San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

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…]

‘Happy Dance’ for San Diego State University Dance Company on Turning 25…

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By Alejandra Enciso Guzmán

The SDSU University Dance Company will celebrate twenty-five years of dance this spring with a concert featuring stunning young artists in a contemporary dance work by SDSU faculty and guest artist Gina Bolles Sorenson. Intrigue, the bizarre and the fascinating set the tone for this showcase of San Diego’s rising new dance talent.

Lizbeth Price, Public Affairs Specialist at the SDSU School of Music and Dance, contacted San Diego Free Press to share the great news. I had the opportunity to direct a few questions to Melissa Nunn, Choreographer and Emeritus Professor of Dance.

“The objective is to provide advanced students with performing experience under the direction of professional faculty and guest choreographers; to prepare these students for professional work once they graduate” shared Nunn who will premiere a choreography of her own in this concert titled Presence.   [Read more…]

Giving Up on Home and Heading to Unist’ot’en Camp

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By Will Falk

I have given up on the notion that I will ever get home.

In many ways, I have always been rootless. I was born in Evansville, IN, moved to Bedford, IN when I was 5, moved to Salt Lake City, UT when I was 11, and then enrolled at the University of Dayton in Ohio when I was 19. After college, I went to law school in Madison, WI and then took a job in Milwaukee. Now, I find myself in San Diego.

And, I just turned 27 in March.

For the longest time due to my moving around so much, I thought that achieving a sense of belonging was something akin to a spiritual cure-all. I thought if I could only find the right community, the right place to live, and then to live there long enough, I could ease the nagging feelings of being constantly out of place.   [Read more…]

Who’s Funding the Competing Minimum Wage Initiative?

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By Doug Porter

Seriously. We need to know. UT-San Diego and KPBS have run stories about an initiative in the works proposing an increase in the minimum wage that’s less than the one currently under consideration by the City Council. In fact, the “increase” it purports to offer wouldn’t affect 93% of businesses small and large in the city via loopholes large enough to drive a truck through.

It takes serious money and/or a large grass roots organization to collect signatures for a ballot initiative. Essentially you’ve got to get 100,000 people to sign a petition in the hope that 68,000 or so will be recognized as valid. The shipbuilders association spent somewhere south of a half million dollars to get their measure killing the Barrio Logan Community Plan on upcoming the June ballot. The 2012 Proposition B Pension Reform backers spent over a million bucks.

Yet the person who is the “face” of this competing measure, Blanca Lopez-Brown only came up with 159 qualifying signatures on the nominating petition for her 2013 candidacy for a city council seat. She placed fifth in that special election (1,084 votes). And money? Doesn’t have any to speak of. So this begs the question, who’s really backing this initiative?   [Read more…]

National Poetry Month: Ending with a Bang, not a Whimper

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“Poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it but to those who need it.”

By Anna Daniels

So, is “April the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”? T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

or is April when

“the ponds open
like black blossoms,
the moon
swims in every one;
there’s fire
everywhere…”? Mary Oliver, Blossom

And here we are on May’s cusp– “depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas”–except when it isn’t because a different poet thinks about May in a completely different way.

Poetry is the Big Bang of language, beginning with a singularity of individual expression that spawns whole universes of thought, emotion and even action. Poetry enables the universe to know itself, express itself in an utterly astounding way by virtue of the human capacity for language.

Fleas are incapable of writing poetry about themselves. We do it for them…because we can.   [Read more…]

Orca Profiles in Captivity: No. 4 of the San Diego 10

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By Cara Wilson-Granat

(Fourth in a series)

“In the wild, they don’t solve their problems aggressively. It’s not normal. Killer whales travel in kinship groups or clans and they don’t have those aggressive interactions. If other whales come along from a different group, they just avoid each other. Obviously, you can’t do that in a tank.”
– Researcher, Kenneth Balcomb, regarding aggression with captive orcas

This is the fourth in a series of ten in which we meet one of the San Diego 10 orcas and hear from an advocate who continues to be one of the voices of these imprisoned voiceless, never stopping until the whole world listens.
After reading about Prisoner #4, Orkid, please scroll down this and “meet” one of the top San Diego 10 Prisoner Advocates. This week’s Advocate is Pamela Slater-Price, former San Diego County Supervisor.

Prisoner #4: Orkid

Age: 26

Born on September 23, 1988, during a live Shamu show at Sea World San Diego, Orkid made her debut in front of thousands of spectators. Of course, a natural orca birth in the wild wouldn’t be bombarded with the noise and cameras and invasion of such a personal entrance into the world as this baby experienced.

But Orkid was a captive being—50 percent Icelandic (from her mother, Kandu V) and 50 percent Northern Resident/Canadian (from her father, Orky) – born into the prison world of enforced performance in the name of entertainment.   [Read more…]

Art in the Street: The San Diego Cultural Arts Alliance Partners with Writerz Blok to Encourage Street Art in the Community

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By Karla Flores & Brent Jensen | karla@ajaproject.org & brent@ajaproject.org

How do you feel when you see vandalism around your neighborhood? Does it make you feel unsafe? Graffiti is transformed from a rebellious act of vandalism to a legal form of expression through the Graffiti Education and Mural Arts Program, an initiative by the San Diego Cultural Arts Alliance (The Alliance).

From March 20th through the 22nd, The Alliance partnered with Writerz Blok to lead a mural installation project in the parking garage of Westfield Mission Valley Mall. The event, “Underground Art in the Underground,” was a gift to the community of San Diego and a message to youth whose individuality seeks expression.   [Read more…]

Carl DeMaio’s Pity Party Plays Well With Fox News

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By Doug Porter

Congressional candidate Carl DeMaio has a real talent for manipulating the news media. Yesterday he teamed up with Fox News columnist (and former Bush Press secretary) Dana Perino to let the world know about the vast left wing conspiracy attacking him because he’s gay.

Using examples from his failed mayoral campaign of outliers who tried to make his orientation an issue with right wingers, the Perino story builds to a crescendo incorporating the LGBT community and the left in general marching lockstep into the current congressional contest, united to smear and defeat his “true campaign message of hope.” It’s a pity party writ large and the story is playing well with the ‘GOP is persecuted’ set.

As is usual with Carl, it’s a boatload of crap. There are actual facts in the Fox story, but they’re spun completely out of context. The people making noise about his sexual orientation in the current congressional race are his socially conservative GOP brethren.   [Read more…]

Wealth Creation for Dummies

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By John Lawrence

Now that Thomas Piketty has clued us in with his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that the upper one percent is making all the money and that the middle class is getting screwed, as if we didn’t already know that, the question remains what should we do about it?

Paul Krugman seems to think that government should redistribute money from the wealthy to the poor, and this would be a good solution, one that is achieving good results in Europe, but, since the US government is owned by the wealthy, one that is unlikely to be manifested here any time soon.

Piketty points out that income is derived from two sources: labor and return on capital or wealth. Capital and wealth are essentially synonymous by the way.   [Read more…]

Poem of the Day: “When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver

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“I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”

Introduction by Anna Daniels

SDFP readers submitted more requests for Mary Oliver’s poetry than any other poet. Oliver’s unique form of poetic consciousness blurs the boundaries that separate the human from the natural world. “At its most intense, her poetry aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions that reveal ‘a mossy darkness – / a dream that would never breathe air / and was hinged to your wildest joy / like a shadow.'”   [Read more…]

Why Do Many Religious Believers Want to Silence Atheists?

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When atheists come out, all too often the reaction is to try to shove them back into the closet.

By Greta Christina / AlterNet

Why do so many religious believers want atheists to lie about our atheism?

It seems backward. Believers are always telling atheists that we need religion for morality; that we have to believe because without religion, people would have no reason not to murder and steal and lie. And yet, all too often, they ask us to lie. When atheists come out of the closet and tell the people in our lives that we don’t believe in God, all too often the reaction is to try to shove us back in.

In some cases, they simply want us to keep our mouths shut: when the topic of religion comes up, they want us to tell the lie of omission. But much of the time, they actually ask us to lie outright. They ask us to lie to other family members. They ask us to attend church or other religious services. They sometimes even ask us to perform important religious rituals, like funerals or confirmations, where we’re not just lying to the people around us, but to the god they supposedly believe in.

Why would they do this?   [Read more…]

DA Bonnie Dumanis – Keeper of the Flame for San Diego’s Power Elite

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By Doug Porter

The race for District Attorney in San Diego has heated up in recent days, with incumbent Bonnie Dumanis actually showing up for a debate in Del Cerro after skipping events in Oceanside and La Jolla earlier this month. She also appeared at a Ramona Tea Party multi-candidate forum on Saturday, reportedly wearing a straw cowboy hat.

UT-San Diego gave Dumanis their editorial blessing this weekend, saying “She deserves re-election to a fourth term,” before acknowledging that she might have picked up some “baggage” over her 12 years in office. While that “baggage,” which includes a campaign finance scandal and an over-zealous (and failing) campaign against medical marijuana is of interest, it’s the broader accusations that Dumanis has politicized the District Attorney’s office that merit your attention.   [Read more…]

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