets. An organization started in response to this program to show that this wasn’t the humane or even practical way to treat homelessness.”

Kaufmyn said that while she made a positive impact in all of the groups she was involved with, she didn’t come into her own as an activist until she found the cause of Palestinian solidarity.

“I would say I was an activist du jour. I would basically jump on the bandwagon of issues people were dealing with,” she said. “That’s how I got involved with the Central American project, nuclear issues and then homelessness. I wasn’t really a leader, I would just follow.”

But when Kaufmyn became aware of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, her activism took a more concentrated approach. She began traveling to the West Bank in 2002 and she has been back many times since.

She is an active member of the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led international organization opposed to what it sees as Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

Annika Wood, winner of the Filmmaker Education Screenwriting Scholarship. ROBERT ROMANO / THE GUARDSMAN

By Nick Palm
Staff Writer

Annika Wood wrote her first play when she was just four years old. From that moment, she knew writing was going to be a big part of her life. And it was the magic of cinema that first sparked her interest.

“My grandparents had a VCR, so as a kid I watched a lot of movies,” Wood said. “They never banned me from watching anything. Sometimes I would stay up until one in the morning watching movies.”

Wood, a City College student in the cinema department, was recently awarded the inaugural Filmmaker Education Screenwriting Scholarship by the San Francisco Film Society. The scholarship was awarded through the Colleges and Universities Program, new to the SFFS.

“We are thrilled to be offering our first Filmmaker Education Scholarship to an inspiring student such as Annika,” said Joanne Parsont, SFFS director of education, in a press release. “The originality and style of her screenplay submission clearly demonstrated the vision and skills of a talented young writer with the potential to take full advantage of our screenwriting program. We look forward to witnessing the end results of her hard work.”

Wood was awarded the scholarship after one of her screenplays, “Backwater,” was submitted by her City College screenwriting instructor Denise Bostrom.
“‘Backwater’ is a crime story set in the swamps of Louisiana, deep in the bayou country,” Wood said. The story of “Backwater” came from blending two local legends told to her by her grandfather while growing up in Louisiana. “I’m not sure how true they are, but I just never forgot them,” Wood said.

The scholarship, according to the SFFS, will pay for Wood’s tuition fees in one of their advanced-level screenwriting workshops, called From Rough to Polished.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Wood is on track to receive an A.S. degree in cinema at City College next year. However, this is not her first college experience.

Wood holds a bachelor’s degree in television production from Loyola University.

“They gave me a really great scholarship,” she said. “But they didn’t have a film major. They only had television.”

After graduating from Loyola, Wood worked in television advertising as well as writing and producing in a television news room. The whole time her heart remained in film.

“I thought I could jump right over from one to the next,” Wood said. “But they’re very different, and it’s hard to make the jump. So I decided to go back to school.”

These days, Wood is driven by the hope of someday becoming a professional screenwriter. “It’s what I do all the time now,” Wood said. “If I’m not in class, I’m writing. I’ve finished two scripts this year.”

When working on a new screenplay, inspiration comes to Wood naturally.

“A couple of my screenplays have been sparked by dreams,” Wood said. “I don’t write them down initially, but if I have a dream that I’m still mulling over a month or two later, I’ll write it down. I wrote the screenplay I’m currently working on in my head while I was driving home from Tahoe.”

The writing process itself becomes a piece of fine art when Wood starts writing. “After the first draft, you’ve got the block of clay. With the second draft, you start to make it into your sculpture. You hack away at all the unnecessary things, and you bring out the shape,” she said.

The film industry, especially in Hollywood, is known for its cutthroat attitude and competitive nature that often discourages young filmmakers and screenwriters from pursuing their dreams. “You have to give it 100 percent and not look back,” Wood said. “Because everyone you’re competing against is that way. Anyone that’s going to shake out and rise above the rest has to be thinking that way.

“If you’re willing to put in the time, and willing to make sacrifices in other areas of your life — it’s no guarantee — but you’re giving yourself the best possible odds to succeed. You have to give it a shot,” Wood explained as a mantra that would be good for any young artist with a dream to follow.

By Tristan Crane
STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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By Greg Zeman
STAFF WRITER

Alycia Williams is a Second Chance Program success story. When she first entered the program in 2007 she was homeless and lived in shelters or on the street. Now she supports herself, is reunited with her family and actively involved in the kind of outreach that helped change her life.

For individuals who have been caught up in the criminal justice system, the Second Chance Program is just that — a second chance. “The EOPS Second Chance Program is specifically designed to recruit and support formerly incarcerated individuals currently within the criminal justice system who wish to achieve their educational and vocational goals within City College of San Francisco,” according to the City College website.

“Just through education alone, I was able to get my own place,” Williams said. “It was like a spiral effect of nothing but positivity in my life — just making the decision to go back to school.”

Williams is a City College student and a recipient of the Antonio Guiuan Memorial Scholarship as well as the San Mateo county HOPE Leadership Award. She is currently being certified as an Alcohol and Drug Educator. As part of her internship, she is working with the San Bruno Jail, reaching out to incarcerated individuals.

In the past, Second Chance has actively sought out new students. “I was introduced to the program through a guy named Charles Moore.” Williams said.

Charles Moore is in charge of outreach and recruitment at the Second Chance Program. He still actively seeks out students who he hopes will be able to replicate the kind of success seen with Williams.

Moore is a program graduate himself. After being arrested at 13 for stealing a car, Moore became entangled in a lifestyle of delinquency and violence. He then found moral clarity in the church and was ordained as a Pentecostal minister. In 1976, he was hired by City College as the Second Chance outreach coordinator and peer adviser.

“He pretty much took me up under his wing and got me involved in the City College community,” Williams said of Moore. “He personally took me around to different resource areas and explained to me what my options were. That made me even more hungry and gave me the outlook that I could succeed in college.”

“[As a parolee], you already have strikes against you. When you get out-without family or friends- you come back here with what’s on your back. That’s why so many wind up going back in,” Moore told Etc. Magazine in Fall 2006.

In the same article, EOPS director Alvin Jenkins said, “Imagine being locked up for five or ten years and dropped off in downtown San Francisco with $200. It’s pretty frightening to think about.” The Second Chance Program tries to ease the transition back into society and provide assistance and support.

“Just being a part of the Second Chance Program opened the door for so many other opportunities for me,” Williams said. “It’s just been wonderful, and I’m continuing to grow. Basically, the Second Chance Program planted the seed I needed to get where I am today.”

“Last year we had 138 Second Chance students,” said Roland Montemayor, associate dean of financial aid. “Our retention, those that complete 9 units with a 2.0 GPA and continue onto the next year, was 67 percent.”

Despite its past success, the EOPS office has suffered severe cutbacks in the face of the budget shortfall.

When Williams was a Second Chance student, EOPS provided financial assistance to students in addition to whatever financial aid they received. This assistance came in the form of cafeteria food vouchers, public transportation vouchers and money for textbooks.

“These are the longest lines I’ve ever seen and I’ve been working at Financial Aid for over 25 years,” said Jorge Bell, dean of financial aid, EOPS and CalWORKS services. “The programs here like EOPS, Second Chance, CARE and CalWORKS — all of them were cut. So there’s nowhere for the students to get books or supplies.”

“EOPS normally has between $400,000 and $500,000 in book services, and that’s gone. So that’s pretty significant,” Montemayor said. “Students who have completed nine units and made their three contacts, with Second Chance or EOPS [counselors] will get $100. That’s really the best we can do. It’s something.”

According to Bell, the department’s strategy was to minimize services during the summer semester to stockpile funding for fall.

“The overload was gone in the summer,” Bell said. “We only had the clerical support staff working in the summertime, so all that money that we were able to save we gave to the students in the form of books.”

Despite the budget constraints, the EOPS department is doing all it can to help.

“We’ll do the initial counseling and make sure they have the right classes and that’s pretty much all we’re able to do. There are programs that are available, but we don’t have any additional resources,” Roland said. He added there was a class specifically for Second Chance students with 25-30 students enrolled this semester.

Bell stressed that the Financial Aid office was still a place with resources available to students.

“I would say about 99% of anyone who applies for financial aid gets some kind of financial aid,” Bell said. “It might be a fee waiver. It might be a loan. It might be employment work study. It might be a grant. Not all of them will get a grant, but most of them will end up getting a fee waiver or something.”

“We’re looking for external money,” Roland said. He spoke of the possibility of, “creating an advisory committee for Second Chance and having that be an advocacy group for how we can pursue other funds that are available.”

For the time being, any services provided by EOPS are not open to new students.

“We are currently not accepting applications for any prospective EOPS students,” EOPS director Alvin Jenkins wrote in an e-mail to The Guardsman. “We do not know when we will be able to admit new Second Chance students to EOPS.”

Jenkins declined to be interviewed for this story.

By Cailie Skelton
STAFF WRITER

Desmond Miller has always known that he wanted to write comics. When be was rejected by the publishing companies at the top of the industry, he knew just what to do.

Miller, a former City College Guardsman staff member, started his own publishing company, Slumberland Press to publish his comic books.

“It was really hard breaking in myself and getting picked up by a company like Image,”  he said. “For the longest time I was trying to break into the business with just my writing.”

That is until he spoke with Bob Schreck, a former DC Comics editor at a comic book convention. Schreck encouraged him to accompany his writing with illustrations, even if they were stick figures.

“I’m always looking for more artists,” Miller said. So far he has found two artists via Craigslist and a website called Deviant Art. He is trying to pay them a meager sum of what he makes from the comics.

Miller acquired his editing skills at the City College Guardsman newspaper where he started out as a writer and then continued as an editor. “Going through the journalism department,” Miller said, “has taught me how to think more critically.”

Aside from not always getting his comics accepted to better known press companies like Image Comics and Red Five Comics,  Miller has faced hardships with Slumberland. He often struggles to cover even the cost of printing, however  he doesn’t let that weigh his spirit down.

Miller encourages other students to start and expect to fail, learn from it and then try again. “You know when they say you don’t make money in the first three years?” he said. “They mean it.”

Miller doesn’t let the rejection get him down either, because his comics are gaining fans. “For every two people who say ‘Oh this is stupid’ there is at least one person who thinks ‘wow this is awesome!’” Miller said.

Millers comics range from Western-themed story lines, to comics about the children of golden-age superheros. They are sold at a comic book shop in Fresno called Heroes Comics, at San Francisco’s Whatever comic book shop and on ComixPress.com.

“Desmond is a man of a million thoughts,” said Rich Boutell, the owner of Whatever, a comic book store in the Castro, who picked up two of Slumberland’s comics about a year ago.

While he still wants to get picked up by a bigger publisher, Miller plans to continue building his company. His vision is to turn Slumberland into a magazine called SLP that will be in the same vein as Geek magazine, which covers comic-related stories.

In 2010, Miller will be market his books at comic book conventions across California, one in Oregon and as far east as Chicago.

Slumberland Press can be found at http://slumberlandpress.com. You can also search for them on Facebook by entering  ‘Slumberland Press’.

Staff members from The Guardsman and etc. Magazine took home a total of 27 awards from the Spring 2009 Journalism Association of Community Colleges statewide conference. ALEX LUTHI / THE GUARDSMAN

By Ellen Silk
NEWS EDITOR

At the Spring 2009 Journalism Association of Community Colleges’ annual convention, the Guardsman and etc. magazine took home 27 awards, including the Pacesetter award for the Guardsman.

Etc. magazine took home a total of 11 awards, with The Guardsman taking home 16 in mail-in, on-the-spot and bring-in categories. City College took first place awards for on-the-spot news story by Sean Singer and mail-in first place magazine opinion story by Stephanie Rice. The Guardsman and etc. magazine both won the general excellence award.

Guardsman staff writer Sean SInger displays his first place award for on-the-spot newswriting. ALEX LUTHI / THE GUARDSMAN

Winning awards wasn’t the only thing to do at the convention. After a key note speech from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Marjie Lundstrom, an investigative reporter for the Sacramento Bee, students from both City College publications, along with students from community colleges across the state participated in contests and workshops,

“This is my first year going and I liked seeing all the different papers and how they worked,”  said Roxanne Bequio, calendar editor for the Guardsman. “The contests were nerve-racking, but I was proud of myself for participating.”

The JACC 2009 convention offered workshops like “Intermediate Indesign,” “Writing the Game Story,”  and  “Can College Newspapers Still Make an Imprint in the 21st Century.” The Guardsman’s own Alex and Jessica Luthi, along with John Hornberg from San Jose State University, hosted the workshop “Newsroom 2.0: Integrating Social Networking into Your Publication.”

Etc. Magazine staff member Patricia Decker holds her third place award for copy editing. ALEX LUTHI / THE GUARDSMAN

“Even though the turnout for our workshop was low we addressed a lot of issues. I think we did a fairly good job informing people on how to use Facebook and Twitter for their papers,” said Jessica Luthi, editor in chief for the Guardsman.