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Earth Day with Trumpet Player: Mr. F Doesn’t Race Jaguars, and Bret Knows The End is Near

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By Bob Dorn

Separated from each other by temperament — and some 30 or 40 minutes — Mr. F and Bret find their ways to a place in the park I don’t normally choose for my practice sessions. The car was out of gas, and the benches out front of our condo were empty, so… The thing is, it’s Earth Day, and how long will I be left to myself?

Mr. F (not his name, by the way) is shy and awkward (despite the hearty urban male fist bump he’ll be offering once he’s comfortable) and it takes him three or four minutes to get within some 10 feet of me – clearly inside the inter-personal radius — and he can’t make eye contact as he circles.

He was wearing a showy stadium jacket, altogether appropriate for the chilly Earth Day morning, with Jaguar racing emblem and crew designation and other racing signs. I asked him if he raced Jaguars; he looked away and murmured something. The competition between his behavior and his strange camouflage is causing noticeable dissonance. He has approached and retreated.   [Read more…]

New Chicano Park Muralists Are Honored to Paint in the Park

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44th annual Chicano Park Day Celebration this Saturday

By Brent E. Beltrán

The Chicano Park Steering Committee and thousands of their friends will be celebrating the 44th anniversary of the takeover of Chicano Park this Saturday in San Diego’s Barrio Logan. The theme of the celebration is “La Tierra Es De Quien La Trabaja: The Land Belongs To Those Who Work It.” 

Last year I wrote:

“On April 22, 1970 a rag tag group of artists, activists, and community members joined forces and took over the land underneath the San Diego-Coronado Bridge in Barrio Logan. At the time, construction was about to begin on the building of a California Highway Patrol substation. For many years, residents of Barrio Logan had been promised a park. Seeing the pending creation of a CHP substation was the straw that broke this barrio’s back.”

Every year the community of Barrio Logan, as well as Chicanas and Chicanos from all over, and our friends and allies, all come together to celebrate the takeover of the area underneath the San Diego-Coronado Bridge.   [Read more…]

Barrio Logan: Arts and Culture

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Film by Media Arts Center’s Teen Producers Project
Intro by Brent E. Beltrán

With the ballot battle looming over the future of Barrio Logan, due to Maritime Industry’s refusal to accept the Barrio Logan Community Plan update, I feel it is necessary to give voters of the city of San Diego a little history of Barrio Logan and highlight the issues residents face. In June, eligible San Diego voters will go to the polls to vote on whether to approve the community plan or reject it.

Over the next few weeks I will post a video on Sundays that highlights the community of Barrio Logan and the beauty within San Diego’s most historic barrio.

This week’s video, Barrio Logan: Arts and Culture, is about how arts and culture are an integral part of Barrio Logan’s identity.   [Read more…]

Bob Filner’s New Book and Other Tales of Alternate Reality

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By Doug Porter

So the word on the street, courtesy of columnist Logan Jenkins, is that former mayor Bob Filner is writing a book and looking for an editor. The UT-San Diego columnist has offered to “anonymously ghostwrite. Gratis.”    

I’m sure there any number of San Diego journos who’d love the opportunity. I remember reading lots of self-righteous tweets and barely concealed contempt in coverage by too many of this town’s “reporters.” After all, writing anything else might have excluded them from the crafty beer klatches and opportunities to genuflect before local luminaries so necessary to generate “coverage.”

I can only hope Filner’s period of confinement and reflection has re-enforced the (obvious) notion that “none-of-the-above” would be the only right choice to make when it comes to local scribes.
  [Read more…]

At the Behest of the Dirty Food Lobby, Congressman Peters Joins GOP in 55th Attempt to Sink Obamacare

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By Doug Porter

Congressman Scott Peters and seventeen other Democrats responded to the clarion call of the dirty food lobby last week by joining with House Republicans in their 55th attempt to to scale back or repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Following intensive lobbying and publicity events by the American Hotel and Lodging Association (hotels won’t be able to provide 24 hour service any more) and the National Restaurant Association (we’ll simply cut employee hours) the House of Representatives voted last week 248 to 179 to change the law’s definition of full-time work from 30 hours a week to 40 hours.

A report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says about one million people would lose employer-backed coverage and the number of uninsured would climb by nearly 500,000 if the law’s work definitions were changed.   [Read more…]

Balboa Park Celebration Leadership Snubs City Council Hearing

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By Doug Porter

The outrageous conduct by the leadership for the Balboa Park Celebration, Inc. continues.

After blowing through nearly $3 million during the past three years with nothing to show for it, BPCI co-chair Nikki Clay and transition director Gerry Braun have told the City Council’s Environment Committee that they’ll be unavailable for a hearing today.

Committee chair David Alvarez is looking for answers, requesting a report be provided regarding the soon-to-be-defunct group’s activities and along with an explanation for the $13,000-a-month salary being paid to Braun while he winds things down.

UPDATE: Braun did appear, after all. According to one observer:

He was grilled by Marti Emerald for a delightfully painful 20-25 minutes. He stayed on message and script as best he could, but he had no answers to the good questions. 

  [Read more…]

Sanctuary: 7th Annual Dia de la Mujer Juried Art Exhibition to Open

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An all woman’s art exhibition, a film screening and a very womanly celebration

By Leticia Gomez Franco 

Casa Familiar’s THE FRONT will once again present their annual ode to women, this year called Sanctuary: 7th Annual Dia de la Mujer Art Exhibition. The group art exhibition features the work of 48 female artists from both sides of the border and will be on view from March 7  to April 24.

With over 50 art pieces on view, the exhibition is a wonderful collection of work, inspired by this years theme: Sanctuary. Artists were invited to explore the idea of sanctuary in its many manifestations as it relates to them as women and builders and creators of their own spaces. With this theme the exhibition curator honors the mission of Día de la Mujer. The art exhibition allows women artists to create real representations of themselves, to counter the powerful stream of visual stimulation spat out by the media, oversaturating our world, with foreign, unrealistic versions of women. Día de la Mujer fosters a safe space for women to be real women and to celebrate that realness, in all of its diverse beauty.   [Read more…]

With Our Words We Celebrate the Voz Alta Project Gallery

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Art space that helped start the Barrio Logan Arts District closes

By Brent E. Beltrán

This past Thursday night the Voz Alta Project Gallery in Barrio Logan closed its doors as a physical space. Though curator Carlos Beltrán (no relation to the author) will keep Voz Alta going through collaborations with other spaces the physical space that was Voz Alta is no more.

Due to a variety of reasons Carlos chose to close the space that helped start the revitalization of the arts in Barrio Logan. If Chicano Park is the grandfather of Chicano art and culture in San Diego then Voz Alta is the child that became the big daddy to most of the recent spaces that have opened up over the last four years. Places like The Roots Factory, The Spot, Stronghold, Chicano Art Gallery, La Bodega and The Nest all owe their existence to Voz Alta and those that made Voz Alta possible.   [Read more…]

Community Radio Coming Soon to the Greater Logan Heights Area

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Radio Pulso del Barrio will focus on arts and education

By Brent E. Beltrán

For the past few months there have been meetings at various locations throughout the Greater Logan Heights area to implement a public art project called Open Spaces. Open Spaces is a two-year public art initiative that is funded by the James Irvine Foundation through the San Diego Museum of Art to create a community based art project.

This is the second Open Spaces project in San Diego. The first is ongoing in Lincoln Park.

“Open Spaces goes out into communities and allows community members and residents to be the decision makers on what public art should look like in their area. And that would be content, medium and location,” says project coordinator Irma Patricia Aguayo Esquivias.  “Coming into these communities we never know what it is going to be. We have no idea until we are actually participating in the community meetings then people start to voice what they’d like to see.”   [Read more…]

Concert and CD Review: The North at Dizzy’s

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By John Lawrence

On Saturday, February 1, a trio group called “The North” played San Diego’s premiere jazz club, Dizzy’s, just off the I-5 in Pacific Beach. It was a pre-release party for their album, “Slow Down (This Isn’t the Mainland)” which is officially due out April 15 although albums were available at the club. The group consists of Romain Collin, piano, Shawn Conley, bass, and Abe Lagrimas Jr, drums.

Recorded in Hawaii, and dedicated to Oahu’s north shore (hence the name), they mainly created a mellow, laid back sound. No hard-edged New York City vibe here. As such the music should be very accessible for the average listener but not so much for the die hard jazz fan. One person’s “laid back” is another person’s “nuthin much happenin.”

The group performed the tunes they had recorded on the album, naturally.  The most successful tune even more so in concert than on the album was Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The group’s exquisite rendering was almost prayerful and churchlike. They tried quite successfully to incorporate folk music in their ouvre.   [Read more…]

Pete Seeger: A Man Who Surrounded Hate with Love

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By Ernie McCray

With Pete Seeger having passed away I can’t pass up an opportunity to share my sentiments about him.
I once sang on stage with this incredible loving human being and other master musicians and singers. Peggy Watson with her crisp and pretty voice. Sam Hinton. Folklorist, artist and founder of the San Diego Folk Song Society. Joe Glazer, “Labor’s Troubadour.” It was a sing-along (if you’re wondering how I belonged). We were there to honor John Handcox, a friend of mine who just happened to have written major labor anthems like “Mean Things Happening in this Land” and “Roll the Union On.”

Pete had been singing John’s songs for years. He had no idea that he was alive. But when he found out that he was, indeed, still on earth, in an inner-city San Diego community, he reached out to him and took him on a few tours so that audiences could see and hear the man whose words had rallied them for so long in various labor movements – a man who had been a sharecropper in Arkansas where he made up songs as a way of organizing the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, a man run out of the state by the Klan.
  [Read more…]

District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis Becomes Focal Point for Campaign Contribution Scandal

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By Doug Porter

San Diego County’s District Attorney is getting a lot of heat as reporters continue to unearth new details about a campaign finance scandal spanning the last couple of years.

Prosecutors have determined that more than $200,000 was illegally funneled into independent campaign committees in support of her failed mayoral candidacy in 2012.  UT-San Diego ran a front page story claiming candidate committees directly under Dumanis’ control received $13,250 connected to three persons connected with the ongoing investigation.

Calls for an additional investigation are mounting.  The District Attorney has returned $1,400 in contributions to her current re-election campaign since the scandal unfolded and is refusing to re-open earlier campaign committees to give back monies from earlier contests.   [Read more…]

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