In a music scene dominated by men, female musicians prove they are not to be forgotten

A man finishes playing drums in his band’s set and packs up his equipment.

“Excuse me, coming through!” he yells as he carries his drums through the crowd. Everybody moves out of his way.

“That has never been my experience,” said frontwoman of local indie band Blood Hunny, Ariel Rose Fishkin.

This is one of the differences Fishkin experiences as a woman in the Humboldt Count music scene.

Fishkin started learning music around the age of five when she participated in a mommy and me piano class, and started teaching herself guitar at 14. Fishkin first started playing her songs as a solo project at open mics under the name Ariel Rose, but later started performing under the name Blood Hunny in the summer of 2017.

After being told by a concert booker that he would book her for shows if she had a backing band, Fishkin eventually recruited Julio Perdido on bass guitar and Jacob Partida on drums.

Fishkin believes the music scene here is tight knit but can be difficult to break into at times. She describes the scene as a group of musicians that know each other and ask each other play in each other’s shows.

Fishkin felt it was impossible for her to play anywhere other than open mic when she first started as a solo act. But as she has become more involved in the scene, Fishkin has seen that recently a lot of bands are open to having her play with them.

“You do kind of have to know somebody,” Fishkin said. “But once it happens I feel like it’s fairly easy to get shows.”

Fishkin is not a big fan of harassment at the bar scene, but she knows that that isn’t a problem specific to Arcata. Because the Arcata music scene is so small, when issues come up about other musician’s behavior it can be hard to motivate people to address them.

“There’s a sense that we don’t want to lose those musicians from the scene” Fishkin said. “Each band since there are so few, makes up a big portion of the scene. So it’s difficult to hold people accountable.”

Having personally experienced harassment from an audience member at an open mic, Fishkin now brings it upon herself to spread awareness during her performances.

“As shitty as that experience was,” Fishkin said. “I have the opportunity to use my platform there again to bring awareness to that.”

Jasmine Bigham, who goes by Jazzy Jane, has only been rapping publicly for a month and has already made a name for herself in the Humboldt music scene. She is one half of Indigo Soul, along with Raquel Peña who goes by Rocky Planet. Bigham and Peña are both Kinesiology students at Humboldt State University who met in dance class after Peña heard Bigham rap instead of dance as her solo performance at the end of the semester. After that, Peña approached Bigham and from that came Indigo Soul.

Even though Bigham is fresh to the music scene, she has already played at venues like The Jam multiple times and with local hip-hop staples such as Nada Crew, Ason and Rafi and with another female led band Tessoulation.

“It’s easy to do music here if you know your shit,” Bigham said. “If you really work at your craft, people will allow you into their circles. You’ve got to earn it.”

Bigham said women entering the music scene are starting to become more of a thing. With the induction of events like Ladies Night on Mondays at The Jam, women have had more opportunities to step into the spotlight.

Kyra Teevan started playing drums in high school after her Aunt’s drum set ended up at her house.

She took lessons and learned a lot of Nirvana songs from her teacher but initially stopped after graduating in 2013 before moving to Humboldt County for school. About a year ago, Teevan met Luke Aronie who encouraged her to start playing again, and after playing together they formed Frog, and recently recruited Wyatt Brenner to play Bass.

Teevan loves nature and studies Soil Science, which she said seeps into the music that Frog plays. Some of their songs are appropriately named like Swamped or Soil Witch, which is about Teevan.

She believes people should spend more time to appreciate nature.

“It’s really nice knowing that after I play a show and I don’t feel very strong about it, I’ll have people afterwards that’ll give me a hug,” Teevan said. “Even though I’m sweaty and probably smell like shit.”

HSU International Film Festival struggles amidst cutbacks

It’s never been easy for the Humboldt State University International Film Festival. The festival has struggled to stay afloat, dealing with cutbacks and lack of notoriety.

The process for building the festival was slow. It took a few years for the word of its existence to get out. However, thanks to a committed team behind the festival, it remains the oldest student-run film festival in the world at 51 years old.

Susan Abbey has been involved with the festival teaching film appreciation classes since Grad School. One of the film faculty members at HSU knew Abbey.

“They needed somebody who could help work with a classroom, event planning and promotion and also knew enough about film to help create the annual event,” Abbey said.

Abbey says that since the club also acts as a class, she encourages non-majors to take it for two credits.

“Teachers come and go, budgets come and go, but the students, even in really thin years when our budget has been cut down to nothing, the student’s passion keep it going,” Abbey said.

One of the benefits of the festival is that it gives experimental films a venue.

“Experimental films once did not have a venue but because of the kind of avant-garde nature of HSU, it was able to hold the context for them,” Abbey said.

One of the problems that the festival constantly faces is with the school administration, from which they receive very little support.

“The class was going to be dropped a few years ago because it was dropped from being a core class and the teachers here didn’t have the time to teach it,” Abbey said. “The festival also had to be cut from seven days to four to make it more sustainable.”

Aurelio Torres-Garcia has been part of the club since he was a freshman in 2016, and helps Abbey as co-director.

“It is all encompassing,” Torres-Garcia said. “Everyone tells stories and everyone has a story to tell. Many of my co-directors are film fanatics and they love working in the film festival.”

Another co-director is film major Katherine Lundahl.

“I want to go into documentary,” Lundahl said. “I want to make social positive change and documentary is an amazing resource and it’s the responsibility of the filmmaker to use this tool to make positive change.”

Lundahl detailed some issues with the clubs had financially.

Peter Blickensderfer began working for the festival ever since he had done similar work organizing smaller film festivals at his high school.

He liked the way the community responded to the festivals. Blickensderfer has been part of the festival for two years and said he sees the way budget cuts have affected the festival.

“The school seems to have been pulling back funding from the festival, which is a shame because they are the major funder,” Blickensderfer said. “It’s always been a struggle since the beginning. It’s always been a passion project and the history of it is also a major reason to keep it going and the community likes it, always responding well to it.”

It turns out that there must be $4000 left in the trust before any club can ask for more money and that wouldn’t even last a year. There is also no guarantee that they would be approved for any extra funds once down to that low amount.

“We have $19,000 in our trust, that money is from fundraising, ticket sales and filmfreeway submissions,” Lundahl said. “The problem this year, because of cuts all clubs are being impacted, even bigger organizations on Campus.”

Humboldt County expresses inner nerd at Ohana Comic Con

Hosted at the Blue Lake Casino, Ohana Comic Con is the first comic convention to be hosted in Humboldt County. Locals and out of town vendors set up stands to sell, meet enthusiasts and have an overall good time.

Professional cosplayers Cammie Duvall and Ashton Taylor said they were having a great time at the con.

“It’s always fun to meet new people at conventions,” Duvall said. “Nerds coming together dressing as nerds is always fun.”

Duvall and Taylor set up a stand together to sell photo prints of their cosplay.

“For seven years I’ve been cosplaying,” Taylor said. “Seeing the cosplay community grow overtime has made continue to dress up over the years.”

Stands for local businesses was also at the convention. Danielle Jones, who founded “Cream N Things,” and sold her handmade soaps. Jones is a Humboldt State University graduate with a masters in science in Natural Resources.

“I founded my business because my skin has a bad reaction with store bought soaps.” Jones said. “Since then, I’ve been making soaps out natural material. Stuff like goat fat, I know that’s weird, but stuff seen as ‘waste’ can be used for something beneficial.”

Family and friends stopped by the comic con, dressed as their favorite comic, anime, film and video game character. Some of the costumes range from store bought to custom made.

Locals Rebecca Hayes and Richard Strobach cosplayed as their favorite video game characters. Hayes dressed as Link from the Legend of Zelda series and Strobach was dressed as Master Chief from the Halo series.

“This is my first time at a convention dressed up,” Hayes said. “This won’t be my last one either.”

“Some of the parts was store bought but I had to modify some of it,” Strobach said. “It took me about a month to make.”

Artists were taking commissions for fans and random passerby who were interested in their art. Danielle DeMartini was one of the various artists who set a stand up for her art. She busily took sketch commissions and sold her artwork prints.

“I’ve been drawing for 14 years now,” DeMartini said. “I didn’t expect so many people to stop by the stand and ask for my drawings, the turn out is great.”

Blue Lake Casino’s management was happy with the amount of attendees at the Ohana Comic Con, and they’re already planning to host another one next year.

Freshman paramedic helps out those in need on and off campus

Danielle Brown remembers the day a man was rushed into the emergency room where they found out that he had cut his own toe off and tried to super glue it back on.

“I was working in the emergency room as an EMT, so this happened when I first started,” said Danielle Brown, a Humboldt State University freshman. “He was coming to us about two weeks after it happened, he was septic and ended up having a blood clot in his heart.”

Brown is a HSU freshman currently majoring in cellular/molecular biology but she’s also a licensed paramedic in Arcata.

“The toe was dead and we immediately had to cut off the foot to stop the infection from spreading,” Brown said.

Brown has been a paramedic for close to two years now. She started off as an emergency medical technician for six months where she completed the 1,700 hours she needed to become a licensed paramedic. As a paramedic she helped out in various different locations in Los Angeles, responding to all types of medical emergencies.

As a paramedic, Brown is trained beyond the requirements for an EMT.

“I have the ability to use over 150 different medications,” Brown said. “I can do CPR and I’m trained for any ‘in-field maneuvers’, anything you can think of that is needed in the field.”

Brown is always on call for the HSU campus as a paramedic. This means she responds to calls of people in need of medical assistance whenever her phone rings.

“I think I get a call at least once a week from some people next door needing some help,” Brown said.

According to Brown, the job gives her a high adrenaline rush. She’s literally always on her toes and no two days are the same.

“It’s always great to have the ‘go go go,’” Brown said.

In regards to the future with her career, Brown wants to go into emergency medicine. She hopes to progress from a paramedic to an ER doctor. She is doing this all because she not only likes helping people, but it also looks great on medical school applications.

Outside of the great parts of the job there are also some downsides, the main one being the fact that you never know what happens to the people you’ve helped afterwards.

“The EMTs and paramedics all have a saying which is ‘stitch em’ and ‘ditch em’,” Brown said. “You patch them up as quickly as you can and throw them on.”