There is a mountain
climbing out of the mountain
at the speed earth moves [Read more…]
MBS and Friends
1968 in Black, White, and Gray – Part Two
For starters the old joke ain’t true. If you remember the ‘60s you actually mighta been there. As far as 1968 by itself goes (as opposed to being short hand for the ‘60s’) except for Tigers fans of a certain age the revolutionary significance of the year has left deeper marks in France than the U.S. While the immediate inspiration for the French students may have been their American counterparts in Berkeley, by the spring of ’68 it really did look like a coalition of students and workers might take down the Fifth Republic. On this side of the pond all the radical movements put together were never even close.
[Read more…]
1968 in Black, White, and Gray – Part One
Like a kid who pauses halfway up a tree and is surprised to see how far away the ground has gone it’s disconcerting, and 50 years later a little comical, to see childhood memories as bit players in the broader dramas of receding History. Though I’ve never been 61 years old before, I’m assuming these feelings of vertigo and bemusement are perennial and widespread among kids who survive long enough to feel them. [Read more…]
Anselmo Sacasas – Trumpcrazy | Video Worth Watching
What was the inspiration for this title? Was it a time-traveler? a psychic? a distant relative? random chance? a play on the word trumpet? For whatever reason Cuban musician Anselmo Sacasas chose this title, he laid down a mean mambo back in 1955 with this as its name, and with our current POTUS it somehow even rings true. [Read more…]
Canned Heat – Election Blues | Video Worth Watching
Canned Heat is more widely known for its hits “Going Up the Country” and “On the Road Again”, but here’s a lesser known one of their numbers from 1972 after Nixon was re-elected and features a theme that has been repeated all too often. One of the verses includes the lament “When votin’ time came, most people didn’t turn out at all”. Let’s not repeat that mistake. Make sure that you are registered to vote, then pledge to turn out to vote this year, even though it’s not a presidential election. Representation in Congress is just as important as who’s in the White House. [Read more…]
Encountering Idols At LAX (KPOP’S NCT 127) | Geo-Poetic Spaces
Behind the door god’s
ninety-nine paths
Initiates
voluntarily shed coats
remove shoes
submit their inner selves
to the scrutiny of electromagnetic waves
The absolved
float down narrow corridors
through automatic doors [Read more…]
The Ups and The Downs | My Reporter’s Life, Part Three
By the late 1970s, I was brought back into the newsroom to do general assignment reporting, a kind of sideways move. I could handle breaking stuff, and innocent features (like my seven-day case of hiccups) but the editors might have figured I offered too much trouble on the beats — police, higher education and investigations.
Once again on the day shift, I made it to journalism’s summa cum laude, or maybe just the magna version.
On September 25, 1978, a fully-loaded PSA liner crashed into a private Cessna in its approach path to Lindbergh Field, leaving 144 dead, most of them the airliner’s passengers. The first call sent all of us to the east windows of the Copley Building, where we could see the white smoke towering over North Park.
I forced myself to ask to go to the scene but the city editor told me to stay and take the reports from the staff sent to the scene, the two of them so horrified I recommended they do what I’d done at less bloody scenes: locate the fireman in a yellow hazard suit or a plainclothes suit and walk toward either or both, looking neither left nor right. They’d have the answers. [Read more…]
Some Big Developments | My Reporter’s Life, Part Two
I didn’t know that the police beat was one of the tests normally applied to newcomers until the San Diego Evening Tribune editors released me from it after six months and, to my surprise, had me cover the County Board of Supervisors.
Developers had been pumping out two-story stuccoes amidst the chapparaled and original Spanish land grants to the east and the north of the city. The collapse of C. Arnholt Smith’s US National Bank was at this time the largest bank failure in US history, so I was a bit surprised to be assigned to cover the Board of Supervisors; after having been in town only 12 months or so I figured I didn’t know f-all about the county.
The Union had a former Associated Press guy covering the Supervisors, a veteran not easily excited or cowed by the job, and he helped me out, as if I were his kid brother, maybe 15 years younger.
Don’t worry, he’d tell me, nothing really happens here. You’ll be fine. Something like that. [Read more…]
The ‘March for Our Lives’ Parkland Students Collaborate with Artists Sage, Kesha and Chika to Create a Powerful Video on the Issue of Gun Violence | Video Worth Watching
The March for Our Lives group has collaborated with artist Sage to create a video that is a sort of mashup of Groundhog Day and a Rube Goldberg device. From the SAGE YouTube web page:
“Safe” is the debut single from the artist Sage. Sage wrote the song while in his senior year of high school after the tragic mass shooting in a high school in Parkland, Florida. He played the first version of the song for his older sister, the music artist Kesha, who instantly felt the power of the track and wanted to help the cause by lending her voice to the song and movement. Chika, independent female rapper known for her vicious flow and fearless lyrics, contributed verses to finish the song.
More at the March for Our Lives website. [h/t to AGD] [Read more…]
Two City Works Press Books Explore San Diego’s Impact on the Psyche | Release Reading at Tiger! Tiger!
San Diego City Works Press is a project of the San Diego Writers Collective, which is a group of San Diego writers, poets, artists, and patrons dedicated to the publication and promotion of the work of San Diego area artists of all sorts. Our specific interests include local, ethnic, and border writing as well as formal innovation and progressive politics.
The Collective’s main focus is local, but we have engaged in occasional collaborations with writers from around the world. City Works Press is an all-volunteer non-profit, funded by local writers and friends of the arts, committed to the publication of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and art by members of the San Diego City College community and beyond.
Sunday, October 21, at 4:30 at Tiger!Tiger! City Works Press, in concert with Verbatim Books, is proud to present the release reading for local novelist Josh Turner and San Diego poet, Joe Medina. Fall 2018 marks 13 years of publication by SD City Works Press, and Baxt and Medina’s works continue our tradition of birthing first books by homegrown authors. [Read more…]
Pain and Suffering at the SDPD | My Reporter’s Life, Part One
I worked for the San Diego Evening Tribune for approximately eight years and 11 months. I was just 13 months short of being vested in the retirement program when I quit. That’s okay.
If I’d stayed on at the paper I might have gone fully crazy.
I was 28 when the Trib hired me out of a small-town daily in New Jersey’s rural northwest. I think somewhere I still have a picture of myself at the Sussex County Fair — taken by the staff photographer who’d accompanied me — as I tried to milk a Holstein. Standard stuff for small-town dailies back then.
I asked the wise guy Italian Assistant Managing Editor named Larry Lusitana why he’d hired me, and he said: “We’ve had good luck with people from New Jersey.” It was only after I’d left the paper that I found out Lusitana was from that state. [Read more…]
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